In ten years you may find yourself living alone with 16 cats. The reason?  You had too high a screen time when you were at Lake Mary High School.  How much screen time is too much?  There isn’t an established base, but several LMHS students are pushing the boundaries of how much time a human can possibly hold a phone in their hands. Students have been pushing 8, 10, and even 12 hours of screen time each day.

We conducted interviews to see who at LMHS has the highest screen time and who has the lowest to see what each one means. The person who we interview who had the highest screen time was Sofia Luna who is a sophomore. She averaged 12 hours and 30 minutes of screen time per day, which is equal to over 85 hours a week. When we interviewed her about her high screen time she said “seeing 12 hours was shocking to me because I know that there are things that we do on our phones everyday so some time is to be expected, but I didn’t realize how much time I was actually spending staring at a screen. I think that my life is being controlled by my phone and that it is a big problem for teens like me.”

On the other hand, some people we interviewed had much lower screen times. These students are averaging only 4 or 5 hours per week. These tend to be people who play a lot of sports or just have a busy and eventful life. One of the students we interviewed is a sophomore named Grace Fussell who only had 4 hours and 45 minutes of screen time, and she said, “I’m just too busy to be on my phone all the time, and I think that is a good thing so that I don’t have to be worried about the effects it could have on me in the future.”

There are many damages to the people who have really high screen times. According to valleywisehealth.org the damages of too much screen time can include poor social skills, bad eyesight, sleep problems, neck and back pain, and depression. If students keep going at this rate, than they will end up living with 16 cats and won’t be able to leave their houses because they don’t have any social skills, they’re tired all the time, and they have neck and back pain.

Some ways to prevent these problems and not end up living with 16 cats, is to put a limit on how much time students spend on their screens each day. People can do this by downloading apps to physically stop them from being on their phones, or they can just do more things that require them to put their phones down, like hanging out with their friends and not cats. Just because you have a high screen time doesn’t mean you can’t get a lower one because everyone can get a lower screen time but it just takes some time and self-control.