I’ve got to be honest about something.
Just reducing your total amount of screen time isn’t automatically going to make your life better, or more meaningful.
In fact, there can often be a cost to reducing our screen time. That cost might be emotional, mental, social, or all three. Reducing our screen time can actually make our lives harder—at least in the short-term.
Whether the process is beneficial ultimately comes down to what we replace that screen time with (which is what last week’s newsletter was about)—and whether we’re able to recognize and address the root causes that were driving our screen use to begin with (which is what this week’s newsletter is about).
Coming up:
Why uncovering the root issues under our screen use is crucial
What to know about the new parental-control features on iPhone
A recent conversation with my 9-year-old about social media
Let’s get to it.
Actually, screen time isn’t the problem
An organization called The Freedom Fight helps men and women get out of compulsive behaviors—specifically, in their case, behaviors involving p-rnography. In their research, they’ve found that when people develop some sort of compulsive behavior, they’re typically trying to medicate one of eight different underlying emotional issues. Those are:
Boredom
Loneliness
Anxiety
Stress
Self-doubt
Anger (or, feeling “ticked off”)
Exhaustion
Depression
Now, screen time can help to temporarily relieve a lot of these. Take boredom for example; curing boredom is probably one of screen time’s #1 use cases.
But part of the issue is that the “cure” is always short-term—and in a way that often makes you want/need more the next time.
Taking a clearer look at our own emotional landscapes can help us realize what, exactly, our screen time is doing for us—and how we might pursue the underlying motivation more directly.
Healthy coping mechanisms
Part of how I’ve learned to process my own difficult emotions has involved things like going on a walk and praying. Trying to directly name whatever I was going through in prayer, instead of trying to just cover it up with screen time, has made a big difference.
Another big part of learning how to cope well has to do with the community we surround ourselves with. Some adults struggle for years trying to get their screen time under control, and part of why they fail is because they try to do it all by themselves. What we need is a form of healthy, restorative community.
If you don’t already have that, here are two different ideas:
Send a friend this text: “Hey [friend’s name]. I’ve been reading a newsletter called selfctrl, and it’s inspiring me to want to become more intentional with how I use [specific piece of technology]. Would you be willing to start asking me about how that’s going on a regular basis?”
Go to a celebrate recovery group. Celebrate recovery groups are all over the country, and based around the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous—but for any “Hurt, Habit, or Hang-up” that’s relevant to the people attending. The patterns of recovery underneath screen time addiction are often very similar to the patterns under, for example, substance abuse.
Again, the end goal of these steps should be uncovering the deeper roots that are motivating your use of screen time, and learning to find healthier ways to pursue solutions to those issues. The reality is that compulsive screen time is doing something for us—but there are healthier, more sustainable ways to meet our underlying needs.
A few stories that caught my eye this week.
Apple’s iOS 27 includes a variety of updates to its Screen Time and parental control features, including “Ask to Browse,” a setting in which a child who attempts to visit a new website in Safari can be required to request permission first. Click here for a full writeup of the new features.
A new study published in Acta Psychologica found that people who passively consumed content on smartphones for four to five hours or more a day (“heavy process users” in the study’s terminology) performed worse than expected for their age on measures of attention and memory. They were also more likely to suffer from “text neck.”
Another new study from Pew Research found that 45% of Americans tried to cut back on their smartphone use over the last year, but only 25% said they were “Extremely/very successful.” I have to think that number would have been higher if they’d tried one of the ideas above!
We had a social media conversation with our 9-year-old recently, after she came home from school and told us that some of her peers were already starting to get social media accounts.
Hold the line, parents!
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