How To Defeat Your Social Media Addiction - Catherine Price - #921

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How many hours a day are most people spending on their phones? How many times are they picking them up?

**Catherine Price** (0:05)
It's hard to get a firm answer on how many hours, but the best statistics I found range between four and six hours a day that people are spending on their phones. If you want to go for the middle number there, five hours a day, it adds up to about 75 days a year. It's really a shocking amount.

**Chris Williamson** (0:22)
Yeah, I wonder what the comparison is, because that's presumably across a bunch of different age groups. If you were to go under 30, I would guess that that number goes up. I would also guess that the hours of sleep would go down under that. I certainly know Luke, who is a good friend of mine and my tour manager, he regularly manages to double his sleep time with his screen time.
He's 12 hours a day on phone, six hours of sleep.

**Catherine Price** (0:50)
Oh, that direction. I thought you were going the other healthier direction.

**Chris Williamson** (0:53)
No.

**Catherine Price** (0:53)
Oh, that's not good. Does he need an intervention?

**Chris Williamson** (0:57)
He's a club promoter.
He's like patient zero for phone news. All of us are. So anybody that used to run nightlife stuff, we basically were hardwired into WhatsApp, and it's very difficult to get rid of that. Maybe this is me just creating an excuse for myself. But yeah, if you grew up being some club promoter type person, you have maybe the worst neural networks possible. For that phone use is not good.

**Catherine Price** (1:29)
That's a separate category. So you have like 18 to 29 year olds, 29 to 40, and then you have like club managers, which is-

**Chris Williamson** (1:34)
Correct. That's good. It's a different species technically.

**Catherine Price** (1:36)
Yes. I hadn't thought about that.

**Chris Williamson** (1:38)
I'm already learning. That's it.
I was going to say, when you look at different cohorts, do boys or men use it more than women? What have we got about teenagers, young people? Does this tend to fluctuate over time?

**Catherine Price** (1:52)
Yeah. The generational thing is definitely true. Everyone is spending a lot of time on their phones, but younger people, which the terms are Gen Alpha and Gen Z, basically up to 28 or 30 or so, definitely higher than Gen X or let alone Boomers. But with that said, I do think that older people get off the hook too easily when it comes to screen time because I think most of us have probably had an experience when you're with someone in their 70s and they just have their phone out usually on Facebook all the time. I recently heard a great word for that which is screen your citizen.

**Chris Williamson** (2:23)
Oh, screen your citizen. Very good.

**Catherine Price** (2:26)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:27)
Very good. Yeah.

**Catherine Price** (2:28)
I think in terms of gender breakdown, you tend to have different people doing, it's all stereotypes, but it's like women tend to be on social media more, men tend to be, and young men in particular, on gaming more. It depends on the person, but those are the general breakdowns. But yeah, younger people are on their phones more than the much older generations for sure.

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
I suppose what's interesting about this is something I only realized a few years ago, which is phones come in and they take, let's say, six hours of our day, and I'm going to guess that a lot of what's being studied here is not word processors, emails at work, it's much more social media sort of casual leisure time type stuff. But the length of the day hasn't become 30 hours. So that six-hour window has had to squeeze other bits of life that 25 years ago existed, that has to have been squeezed from somewhere, unless you've become more efficient at playing in the park or more efficient at spending time with your friends or whatever it might be. So inevitably, to put six hours of your day onto screens, that means six hours of your day doing something else has had to go.

**Catherine Price** (3:34)
Yeah, I think the opportunity cost is something that people need to pay more attention to. I will say though that I think a lot of times people are multi-screening. And that, because I thought about the same thing, how does this math actually work? You know, there's like teenagers are supposedly spending something like seven hours a day on screen-based leisure that doesn't have to do the schoolwork. I'm like, how is that possible? School's eight hours a day. So a lot of it is multi-screening. You're watching TV, you're also on your phone, you're playing a video game, you're also chatting, like that kind of multi-screening. But going back to what you were saying, I think that we really do need to think about this in terms of opportunity cost, is there are only 24 hours in the day and every time we spend an hour on one thing, let alone six hours, we end up with six fewer hours to spend on anything else in life. And I always say like, if you are aware of this and you decide you want to be spending that much time on a screen, it's your life. But I think that for a lot of people, it's not an intentional choice, you get sucked in and then you don't really recognize your life is being stolen from you in these little increments that add up to weeks and months and literally years.