Time Spent on Digital Screen and its Impact on Health and Academic Performance of Youth

Abstract

Background: The current era is a digital era. Every individual spending a lot of time using digital screens for almost everything from work and school to socializing and fun. COVID-19 pandemic further increased the screen time as people stayed indoors and forced to spend more time on screen media. Several studies conducted and revealed the effects of excessive screen time on health and wellbeing. Since youth are the change makers of the society, the current study aimed to conduct on the youths. Results: The findings of the study revealed that, youth in Saudi Arabia spending 7 hrs. daily on an average on screen media. Gender wise females are spending (8 hrs. average) more time on screen media than males (7 hrs. average). Watching movies and other entertaining programs and social media use have highly significant association with increased screen time. More than 50% participants agreed with the fact that their amount of screen media use behaviour affecting their life in diverse way such as, they neglect daily activities, losing sleep, grades suffer and it bothers to their family too. Physical wellbeing markers such as BMI (0.03), suffering from asthma (0.006), suffering from headache often (0.03), suffering from food indigestion often (0.03); psychological wellbeing markers like, feel depressed/low mood/sad often (0.004) and feel lonely often (0.05) have significant association with daily amount of screen time. Social wellbeing markers such as like to spend time with family (< 0.001), like to talk or visit with friends or relatives (< 0.001), like parties (< 0.001) and academic performance marker like grade achieved in recent exam attended (< 0.001) have highly significant association with daily amount of screen time among the Saudi youths. Conclusions: The current study is an eye opener for the whole world to sensitize them for limiting their screen time in order to live a healthy, happy and more active lifestyle.