Too much time on your phone? Learn about digital well-being.

Oct. 30, 2026

By Mary Wade Burnside

Monongalia County Health Department can’t come to you and grab your smartphone out of your scrolling fingers.
But we can foster a discussion about something called “Digital Wellbeing” that, if practiced, could potentially improve your mental and physical health.
Not unlike a lot of people, I have issues with spending too much time on my phone. I had considered going cold turkey and trying to stay away from social media altogether. But I use it to message friends and family and I like to see what’s going on in their lives.
Plus, I need to be on social media for my job.
A couple of months ago, I was having lunch with a friend who told me she had figured out that she could limit her time on Facebook. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to enable safeguards to help avoid time-robbing and sometimes anxiety-producing posts and videos.
It also just might literally save your neck if you are experiencing pain from looking down too much.
The process requires going to the settings on your Android phone and scrolling down to “Digital Wellbeing” or your iPhone and scrolling to “Screen Time.” Then you can choose the apps on which you want to limit your time.
You can also simultaneously or only use screen time tracking, which reminds you how long you’ve been on your phone in five-minute increments.
Activating these measures provided me with immediate relief, which illustrates how easily some of us can be sucked into spending way too much time on our phones, digesting a lot of unimportant and random clickbait.
Digital wellbeing is a public health issue. In fact, researchers began addressing “internet addiction” in the mid-90s, before a lot of people were even using the world wide web, or even actually born yet.
And we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone, which made smartphone technology available to a much wider audience.
Now, in the mid-20s, information on the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine acknowledges how social media is a double-edged sword.
It provides connections with friends and family. In fact, one of my best friends now is someone I reconnected with on Facebook after distance kept us from communicating for several years. It’s also a great tool during emergencies.
And yet, social media can also be very isolating, keeping us from interacting with people in our own households or communities.
Social media also “contributed to public health crises by exacerbating a decline in public trust, deteriorating mental health (especially in young people), and spreading dangerous misinformation,” the NLM blog states.
This is not even taking into consideration the harm that social media can cause kids and teens, individuals with growing brains who are especially susceptible to online bullying that can lead to self-harm and even suicide. School boards around the country, including Monongalia County, have recognized these issues by turning places of education into “smartphone-free zones.”
Enabling screen-limiting protocols on your phone is just one step to help you reduce phone usage. Another big one is to receive fewer notifications. Our past selves would think we are crazy to think that there is so much information that we need to be alerted to RIGHT NOW.
Setting your phone to greyscale also makes it less enticing, and hiding your social media apps makes them less accessible. I took mine off of my home screen a while back.
And then there is the obvious one: Don’t always have your phone right next to you. If you are at dinner, put it away and talk to your friends and family. If you are at home relaxing, plug it in in a different room.
These steps can have so many positive effects on your mental and physical health. These include lowering cortisol, improving sleep hygiene and freeing up time for other activities like exercising, reading and talking to people in real life.

Mary Wade Burnside is the public health officer at Monongalia County Health Department.