In today’s society, most of us are addicted to our phones. Our lives are wrapped up in our phones, so it’s no surprise that it’s hard to go for any extended period of time without picking it up. No matter how much will-power you think you have, not knowing who’s been trying to reach you is a scary feeling.
While we know this is the reality, seeing hard numbers on exactly how many minutes we waste staring into our screens is shocking. With Apple’s screen time feature, you can see precisely how much time you spend on your phone and which apps you use the most. You can also see how many times each day you pick up your phone.
If you’re horrified by your results, you probably aren’t alone. You definitely aren’t the only one addicted to your phone, and other people in your generation likely have similar (if not higher) stats in their weekly screen time report.
But how much time you spend scrolling each day may depend on where you live. A recent study by SimpleTexting.com mapped out the average screen time habits for each state in the US to see exactly which states have the worst digital addictions.
In Virginia, the average citizen spends about 179 minutes on their phone each day. That may not seem like a lot, but it adds up fast. In just one year, that’s a total of 45 days dedicated solely to your mobile device.
Compared to the nation, Virginia is fairly average. States range from an average of 131 minutes in Oklahoma to 276 minutes in Arizona. It’s safe to say that our state isn’t the most addicted to our phones like the Southwestern region, but we’re definitely tapped into the digital era.
Of course, there’s a lot of variety in these statistics. Your demographics, including age and gender, probably play a large role in how much time you spend on your phone. It’s unsurprising that millennials spend the most time on their phones, but the baby boomers really aren’t all that far behind.
Millennials spend an average of 3.4 hours each day on their phones, compared to 2.3 hours for baby boomers. Women spend slightly longer on their phones, but only beating out their male counterparts by 20 minutes.
The most used app by both men and women is social media supergiant, Facebook. While Facebook has had a long reign in the social media sphere, the recent China-based app TikTok has quickly gained popularity with over 1 billion downloads since its launch under three years ago.
With the creation of these new addicting apps that have the mysterious ability to suck us in and devote excessive portions of our lives to, we can only predict that our screen time stats will continue to rise as time progresses.
At this point, mobile devices are so much a part of our daily lives that it’s hard to say this immense amount of time as a problematic waste of time. In fact, our phones can be aiding our productivity, so take all of your screen time results with a grain of salt.
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