Americans spend 4.5 hours daily on phones. Hobbies offer a healthier, more rewarding alternative.

Hobbies reduce stress, boost dopamine, and improve focus—benefits scrolling simply cannot provide.

No expertise needed: Beginners gain the same brain benefits from hobbies as advanced practitioners.

It’s just easier and more fun to look at one of the millions of truly fascinating items on our phones than attend to … whatever else it is we are supposed to be doing at this moment. Our phones and the social media on our phones are designed to keep our attention.

The numbers back this up. According to Consumer Affairs, in 2024, 98 percent of Americans (331 million people) owned a mobile phone, with 91 percent being smartphones. They found that, on average, Americans spend 4 hours and 30 minutes on their mobile phones and check their phones 205 times per day. Social media browsing takes up an average of 1 hour and 57 minutes of that time on our phones.

It helps to understand why our screens are so seductive. The technology behind scrolling uses an intermittent reward system (based on research by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner), the exact same psychology that makes slot machines in casinos so addictive. The algorithms used by social media sites are designed to know us better than we know ourselves and offer us content that we just can’t resist. Lastly, our phone fits easily in the palm of our hand, and we can even scroll one-handed—absolutely nothing is asked of us except to own the phone.

Abundant research continues to affirm that excess social media use is detrimental to well-being—for example, the 2026 World Happiness Report found that social media use among adolescents is inversely linked to life satisfaction.

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