Lockdown and tech overload – how to escape your screens

Description

From churchgoers to nursery school children, video calls, conferences and quizzes have become a lifeline at this time. But this has also meant the boundary between work and family life has become blurred and unbalanced – with notifications, calls and messages, interrupting mealtimes and conversations.

And herein lies part of the problem, because research has found that breaks from work where we engage with our smartphones – to play games or scroll through social networks – are less effective or restorative than conventional breaks such as walking or napping.

This is in part why we have started a new research project to find out how increased screen use during the pandemic – for both learning and downtime – is affecting student wellbeing and concentration levels. Existing research shows that students who are addicted to their phones have lower level of self-regulated learning, low level of flow – or feeling “in the zone” – and are constantly interrupted by applications on their phones when they are studying. So we want to see if enforced break time – away from all screens – could help.