Sometimes, it’s even less, as illustrated by the examples of the sleep-deprived college students who boasted about their suffering. For most people, the amount of sleep we should be getting is often cut in half. If you’re like most people, then it’s probably pretty safe to say that you don’t get a regular 8 hours of sleep every night.

And 28 hours a week definitely counts as an addiction!

That means that we spend 28 hours a week being consumed by our phones! That’s the same amount of time we’d spend in a pretty busy part-time job! So, if we go back to our earlier example, we can see that the issue at hand is actually much greater than just a few innocuous glances at our phones! Because, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, you’re considered a “heavy media users” if you spend more than 16 hours with digital media a day. Collectively, US smartphone users check their phones in the aggregate more than 9 billion times per day.” Does that sound like a lot yet? If we break those statistics down, you’ll also see that Americans spend an average of four hours per day with their phones, seven days a week. All told, we look at our phones approximately 47 times a day, and that number rises to 82 for 18-24 year-olds. Likewise, we have trouble putting them down, with over 30% of consumers checking their devices five minutes before going to sleep, and half doing so in the middle of the night. But when it comes to the “casual” stress of our daily lives, we simply suppress these signals and move on, burying our physical symptoms or telling ourselves that a glass of wine will do the trick.Ī 2016 study conducted by the British consulting firm Deloitte discovered that “more than 40% of consumers check their phones within five minutes of waking up.

We would recognize our pounding hearts, throbbing temples, and shaky legs as cues that we had survived an ordeal and allow ourselves some time to rest. If we had encountered either of those scenarios, we would of course understand that our bodies have been traumatized and that we need time to recover. And although you may not realize it, “everyday stress” scenarios like this one activate your body’s “fight or flight” response, flooding you with the same levels of adrenaline that would be produced if you were fleeing a serial killer or fighting off a bear. In your experience, that pressure might manifest in the form of rushing home from work to pick the kids up from daycare and scrambling to craft a home-cooked meal while you hold the phone with one hand and your screaming baby with the other.

How to stop time by matt haig summary