The Morning Call

WHAT IS YOUR SCREEN TIME? WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT?

What’s your number? (And what you should be doing about it)

- By Cindy Dampier cdampier@chicagotri­bune.com

Though screen-time trackers have been around for a while, Apple has moved the needle, just by including Screen Time as part of its iOS 12, which rolled out in the fall, and sending users notificati­ons.

Ever since Apple rolled out the iOS 12 operating system a few months ago, the new Screen Time app has been tracking time spent with iPhones — specifical­ly, whenever the screen is on. The app lurks quietly in the background, taking note of those scrolls through Instagram that soothe your train commute. Your late-night Twitter habit and the text fight you had with your sister? Add those to the damning total.

At week’s end, voila, the tiny computer does what computers do: It spits out data about your phone use for the week, and sends a message. “Your screen time was up 11% last week.” And then … the number: Six hours per day? Or 45 minutes? Virtue, or digital degeneracy?

You lean into the delicate glow of the screen, mouth gaping slightly. Did you see that right? An average of six hours per day? That’s more than a 40-hour workweek.

Want to find out your girlfriend’s number? Your boss’s number? You bet you do.

Though screen-time trackers have been around for a while (in the form of apps like Moment) and though Google also has a tracker, Digital Wellness, it’s Apple that has moved the needle, just by including Screen Time as part of its iOS 12, which rolled out in the fall, and sending those little notificati­ons. While we were worrying about screen time for kids (and you can use these apps to track your child’s use too), guess what? We were all staring at the phone much more than we thought we were.

“I’m on it all the time,” says Larry Rosen, whose number hovers in the four- to five-hour range. “I’m staggered by how much I use it.”

Rosen understand­s his phone use much better than most of the rest of us because he’s a well-known research psychologi­st and expert on the “psychology of technology.”

He has been studying smartphone-use trackers for the last three years with apps that examine the habits of college students. His research subjects track their usage and send him weekly reports or screen shots of the report on their phones. Then, when the study is finished, he asks them whether their usage was more or less than expected. “The answer,” he says, “is always more. And then we ask, ‘Did you do anything about it?’ and the answer is always ‘Nope.’ They know they shouldn’t do it, but they don’t want to change it.”

Why? “Because they can’t see anything that they are doing with the phones that they’d want to give up or reduce.”

Rosen gets it — he’s a news junkie, constantly checking headlines on his phone. And if you were startled by your Screen Time notificati­on, you probably went looking to see which apps you spent time on. (There’s a handy list in the app; tap to expand the graph at the top.) People scrutinize the time-sucking apps mostly in the name of self-justificat­ion, since one of the first questions that popped up when the notificati­ons started arriving was “Is it counting my podcast/ music/navigation app time?” The answer is a qualified yes — the ticker is running whenever the screen is on.

But the grand total hours spent, Rosen says, might not really be the big problem. Among his research subjects, he has seen total phone use creep higher year by year. But the stat that shot up in the last study was check-ins, or how often the subjects picked up the phone or touched it to check something. In the first year, subjects checked their phones an average of 56 times per day, and had screen time of around 220 minutes. By year three, subjects logged screen time of around 277 minutes, but checked their phones an average of 77 times per day. (Screen Time will also show you your check-in number, or pickups.) “It’s not necessaril­y the increase in the amount of time, it’s the rapid increase in the number of times they check in. That’s what they’re doing — they’re checking in, but it’s for about three minutes, and then they are off for only about 10 minutes at the most. And the interestin­g thing is we know why.”

Research has shown that “what’s driving it is anxiety, and it’s a particular kind of anxiety some people call nomophobia but we call technologi­cal dependency.” Nomophobia is also known as fear of missing out. Rosen explains it like this: “As soon as you check in, chemicals start to build in your brain,” including the stress hormone, cortisol. “When those get to a sufficient level to create external distress, that’s the key that forces you to go, ‘Oh, I better check in.’ ”

Knowing this, and getting those weekly Screen Time reports, may have caused you some distress. There are solutions to curb your screen time, Rosen says. Screen Time includes features that allow you to choose time limits on the use of certain apps, though you can also choose to override them. Rosen suggests a few more basic fixes:

First, turn off all notificati­ons, except essentials like calls or messages from your family. Bury your social media apps inside folders on the last page of the home screen, so that it takes several clicks to retrieve them. Don’t save your password

in social media apps or apps you spend too much time on, and close the app each time you leave it, so that you have to log in each time — again, this puts up an incrementa­l roadblock. Keep your phone on gray screen, all the time. Since color is an arousal tool, seeing shades of gray on the screen make it less alluring to your brain.

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