There are so many habits that people find hard to break nowadays. There’s smoking and drinking and shopping and a million other things, but in feedback I get from my clients one of the habits people are struggling with most of all right now is reducing screen time. This is also a concern I see a lot from parents of teenagers, whose faces always seem to buried in their phone or tablet. It’s to the point now where it’s difficult for us to go out to dinner with friends without someone pulling out their phone.
I started to realize that *I* had a problem with this a few different ways. The first was that my screen time was affecting my sleep. I’m a Youtube addict because I’m someone who loves learning and I tend to fall down rabbit holes of educational videos. I figure that someday I’ll be on Jeopardy and some of this information might come in handy. In short, I'm a big old trivia nerd.
The second was that I set up my iPad to inform me on a weekly basis about screen time and I was shocked to see that I was averaging about 4 hours per day on my iPad. Granted, I do use my iPad for work as well, but spending one-sixth of my day on this device didn’t seem like the healthiest lifestyle choice and I wanted to change it.
The third thing I was shocked to find was that on my phone, there’s a section in the Settings called “Digital Wellbeing” and I was finding that on an average day I was unlocking my phone about 55 to 60 times a day. If I’m awake for 16 hours a day, that means I open my phone to check it at least 3.5 times an hour.
What’s crazy is that I started realizing that my friends are worse than me. I happen to live with by bestie and as much as I’m on my phone, I notice that he uses his at least 2-3 times more than I do. I have a couple of aunts who seem to live on their devices. I gave up a friendship with someone I love dearly because when I came to visit (at a prearranged time), she wouldn't get off of her video game. It happened several times and she lived an hour away from me, so it was painful to me that she wouldn't take the time to step away from her computer after I travelled so far to see her. Eventually, I'd head back home without saying goodbye and to be honest ... I don't even think she noticed.
Now, I love TV as much as the next red-blooded American man, but I also notice how much TV time my friends put in. At every getogether the topic almost always turns into "shows we've been watching". I recently spent a four day weekend with a good friend and I'd guesstimate that he asked me if I watched 15 different shows over those days. I told him early on that I watch Jeopardy and maybe 1 or 2 other programs at the most (usually SNL and whatever costume drama is on PBS at the moment) so asking me if I've seen something is rather pointless. It seems like we're all addicted to our screens.
So I started doing some research into this and I found some interesting stats:
According to research from the CDC, kids 8-18 now spend 7.5 hours per day in front of screens *for entertainment* including 4.5 in front of the TV. This means that in the span of a single year, the average American child spends 114 days watching things just for fun. This is not including screen time for educational or work purposes. 114 days. That’s 114 days of not running, playing, exploring, or making friends in real life. Kids in the 11-14 age range have it the worst, according to the data, as they average 9 hours per day using screens for entertainment with 5 of those hours being television.
Things are pretty dire for adults, as well. According to data research companies comparitech and datareportal, adult screen use time is very high too. Adults spend a little over 7 hours in front of screens any given day, split fairly evenly between computer screen and mobile screen time. The average American spends roughly two hours a day on social media. I left some links below if you want to read up more on this.
I’m not against screen time altogether. However, my concern is that screen time can literally become addictive if left unchecked. A big reason for this is because of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine doesn’t create pleasure, but it is a part of our brain's reward center and it acts as a feel-good chemical. In effect, it links pleasure with certain behaviors. When you do something and your brain secretes dopamine, you relate that action with pleasure. Much of our screen time, particularly online games, are designed to be addictive. Don’t forget, with any “free” service out there – social media, games, etc. – you are the product they’re selling and they only earn revenue if there are eyes glued to the screen. Your attention = Money. It's really that simple. How else do you think Facebook stays in business?
With all that being said, I went about trying different methods to reduce my own screen time. I put restrictions on my devices that would turn off certain apps after 10 pm. I put my devices in a drawer, out of sight and with the sounds off. I turned off notifications. These all worked to some extent, but not as much as I would have hoped. The day after I blocked apps after 10 pm, I disabled the setting so I could watch some sweet, sweet Youtube.
Then, I came across my magic bullet. My game changer. It was almost so simple that it seemed silly.
