Good news! Screen time may not be as bad for your health as you thought

Each generation has its own “boogeyman” when it comes to wasting time. In the 1950s and 1960s older adults bemoaned those awful comic books that were rotting kids’ minds. By the 80s comics were replaced by video games, and nowadays the culprits are smartphones, tablets, and screen time in general.

It’s certainly reasonable to theorize that spending hours upon hours every day switching from app to app isn’t the best way to use one’s time, but does more screen time really lead to poorer mental health? Interestingly, a new study just released by the University of Bath reports the jury is still very much out.

Researchers say it’s impossible to determine if screen time is detrimental to mental health because there just isn’t enough reliable information. 

Why is it so hard to get a handle on this? After analyzing tons of prior relevant research, study authors say people rarely if ever submit accurate estimations of their daily screen time habits. Across 47 different studies encompassing roughly 50,000 individuals, only 5% of studies included accurate usage estimates.

“For decades, researchers have relied on estimates of how we use various technologies to study how people use digital media and the potential outcomes this behavior can lead to. Our findings suggest that much of this work may be on unstable footing,” says lead researcher Dr. Doug Parry at Stellenbosch University.

“The screen time discrepancies highlight that we simply do not know enough yet about the actual effects (both positive and negative) of our media use. Researchers, journalists, members of the public, and crucially policymakers need to question the quality of evidence when they consider research on media uses and effects. We can no longer simply take claims of harmful effects at face value,” he adds.

To reach these findings, any and all prior studies that compared logged or tracked media use (screen time) with subjective screen time self-reporting were sought out and analyzed.

“These highly flawed studies are over-inflating the relationships between digital media use and typically negative outcomes, such as mental health symptoms and cognitive impairments, which of course explains the pervading view that smartphones among other technologies are bad for us,” explains Dr. Brit Davidson from the University of Bath’s School of Management.

All of this isn’t to say that screen time can’t be harmful. Too much of anything will turn into a problem, especially something as engrossing as a smartphone. At the same time, though, study authors say there really isn’t all that much reliable research to fall back on for some of the more common arguments against screen time.

“Media and technology use takes the blame for everything from increases in teenage depression and suicide to higher incidence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and violence. If we want to properly investigate harms, we must first tackle assumptions about screen time and disentangle how people are actually using their phones or other technologies of interest,” Dr. Davidson concludes. “Importantly, these questionable studies are also being used to influence policy. The UK and Canada both have forms of screen time guidelines based on poorly conducted research, which is clearly worrying and hard to reverse.”

It’s hard for most of us to imagine a world without smartphones, but the truth is these technologies are still incredibly new in the grand scheme of things. Smartphones and the like just haven’t been widely available long enough to draw any conclusive connections between use and mental health impact. Moving forward, future studies on this topic should rely on real-time monitoring, not subjective self-reporting.

The full study can be found here, published in Nature Human Behaviour.