The average teen spends around 7 ½ hours a day on their phone, according to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Calculating their average sleep time, that’s almost half their waking hours. To put that into perspective, in 7 ½ hours, you can put together an entire 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, or deep clean an entire house, or learn the basics of coding. But instead, we glue ourselves to screens and scroll mindlessly through a sea of short-form content designed to capture our attention.

Constant phone use is harming teens’ focus, motivation, and stress levels by overstimulating the brain’s reward system. Research by Harvard Medical School suggests that smartphone alerts and social media cues trigger dopamine because the brain chemical is tied to reward, which can “diminish the motivation to pay attention to anything else.”

This constant stream of quick rewards trains the brain to crave instant stimulation, making slower tasks like homework or reading feel less engaging.

With many social media apps featuring short-form content, we’ve become accustomed to watching a sequence of 10-15-second videos for dopamine hits. According to WDJB7, “…studies show the average attention span of a student is 10-15 minutes, with levels dropping after 10 to 30 minutes of a lecture.” Our phones have become detrimental to our education, causing students to lose focus even in school.

Now, in some cases, your phone may be useful for your growth, for instance, if you wanted to learn how to make the best chocolate chip cookies, you would simply search up a recipe. This is what we call “Adequate phone usage”: using your phone for growth and learning. 

However, it becomes a problem when you are no longer learning and are now entirely distracted from the cookies you were supposed to make because you saw an Instagram notification. Leisure should be a reward for taking care of your duties rather than an all-day everyday activity, because once that happens, you no longer have the will to work or be productive. You become caught up in the web of slothfulness and no longer have the motivation to work towards your goals. You no longer feel like baking cookies.

Cookies aside, studies have also shown that overuse of a phone can result in irritability, anxiety, and insomnia. Some people even experience withdrawals after an extended period of time away from it, showing how we have become so susceptible to the clutches of easy dopamine. Some symptoms of these withdrawals are nausea, fatigue, and something known as “phantom vibrations,” where the user may hear or feel the phone ring when it is not. 

All while you scroll, you’re draining your body and mind at the cost of a couple of short videos online. As a result, your time is being wasted, and you sink deeper into the hole of idleness until your motivation declines further. Your dues are late, and your brain is tired, so we should put our phones down until we take care of our responsibilities.