I changed the screen colors on all of my devices to grayscale. I’m not going to go step-by-step on how to do this on your device as it’s different for apple, android, and so on, but I left a link down below. What I learned was that they often make it hard to do. On my android phone, I had to go into developer settings to make this change happen which required me pushing the same button ten times in a row.
As someone who is all about habits and efficiency, what I loved about this method was that it was really easy. Sure, I had to figure out how to do it by looking online, but it was a one-time change. The key to building any new habit is by looking at the intersection of motivation, ability, and prompt. I had already decided to reduce my screen time, so my motivation was fairly high (I also had creative projects I wanted to work on and dedicate more time to meditation). Google helped me figure out how to make the changes, so my ability level was high. My prompt was that I was researching ways of reducing screen time and I came across this concept and wanted to implement it immediately. If you’re looking to do ONE thing to reduce your screen time or your kids' screen time, this is the one I’d recommend because it is an easy, one-time-fix. Unless you really need to see colors on your screen, it’s easy enough to simply keep your devices in grayscale mode.
For me, the effects were immediate and I mean immediate. I am simply not as interested in watching black-and-white Youtube videos. I’m not much of a gamer, but I do play Wordle and I found that you can’t play it because you can’t tell the yellow vs. green squares. Occasionally I play Monopoly online, but in black-and-white it's way, way less interesting.
The real proof was in the screen usage. Using the Screen Time setting on my iPad, I get a weekly report telling me how much time I’m using it. Within one week, my usage decreased from 3 hours 54 minutes to 2 hours 24 minutes per day. That’s 90 minutes less per day, or 10.5 hours less per week. I started thinking back to how my week was different with all of that new time and I started realizing that I went a bit further on my daily walks. I like to draw in the evenings and I drew for several hours where I might not had before. Most striking: I went to bed earlier. I was in the habit of going to bed around 12:30 am and now I was going to bed around 11:30. Not out of boredom, either. I was genuinely tired and ready to go to bed. Reflecting back, there were many times where I knew I was tired and should have gone to bed, but there was just one more video I wanted to watch.
After two weeks of this experiment, my time went down even further to 1 hour 55 minutes. That’s nearly a 2 hour per day reduction. My phone, which I also put into grayscale, hasn’t gone down by quite as much, but I am using it on average 30 minutes less than before. This makes sense as I have a lot of business reasons to use my phone, plus using it for things like directions, tracking my steps, and paying bills. Still, I’m down 2 hours and 30 minutes of screen time per day and I don’t mean to oversell it, but it’s been life changing for me. My mood has definitely improved. I find myself just taking time to relax and rest. I find that I’ve been less scatterbrained and, instead, I’ve been able to dedicate more time to creative ventures. I feel like I’m going through some sort of dopamine detox.
Yesterday I went to my local Aldi to pick up a few things and the line at the register was long and slow moving. This would have usually been one of the times that I would have checked my phone or my social media, but I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even consider doing it, which I only realized later in the day. There’s just something about a grayscale screen that isn’t as interesting to look at and interact with.
Now that I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks and I’ve been seeing such great results, the question is: Do I ever feel like switching back to color? The answer is rarely. The first day I tried to play wordle, I couldn’t. I considered switching it back to color just for the game, but a 2 minute long game just didn’t seem worth the hassle of opening settings and making all the changes. The only other time I’ve considered changing back was when I’ve been looking at color-coded infographics on websites like the New York Times but even then I saw it as being more hassle than it was worth. I could still generally tell the differences in grayscale. I would say that after two weeks my brain has fully adjusted to the change. Now, I really only watch Youtube videos if they’re something that really, genuinely interest me, so I also don’t feel like I'm losing out on anything, either.
As a technique to change your screen time habits, I rate this a 10 out of 10. It’s easy to do. You can do it just once. It doesn’t take much time or effort at all. Most of all, the results are quite immediate. My biggest suggestion is to make sure you have other things in mind to fill up some of the time you’re freeing up. Have some books on hand or another hobby in mind. Shaving an hour or two off of your daily screen time frees up a lot of time and quick.
Good luck! I hope you try it. Let me know in the comments if it worked for you. Give this video a likey-like because it keeps that sweet, sweet algorithm working for me. I’ll see you next time with more habits and hacks to help improve you life.
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