Digital Wellbeing
What Is Internet Addiction | and When Should You Worry?
Heavy use is not automatically addiction. The line is impairment, and there are practical ways back.
CyberSafeTT · 21 January 2025 · 5 min read
Screen time alone is a poor measure. Two hours of compulsive scrolling can do more damage than four hours of building something. What matters is whether use is displacing sleep, school, food and relationships.
Signs of a problem
- Loss of control over how long a session lasts.
- Irritability or anxiety when offline.
- Sleep loss from late-night use.
- Falling grades, abandoned hobbies, avoided friendships.
- Using screens as the only way to manage difficult feelings.
What helps
- Device-free bedrooms overnight, the single highest-impact rule.
- Replace, do not just remove: sport, music, cooking, a build project.
- Turn off non-human notifications; most urgency is manufactured.
- Greyscale mode and app timers to break autopilot.
- Family agreements written together, applying to adults too.
Next step
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