My screen time isn’t a cute or funny little topic I joke about with my friends anymore — it is, at times, debilitating. I’ve had a widget on my phone screen for a while now that lets me know how many hours I’ve spent on my phone that day and let’s just say … It’s humbling.
Even on the days when I try to be good about not going on my phone, I still rack up anywhere from three to five hours, and I’m not alone — an Instagram poll posted from The Arbiter account found that 80% of voters believe that their amount of screen time negatively affects them.
What was I even doing on it for those five hours? Sure, sometimes it logs when I play music and leave my phone unlocked accidentally, or do something for work, but a lot of that time is spent doomscrolling on Instagram or TikTok. So, I put on some guardrails.
“One Sec” is an app that you can apply to any social media (or other addictive apps) that forces you to take a breath and decide if you really want to open that social media. It also lets you know how many times you’ve opened that app on a given day. The results are sobering and more often than not I find myself choosing the “I don’t want to open fill in the blank app” option.
The creator of One Sec, Frederik Riedel, shared via email that his initial inspiration for the app stemmed from the long days of lockdown in 2020.
“During the first COVID lockdown in 2020 in Germany, I was spending way too much time on Instagram,” Riedel said. “I didn’t want to delete Instagram completely because I still think it’s a useful tool, but I still wanted to significantly decrease my time spent [on it].”
Rather than eliminating the app entirely, Riedel created “One Sec” to give the user agency over using the app — rather than opening it as second nature.
“I noticed that I was using the app mindlessly a lot,” Riedel said. “To help me eliminate these mindless scroll sessions I invented One Sec: An app that forces you to take a deep breath before you can open social media. This small break helps to realize what’s going on and allowed my brain to make an intentional decision.”
Riedel shared that he believes apps similar to One Sec that aim to limit screen time will continue to be created in the future.
“I think social media over-consumption is a very big problem right now,” Riedel said. “Solving this problem with yet another app might seem ridiculous at first, but we have shown in multiple scientific studies that One Sec is actually very effective.”
Outrageously high screen time and doom scrolling are not new concepts — Sydney Boutros, a Behavioral Neuroscientist at Boise State, discussed the concept of the reward and motivation that gets people stuck scrolling in the first place.
“Everything in life, whatever we do, is rewarding, that’s why we do it — it’s really hardwired into our brain to seek out rewarding things,” Boutros said. “Neurotransmitters are the chemicals in our brain that send signals, and that’s what creates feelings of happiness or feelings of attention or reward and dopamine. A lot of people think that it is happiness, but dopamine is motivation and reward.”
Boutros explained that the human brain is excellent at identifying patterns of rewards and seeking out cues that we associate with a hit of dopamine — such as receiving a notification on your phone.
“If you get a little ping on your phone, if you get push notifications for Instagram, for example, you’ll see a little logo pop up …You get a little dopamine burst when that happens, which makes you motivated to check it,” Boutros said.
That addictive burst of dopamine is something Slate Fragoso, a sophomore majoring in psychology at Boise State, intentionally seeks to minimize through which apps he engages with.
While Fragoso described his attempts to supplement his phone usage with reading and other activities, he answered definitively that his screen time takes away from his overall productivity.
“Oh yeah, for sure. Like, right now I’m watching YouTube,” Fragoso said, gesturing to the phone in his hand. “I think YouTube is a lot better than TikTok and stuff with just the amount of dopamine you receive.”
On average, Fragoso stated he spends around five hours on his phone each day. Not bad considering the average member of Gen Z spends a whopping seven hours and eighteen minutes doom scrolling through socials, perusing Google and learning Charli XCX dances on TikTok.
Fragoso shared that those five hours are typically spent on various social media, particularly Snapchat, or music streaming platforms like Spotify. During finals week, he locks himself out of his phone and has utilized “Opal” — an app similar to “One Sec” that aims to minimize a user’s overall screen time.
At the end of the day, we’re all humans attempting to grapple with one of the most addictive vices on the planet. Social media and other apps have been designed to grab our attention and keep it, so beating yourself up over spending a day scrolling isn’t productive or fair. All we can do is attempt to implement healthy habits in our lives that steer us away from our devices and push us to experience life firsthand — not with a phone in front of our noses.
