Overview
Since 2015 the screen time for preteens aged 8 to 12 has gone up by two hours. They are spending, on average, about 5 1/2 hours looking at a device.
Now as for teens in 2015, the average screen time for 13 to 18 year-olds was 6 hours and 40 minutes. This number was already big considering there are only 24 hours in a day. From 2021 to now, for teens the average screen time is nine hours. This number is expected to grow seeing as technology and devices are only advancing.
The Math
There are 24 hours in a day, and about seven will be spent sleeping. Teens have on average a six hour school day. Now if you add the nine hours of screen time to the 13 hours of school and sleep, that is 22 hours out of 24 hours being used up by sleep, school, the phone and other devices.
On average teens also spend around an hour a day eating and drinking. This leaves just one hour to do other stuff. However, if we simply reduce our screen time by half, this still leaves them on your phone for around four hours, but they will have around five hours a day to better themselves.
There are even larger numbers to deal with.
There are 8,760 hours in a year.
Multiply the seven hours of sleep you get times the number of days in a year (365), and this number comes out to 2,555 hours.
Now you also have the hours of school, which is six on average. Multiply this by 365 and you get 2,190.
Already half of a teens hours in a year are taken up by school and sleep.
Now on average, teenagers spend about an hour a day eating and drinking. So multiply 365 days in a year by 1 to get another 365 hours in a year taken up by eating and drinking.
If you add 2,555 plus 2,190 plus 365 this comes out to 5,110.
Subtract that number from 8,760, and you are left with 3,650. Now let’s multiply the nine hours of screen time times the 365 days in a year. This number comes out to be 3,285. If you subtract 3,285 from the number of hours of free time (3,650), this number is a scarce 365 hours in a year left which as I said before this is one hour per day.
Now if you divide that 365 hours by 24 this comes out to 15.2. This math means that your 365 hours of free time is really only 15 days.
Just 15 days to better yourself, or to talk to friends, or even to learn something new outside of school. If I asked you to only talk to your best friend 15 days a year, you probably wouldn’t like that. Or if someone tried to work out for only 15 days out of 365 days in a year, they wouldn’t make much progress.
Advice
This study is just something to always keep in the back of your mind when you are about to scroll on TikTok, or Instagram or you’re about to play a video game. I myself am a part of the big problem that needs to be solved.
Something that you can take away from this is simply be aware of how much of your free time you are using looking at screens. Maybe try to spend less time on your phone or on a video game and try spending more time communicating with friends or playing a sport or simply going outside when the weather is nice.
If you reduce your screen time by half, you will still use your phone a pretty decent amount and you will also be left with a lot more time to improve yourself or maybe even learn something new.
Reducing our screen time as humans can make us more intelligent and creative.
