Q&A: When is screen time healthy and when is it not?

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Smartphones have been connected to a host of modern problems including loneliness, decreased physical activity, sleep problems and all the mental and physical health issues associated with those conditions.

But not all screen time is bad, according to Nelson Roque, assistant professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, and his graduate student, doctoral candidate Rinanda Shaleha. Understanding when screens can support well-being and when they can be harmful requires an understanding of what people do on their phones, when they do it and how it makes them feel, the researchers said.

Roque, a Social Science Research Institute co-funded faculty member, and Shaleha have been investigating how digital technology affects the human brain and emotions. They recently published an article in Developmental Psychology explaining how different contexts influence whether screen time is healthy or not.

In this Q&A, Roque and Shaleha discussed factors that make screen time positive or harmful, how people can protect themselves and their children from unhealthy screen behavior, and how lawmakers could legislate healthier screen environments for everyone.

Q: What counts as screen time?

Shaleha: Technically, screen time includes everything from working on a laptop to doomscrolling TikTok in bed at 3 a.m. But the context is so different between these two things that we tend to only think of the latter one as “screen time.” We need to get away from thinking of time on screens as a single, homogeneous thing if we want to understand what is truly healthy or unhealthy.

Q: So, what truly matters when considering the impact of screen time?

Roque: Instead of thinking only about how much time we’re spending on screens, we need to consider the effect that screen time has on us and our children. Did you have fun? Did anyone mistreat or upset you? How did you feel when you were done? Asking ourselves or our children these questions can help us determine whether a specific interaction with a digital space helped or harmed us.

In our paper, we propose that you need to consider five contexts to truly understand screen time — duration, time of day, purpose of use, interactivity and content structure.

Q: How does considering these separate dimensions help us understand our screen usage better?

Shaleha: Start by trying to get a handle on how you and/or your children are using your phones — and that includes how much time. Every smartphone can provide data about how much time people spend on various apps. Time of day also matters. If you are using your phone when you need to do something else, it’s a problem. Screen time can be a problem if it prevents you from sleeping, for example.

Roque: When thinking about duration, for example, you need to remember that there is no correct amount of screen time. You could spend one minute on a screen, and it could be the best minute of your month; you could meet your best friend or solve a problem you have been wrestling with. Similarly, you could ruin your week in one minute on a screen; you could start spiraling into a mental health problem based on something you read, saw or did. Context matters so much more than duration alone.

If you do measure the duration of your screen time, you can only compare your numbers to your previous numbers, not to someone else’s. If you spent nine hours on your phone last week and that is average for you, it might not be a problem. If you spent nine hours on your phone last week and you typically spend five hours, you should probably ask yourself what was different last week.

Q: Once people have some data and context about their screen use, how should they evaluate it?

Shaleha: Once you have that information, try to put it in context. If you spent eight hours on your phone this week, did you get value from that? Were you researching potential vacation destinations or enjoying a TV series? Or were you trying to avoid unpleasant thoughts when you should have been working or sleeping? If you can answer these questions for yourself — or communicate with your children about these things — you can start to wrap your head around whether your screen usage is healthy for you.

You can also think about your screen usage is in terms of opportunity costs. If you are on your phone doing something passive, you are not spending time with family, you’re not reaching out to friends, you are not going to the gym, you’re not preparing yourself a healthy meal and you’re not sleeping.

Finally, all these contexts all change between individuals. For example, people are differentially susceptible to loneliness, depression and anxiety. For some, screen-based communication may be an important way to stay socially connected, though this depends on how screens are used.

Q: How does interactivity alter screen time’s effects on people?

Shaleha: Understanding interactivity means considering whether your screen time is more passive or interactive. Generally speaking, higher interactivity means greater interpersonal connection or creativity on the user’s part.

Playing a game with friends or creating and sharing content can be great ways to interact with others or express yourself. This is very different from doom scrolling — the compulsive, passive consumption of news or social media often caused by anxiety or used to avoid other tasks, thoughts or emotions. In some cases Doomscrolling has been associated with poorer mental health outcomes, which is probably not very surprising.

Q: Why is the structure of the content we consume important?

Roque: When we talk about structure, we are thinking about the continuum between long-form content — like a movie — and fragmented content, like TikTok videos or YouTube shorts.

Fragmented content forces your brain to continually load information into our audio/visual sketch pads and then dump it, over and over again. Because there is no context, your brain adjusts rapidly to a song clip, then a scene from a movie, then cute animals, and there is no coherent narrative for your brain to work with to organize what you are seeing.

The infinite scroll — the never-ending scroll of short-form videos or social media posts — is specifically designed to manipulate us. People have a tendency to always want one more post, or one more video, for fear of missing out. Each clip or post triggers our reward system, so we keep watching well beyond what we intend. The companies get our attention, and we lose track of time.

This is costly in terms of brain effort, and it disrupts our working memory. Generally speaking, fragmented content is more often associated with decreased well-being.

Fragmentation is one strategy that designers use to keep you engaged with content on your phone for longer than you intend. This is part of what is known as Dark UX — deceitful and manipulative design in the digital world that guides people to use an app or website the way the designers want rather than the way user wants.

When people are trapped in an unhealthy pattern or instance of screen use, they need an opportunity to stop their feeds so they have a chance to consider doing something else. But that is a problem with the way our feeds are designed, and to fix that — and other problems associated with Dark UX — we need changes in policy.

Q: How could policymakers protect people from Dark UX that preys on our reward systems?

Roque: Lawmakers could consider regulating particularly egregious tactics like the infinite scroll, where you can keep consuming short-form videos or social media posts forever. This has been challenged in lawsuits as potentially predatory, but it remains the standard design for social media platforms.

Of course, the strategies of Dark UX would evolve, and regulations would need to be updated on a regular basis. But this type of policy could meaningfully change how we interact with our phones.

Q: What can people do to protect themselves and their children?

Shaleha: Step one is: don’t panic. It can be easy to catastrophize these things, but screen time is not the boogie man. Also, you can change your behavior to decrease unhealthy use, and so can your kids.

For children, there are a number of tools to support parental monitoring. What you should use depends on your circumstances. Generally, parents should be aware of children’s behavior and discuss how screen time affects their happiness and choices.

Roque: I created KidOS for my daughter to have safe screen time options. I wasn’t worried about her number of minutes but rather what she had access to. It’s free to anyone who wants a safe environment for their kids.

I think KidOS is a good environment, but the point is not this specific tool. The point is that tools exist to support you — things that are both native to your phone and products you can find or buy — and by asking the right questions, you can make sure that you and your children have positive, healthy experiences on screens.