Screen time becomes excessive when it affects other major areas of our life—like sleep, ability to focus on schoolwork, mental health, and exercise. According to the CDC, 4 hours or more per day is considered excessive, especially when it’s non-educational. 

In my opinion, screen time isn’t inherently bad. It’s what we spend that time doing that matters, and whether such activity affects other key areas of our life negatively. 

For instance: 

A teen who spends 4 or more hours on YouTube watching educational content on how to solve a calculus or algebraic problem will gain more valuable knowledge compared to someone who spends that same amount of time on TikTok, scrolling mindlessly. 

Meaning, what we watch regularly shapes our thoughts and behaviors. If not done properly, it will affect our future actions in the long run. 

Our brain is very powerful. What we feed it regularly is how it operates and thinks, based on the content we consume daily. 

Think of it this way: our habits today—whether good or bad—are based on the summation of little bits of actions taken in the past that have now become part of our lives. Such habits make us who we are, and that becomes our identity that people see. 

For teenagers, most of them don’t even know how they got addicted to screens in the first place. Some do—yet are still addicted to it due to the instant gratification they get. 

And because the areas of the brain in charge of decision-making and self-control haven’t fully developed yet, screen reduction becomes a near-impossible task for many teens. This eventually turns into a daily habit of screen dependency. 

This is alarming because many teens, lacking self-control and discipline, often suffer both academically and emotionally. They struggle to disconnect from negative content on their own, which is why parental guidance and counseling support become so important. 

What worries me even more is how social media algorithms manipulate our dopamine reward system—constantly learning our preferences and feeding us more of what we like, just to keep us endlessly scrolling.