How many minutes can you lie in bed without touching your phone? For 1 in 2, it is less than just 3
How many minutes can you lie in bed without touching your phone? For 50 per cent of us, the answer highlights our obsession with our screens.
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More than half of all Australian adults look at their phones just before closing their eyes at night and again within moments of waking, a national survey has found.
It reveals 54 per cent access their phones during the last three minutes before they go to sleep with 53 per cent reaching for their devices within the first three minutes of being awake.
However, the study by Mainstreet Insights – a collaboration of major research companies Reventure and McCrindle – also found three in four wanted to change the bedtime habit and reduce the amount of time spent on social media.
“It is the first time we have asked this question and a lot of people (spoke) of being more attached and more connected to their phones in bed than their partners and this research bears that out – it is quite astonishing,” social researcher Mark McCrindle said.
“It shows a dependency on phones, perhaps bordering on addiction to phones, beyond what any of us would have hypothesised.”
Two in five (42 per cent) said they believed the use of screens was negatively impacting on their mental health, two in three (64 per cent) said screens had made their life more sedentary while half (49 per cent) admitted their screen use was hindering their relationships.
Mr McCrindle said recognising an issue was different than acting on it, explaining the 74 per cent who want to rein in their bad habits.
“It is old battle around human nature, we know we need to get movement up, we know we need to eat more healthy foods but the fact is that an intention, recognition and awareness is not the same as action,” he said.
Mr McCrindle said of most concern to the more than 1000 surveyed, ranging in age from 18 to 75-plus, was the use of devices by children aged 11 and younger with more than four in five (83 per cent) agreeing the use of screens caused more harm than good and 73 per cent attributing technology to an increase in the prevalence of bullying.
The survey was conducted just days before a shocking clip of a man taking his own life went viral on social media platform TikTok, hugely popular with kids.
“This terrible video shows the speed of the spread of content on these social media sites, and it is not just one site – it is not just, ‘my children doesn’t have TikTok so it doesn’t matter’ – these things get replicated across the sites and it is a global medium for them,” he said.
“In this instance, by the time school principals had warned parents about it on email, kids had already got it through social media.
“(But) even before this incident, nine out of 10 (respondents) pointed to social media being the biggest spreader of fake news and misinformation, let alone the more extreme content we witnessed this week.
“Every parent wants to protect the innocence of their children but you can’t unsee these sorts of things.
”The world’s biggest social media companies are telling us that they don’t yet have the algorithms to remove this stuff, particularly when it is live-streamed or quickly going viral – Australians are asking, if they can’t manage it,how can we as parents, let alone our kids, manage it?”
On a quirkier note, Australians aren’t big fans of the “cancel culture”, in which brands are boycotted via social media campaigns.
Three in four Australians (75%) agree that cancel culture has caused more harm than good.
“Aussies are not into the pile-on and that is what they are saying,” Mr McCridle said.