Your Fingers Scroll Over 85 Miles On Your Phone Every Year, Study Finds
I'm tired just thinking about it...
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock We all know that most of us are spending way too much time on our phones. Basically, statistics on the topic and all its terrifying knock-on effects could fill a library at this point. But a new study puts it into an entirely different perspective.
What if your fingers' activity were actually measured during all that scrolling and scrolling and scrolling? Say they made a pedometer for your fingertips: How much distance do you think your little pitty-pats would cover by the end of the year? It's probably a lot more than you realize.
A study found the average American's fingers scroll 85 miles a year.
If you're of a certain age, you likely remember the old AT&T ads that told you to "let your fingers do the walking" through the yellow pages part of the phone book. (Youngs, just skip this part; these terms take way too long to explain.)
Well, we may not be "walking" our fingers through the yellow pages anymore (RIP), but we ARE walking the equivalent of 85 miles on average every year across the glass of our phone screens, according to an analysis by TollFreeForwarding.com. For reference, that's roughly the distance between New York City and Philadelphia!
Arizona, Kentucky, and Washington are the states that spend the most time scrolling.
Those 85 miles equate to an average of more than 2,400 hours of scrolling each year. That's 100 entire days spent staring into our phones. But as wild as that sounds, it's only the average: Many Americans are scrolling far more.
TollFreeForwarding.com | Canva Pro
Many states, in fact, are topping the 100-mile mark, and by quite a bit. Arizona, Washington, and Kentucky topped the list of states that scroll the "furthest," with Arizonans scrolling nearly 9 hours a day and more than 115 miles each year, roughly the distance of the long desert drive from Phoenix to Tucson.
Fingers in Washington are going from Seattle to Tacoma more than three times each year at 108 miles, and Kentuckians are walking from Louisville to Cincinnati. Missouri and New Mexico are no slouches either: the number 4 and 5 states came in at 102 miles and 95 miles, respectively
Time spent on our phones is rapidly increasing all over the world, and causing tons of problems.
These statistics may sound kind of bonkers, but they start to make a lot of sense when you get your arms around the data. Time spent on our phones has increased by 30 minutes per day every year since 2013. That's a total of six hours we've lost from every single day over the last 12 years. Think what you could do with an extra six hours every day! Besides playing Candy Crush!
And it's not just a U.S. problem. In fact, the U.S. ranks lower than many countries, including South Africa and Ghana, when it comes to the average number of hours a day spent scrolling. But that hasn't saved us from the negative impacts. Scientists have found that smartphone use is disrupting everything from our sleep patterns to our mental health and even our cognitive capabilities, especially in children.
It's also making our jobs harder. We each check our phones an average of 58 times a day, most of them during working hours, and often these checks are only three minutes apart or less. That's a lot of time lengthening our workdays each week. Time we COULD be using to walk from Seattle to Tacoma three times, apparently. We need to think about our priorities, people!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
