Out of curiosity I checked my phone screen time and found a remarkable 50% drop, basically now averaging 3 hours a day.  I honestly felt like I had gotten my life back.

A major goal of these recent trips has been to ween myself off phone addiction.  Back in Cambodia, the owners at the Kampot guesthouse had mentioned how problematic it is when people travel and spend time on their phones.  They even fired staff over it.

Then I watched an informative YouTube video on phone addiction and how prevalent this is.  Talk about an eye opener.  This is basically something that authoritarian governments actively want.  The statistics for China are outright shocking:  up to 12 hours a day spent watching TikTok videos.  I guess when so many people are out of work and the government won't even publish the unemployment data anymore then their citizens will spend all day watching TikTok.  That or they're on their phone at work.  Unfortunately it's not just China, I've seen it happen here in Thailand too where people spend hours watching that mind numbing garbage.

 As the video commenter said, "As soon as I stopped scrolling through short form media, my screen time went from 4 hours a day to 1 hour.  You do the math and this is insane:  24 hours a week!   That's a day!  When I dropped that down to an hour a day I saw immediate improvements in my mental health, and no joke I started to remember things better.  I felt like I could retrieve those memories again.   This stuff is BAD!!!   I'm not joking.  This isn't some doomer nonsense.  This stuff is truly bad.  And I'm seeing what it's doing to China."

His key point could better be understood in the inverse:  excessive screen time and sleepless nights leads to cognitive decline.  I have first hand experience that memory is indeed affected.  It's also a battle that I fought hard in my classroom at first to ban devices and limit their use but it ended up failing long term.  Like a dam that breaks when water breaches, the tidal wave of phone addiction became too hard to stop.  And then you try to convince these students they should have a good sleep every night, when you're lucky they'll get 2-3 hours a night and not sleep in your class.

It is an epidemic, it truly is.

Much progress in the last six months had already been made on cutting my phone use, now it was a matter of cutting further.  If it was possible to get it down to 1-2 hours a day of screen time then this is a goal I would aim to achieve with the help of a professional in this kind of specialty.