Gen Zers are set to spend almost a third of their lives on their phones.
“If an 18 year old lives to 75, they’ll spend 19 years looking at their phone,” Nicholas Stumphauzer, founder of SHIFT, said on an episode of the “Pints With Aquinas” podcast.
He explained, “From 18 to 75, they spend an average of eight and a half hours a day on their phone, a third of their life. So by 75, they’ll spend about 19 years looking at their phone. Every year that passes, you didn’t dedicate time to creating a life of any kind of meaning whatsoever. And so it gets harder and harder to find a reason to stop scrolling.”
Stumphauzer’s SHIFT is intended to “build technology that helps you get your attention back,” per the company’s website.
Related: Another Study Proves Just How Damaging Screen Time Is On Mental Health
“We believe attention is not a productivity hack,” the site continues. “It is the ground your real life grows from: prayer, work, family, friendship, silence, and the things you actually want to become.”
SHIFT filters content as you need, whether it’s browsers or social media apps, and is intended to help people spend less time on screens.
As we learn more about the long term effects of constant smartphone use, it’s important to be conscious of your own screen time — and how it can impact you.
Kostadin Kushlev, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences at Georgetown University, conducted a study on how smartphone use affects us physically and mentally, and found that “digital detoxes” are beneficial.
“If we think about what we’re trying to detox from, it’s not the calling and the texting for the most part,” he explained. “It is the social media. It’s the gaming. It’s all of those short dopamine bursts that we get from all these things we do on our phones.”
Kushlev continued, “Even though it seems insurmountable, just a little bit of digital detox — a little bit of reduction of the constant stimulation from our phones, social media, games and so forth — could actually help us reclaim our ingrained ability to sustain attention.”
Picking up your phone each day doesn’t seem all that bad, but when you add up the time spent staring at a screen, it’s clear that we need to start putting the phones down and engaging in real life.
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