How screen time affects attention and behavior
A father walks into the consultation room with his seven-year-old son. Before getting seated, the boy pulled the mobile phone from the father's pocket and started playing videos. With a sigh, the father started talking. "Sir, my son never stays in one place. He is all over the place all the time; he can't finish something he has started and has no interest in studies at all." As the father stopped, the therapist asked him to take the phone away from the boy's hands. As soon as he took the phone from his hands, the boy started wandering in the room aimlessly. The frustration was clear from the boy's behavior. He started picking up objects around the room and putting them back; he also tried to run out of the room once.
In the post-COVID era, this has been a concerning issue in most households all around us. Children, adolescents, and adults alike spend a significant part of their days in front of digital screens. Screens of different sizes and shapes occupy our surroundings in the forms of phones, tablets, computers, televisions, and gaming devices. The growth of technology has made our lives almost impossible without these devices. It is true that our education, communication, and entertainment are deeply integrated with technology, but we can't avoid the detrimental effect that our screen time is having on our mental health, mainly in the attentional and behavioral domains.
Attention is the mind's ability to focus on information while filtering out distractions or less relevant information. The content we consume from media on an everyday basis is tampering with this ability. Fast-paced content, especially reels and short videos, gives our brain constant stimulation and trains our brain to seek fast and novel changes. In turn, we lose our ability to focus on tasks which take time. Now it will make sense to you why reading a book or attending a lecture is so hard for us compared to before. It also makes focusing on academic work harder; we will find ourselves getting distracted easily and frequently. Researchers have found a relationship between excessive screen exposure and symptoms of attention difficulties, including restlessness and poor concentration.
Excess screen time is taking its toll on our emotional well-being as well. Even though scrolling through media mindlessly is rewarding at the moment, we often end up being mentally exhausted after use. This often leads to stress or anxiety. In children and teenagers, it may come out as poor attention and irritability, like we saw in the case mentioned above. Prolonged use of digital screens reduces the opportunities for children to engage in real-life social interactions during the significant stages of their growth, thus impairing the development of empathy and emotional awareness. The type of content consumed by an individual also affects these changes. For example, prolonged exposure to violent media content can develop aggressive behavior in the individual gradually. Coming to physiological effects, the blue light emitted from screens can tamper with melatonin production in our bodies, thus leading to poor sleep quality, which, in turn, can affect our mood, attention, and self-control.
Does reading these symptoms bring someone to our mind? A friend, a relative, or maybe ourselves?
If yes, that's where the change starts. With awareness and guidance, we can tackle this too. In children, patience is the key to change; an efficient support system is essential for changing them. This includes their parents, teachers, and caregivers. Instead of cutting them off completely from the digital world, fostering a balanced and healthy routine with set boundaries will be the best approach.
In cases where screen use has significantly affected the attentional and emotional well-being of the individual, seeking support from a professional psychologist or counselor is the best course of action.
Technology is supposed to make human life easier. Its impact will be according to how we choose to use it. We humans have the potential to bend it to our own will. Instead, we often walk into the traps in it. So let's be aware, take control back, and use it to enrich our well-being instead of diminishing it.
Written By- Irfan Saifu K - Psychologist (Mindmaris Counsellors India Pvt)
Early child counselling can help children develop healthier screen habits and better emotional well being.
