It is difficult to realize how little by little the mobile phone crept into all spheres of daily life. And it’s easy to be startled when you first enter the Screen Time panel on iOS, or Digital Wellbeing on Android, and see the daily time we spend on the small screen: on average, it’s more than three hours; and up to six, among the youngest. Although there is considerable controversy about the relationship between the use of smartphone and mental health problems, there is an undeniable approach: very few people wake up and think “today I am going to spend four hours looking at the phone”; and yet, the device ends up absorbing our attention during that time without us having decided.
Every day, on several occasions, we go to the device with perhaps a specific objective (check the time, check a notification) and, when we realize it, 30 minutes have passed. Academics call “revision cycles” when picking up the cell phone for something specific—or for nothing—; something that half of users do more than 80 times a day, according to a survey by Screens Amigas. Through interviews with 50 people, they concluded that it is usual to try to keep the consultation brief, but that very often it expands and invades or replaces other day-to-day activities. “The fascinating thing is that you can completely disappear, mentally, into the device,” said one of the interviewees.
“We use our cell phones as an easy way to escape boredom or stress. Many times we open it without a specific purpose, just to fill a moment of waiting or to escape from reality. This ends up becoming a habit that, without realizing it, consumes a large amount of our time,” confirms Adoración Díaz López, doctor in Education and researcher at the Transfer and Research Institute (ITEI) of the International University of La Rioja.
One of the main culprits that smartphone absorbs us without us realizing it is the design of the applications, designed precisely to catch us and make us want to return. “The human being moves, broadly speaking, between two great objectives: avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. These devices are designed for that, to receive through these rewards (the likesnotifications), a shot of dopamine. We feel happy, entertained,” says Gabriela Paoli, a psychologist who is an expert in technological addictions. The expert also points out the highly studied effect of scroll infinite, which means that there is always new content available. “It makes us stay trapped in a kind of loop and always want to be aware of everything,” she says.
Some studies have already investigated more specific parts of why it costs so little to enter and so much to exit. An example: although logic tells us that, if we have already seen several similar contents, we will surely want to change activities, it has been proven that what happens is the opposite: according to a study published in 2021, users who had seen five music videos in a row were 10% more likely to choose to watch another one than those who had watched just one. If, in addition, we perceive that these videos belong to the same category, we are 21% more likely to see one more, something very relevant for all the sections of videos or related content that appear when we finish something.
The same research went further: does it matter if we intersperse tasks with videos or if we do one thing first and then the other? Yes: people who did the four assigned tasks first and then watched two videos were 22% more likely to want to watch another one than those who did task-video-task-video. That is, the important thing is to try to stop after a single content or, if we are going to continue, change categories.
Dissociated from the world
Then there is the issue of what happens to our perception of time while we are in that loop. Are we really not aware that many more minutes are passing than we wanted when we think “come on, just one more”? Díaz López explains that two factors are added: the state of flow to which this design takes us and, indeed, the decrease in temporal consciousness. “During these loops, our ability to perceive time is impaired because we are ‘dissociated’ from external cues. Without a clear ending, as might be the case with a television program or a time-limited activity, there are no reference points that indicate when we should stop. In addition, constant stimuli avoid the natural pauses that would make us look at the clock or notice the passage of time. “Its mechanisms, with hardly any minimal interruptions and the possibility of going on and on, promote a lack of awareness of how much time has passed,” he says.
Paoli agrees, referring to how in this loop our levels of self-awareness decrease with the disappearance of those signals from the outside. “In everyday life we usually have signals, such as light, noises from outside. You hear the neighbor come home from work or take the dog out and you know, for example, that it is already night. But those signals diminish significantly when on the phone; or watching a movie or playing a video game, because we are with the noise, with the lights, with the brightness. We immerse ourselves in that situation and the temporal markers disappear. The brain has difficulty registering how much time has passed,” he explains.
While it is true that we also enter this state of absorption by dedicating ourselves to many other activities, such as watching a movie, the fact that networks have no end is what makes it more dangerous. Paoli adds another fundamental factor: self-deception. “To say to yourself ‘I’ll spend a little time on my phone and then I’ll work’ is to consciously postpone and procrastinate everything else in order to be connected,” he points out.
A consequence of all this is that not only does our perception of time change while we are on the mobile, but also, if the use is very intensive, that of any other situation in which we find ourselves: we feel that time passes faster, somewhat very related to that very contemporary sensation of feeling that we don’t have time for anything. Back in 2015, research compared people who were always connected with others who barely used technology to see how they perceived the passage of time: after spending 50 minutes in a room, the most disconnected people estimated quite well how much had passed, while those who lived longer on-line They thought an hour had passed.
TikTok and the time warp
More recent studies continue to show a similar pattern. In research published earlier this year, in this case on the effect of short TikTok videos on the perception of time, the people who spent the most hours on TikTok so much overestimated the actual time they spent on the app as the time it had taken them to fill out the survey. This general feeling of believing that time passes faster than it actually does, the researchers concluded, contributes to the general stress of believing that nothing is getting anywhere.
For this reason, it is increasingly normal to fill each “dead time” with digital tasks – which sometimes simply consist of entering social networks -, those responsible for the TIMED research project point out on their website. In a survey of 300 people across Europe, they detected a cyclical pattern: people want to make their time more productive, so those idle moments—a wait, a bus ride—are filled with digital technologies to “do something.” ”. They end up spending more time there than they had planned and feel that those hours on-line They are wasted time. That feeling of losing time leads us to want to be productive all the time and start over.
How to get out of the loop? Psychologist Gabriela Paoli recalls the main recommendations: first, be aware of the time spent on the mobile phone each day and, then, deploy a series of strategies, “starting with small steps”: limit the time spent using applications. , deactivate notifications, establish disconnection times and spaces – for example, the bedroom – that are “non-negotiable” or activate concentration mode. “It is not about demonizing networks, or mobile phones or anything, but about making responsible, conscious and healthy use. You have to find that balance between being connected and enjoying your time. offline”, he concludes.
