About

Smartphones and social media are now a routine part of daily life. For all of their connectivity and convenience, they quietly consume far more time than most of us realize. In the United States, researchers (Bradley & Howard, 2023) have found that college students typically spend 6 hours and 52 minutes per day on their phones, most of that time on social media. Over a year, this amounts to 105 full days, often spent in tiny intervals: a few minutes in line, between tasks, or whenever attention wavers.

The opportunity cost is not simply time on a screen. It is what that time displaces: deep focus, sleep, movement, face-to-face connection, and sustained engagement in work that matters. Research on mental health effects is nuanced—time alone does not always predict harm, and the quality of online experiences matters—but higher or more intense social media use is consistently linked (on average) with worse outcomes for sleep and mental health in young people in large research syntheses.

The Screen Time Intervention was created by an undergraduate student at Providence College. She landed an exciting summer internship and started strong. However, over time, she noticed her performance began to drift while a peer consistently excelled. When she paid close attention to the difference, she saw a pattern: whenever she felt slightly bored or got stuck on a work-related problem, she instinctively reached for her phone and began scrolling. Those small moments, repeated many times a day, compounded over weeks and began to undermine the very opportunity she had worked hard to earn. She eventually deleted social media apps from her phone and built this activity so others could notice the same pattern earlier, and make more deliberate choices before the costs accumulate.

The intention of this activity is not to radically transform your life in one week. It is to nudge you toward more conscious choices: small, repeatable actions that build positive momentum. We hope that this greater self-awareness and self-management can create positive momentum that leads to meaningful change in your life.

For comments and feedback, please contact Dr. Thomas Ptashnik at tptashnik@providence.edu.