Digital Wellbeing & Screen Time

What you’ll learn

• Free apps are not really free; in the attention economy, your attention is the product being sold to advertisers.
• Infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, streaks, and likes are engineered to keep you engaged, not to help you finish.
• Variable rewards work like a slot machine, and dopamine drives the anticipation and seeking that keeps you swiping.
• Effects on sleep, focus, and mood vary by person; how you use tech matters more than raw hours, and correlation is not proof of harm.
• You can push back: turn off notifications, set screen-free times and zones, curate your feed, and use built-in screen-time tools.
• If you cannot stop, lose sleep, skip life, or feel worse after use, tell a trusted adult; it is common and fixable.