“I have removed myself from Instagram and Tik Tok,” says Inma Rojas, just turned 18 and a second-year high school student in Seville. “I have realized that she takes up a lot of my time,” explains this student who faces the dreaded university entrance exam in two weeks. Before making this decision, she dedicated more than three hours a day to relaxing and entertaining herself, she says. Her cell phone hours exceed those recommended by the World Health Organization (120 minutes a day maximum), but do not reach the six recorded by adolescents who participated in a study published in Archives of Disease in Childhoodfrom the British Medical Journal and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The effects of this abuse are poorer grades, increased anxiety, poorer body image, and lower well-being.
The study, carried out on a thousand students between 15 and 16 years old in Finland, with real measurements and information provided by the participants, has found that the average daily use time of smartphones is around six hours. Other studies among Swedish adolescents reflected an average of 161 minutes, almost three hours. In Spain, according to the Steps FoundationDuring the week there are almost 200 minutes a day and 300 on weekends.
Although the data vary, the key is that all analyzes agree on widespread abuse that, according to the author of the Finnish study, Silja Kosola, generates “anxiety and other mental disorders, especially among girls, which contribute significantly to adolescent morbidity. in high-income countries. Among these disorders, addiction to social networks stands out.
Daily time spent on these is also associated, according to Kosola, with a lower grade point average, a poorer perception of one’s own body image, poorer health and mood, more fatigue, and greater feelings of loneliness.
The researcher herself admits that “this is an observational study and, as such, no firm conclusions can be drawn about the causal factors.” However, she concludes that, “the implications are serious and policymakers must urge technology companies to prioritize safety and health.”
The psychologist Gadi Lissak, in a previous more exhaustive study published in Science Directagrees with the conclusion: “The excessive use of digital media by children and adolescents appears as an important factor that can hinder the formation of solid psychophysiological resilience.”
Lissak highlights the effects of using mobile devices and analyzes not only the times, but also the contents, the time of day and the types of uses to identify twenty physical harms, from loss of sleep to obesity and cardiovascular problems; psychological, such as depression and dependence; and psychoneurological, which involve changes in the structure of the brain.
The worse perception, especially among adolescents, of body image identified in the Finnish study coincides with the results of research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics by Cassidy Foley, from the University of Florida. Foley also attributes part of the body’s self-esteem problems to social media and acknowledges that “women tend to be a little more unhappy or uncomfortable with their body image than men.”
“All those hours of screen time in young people leads to a heavier heart and, from what we know from studies in adults, increases the chances of heart attack and stroke,” says Andrew Agbaje of the University of Eastern Finland. and author of a study for the European Society of Cardiology.
In Spain, devices are also part of the daily lives of minors, according to ONTSI data(National Observatory of Technology and Information Society), which indicates that 98% of them use the Internet regularly and seven out of ten have a mobile phone (39% before the age of 11).
The consequences of abuse are general. The report Influence of technology on the lives of Spaniards, prepared by the cybersecurity company Kaspersky, reveals that almost 70% of the population is dependent on technology and 46% admit that they should reduce their use, although only one in 10 has gone to therapy to achieve this. The functions that generate the most dependency are instant messaging applications (32%), social networks (22%) and online video viewing platforms (11%).
Despite this reality, 26% of parents admit that they do not have enough information to explain to their children how to use the Internet safely and responsibly and 75% believe that their children are not prepared or do not have sufficient knowledge to do so. safe use of the Internet, according to a survey from the same company.
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