Filipinos Spend Too Much Time Scrolling Through Their Phone Screens, According to Report

Yes, you are spending too much time on your phones. And no, it's not just you. As it turns out, a study recently confirms that Filipinos have the highest average phone screen time. How productive of us.

Conducted by electronics information website Electronics Hub, the report focused on the screen times of about 50 countries from Digital 2023: Global Overview Report by DataReportal earlier this year. Screen time encompasses social media, gaming, and computers. The website also looked at sleep pattern data from Sleep Cycle to determine average sleep time in various nations to come up with the figures for screen time spent during our waking moments.

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The research concluded that Filipinos usually spend a third of their day on their phones. At 32.53 percent, we have the highest digital dependence in Asia. Filipinos also have the third-highest average screen time worldwide at 54.44 percent, right behind South Africa and Brazil. We also have roughly 70 million smartphone users in a country of 110 million people.

For computers, the Philippines ranks eighth at 21.91 percent in terms of screen time. We also have one of the highest average time spent on social media at 21.91 percent. Meanwhile, Filipinos are said to spend 8.75 percent of their time awake playing games. Saudi Arabia tops this category at 11.47 percent, primarily due to the country's $37.8-billion investment in game development.

Remember that there was a time when the Philippines was considered the texting capital of the world? Maybe we just can't let go of our devices. This is especially the case for younger Filipinos. The study, Factors associated with smartphone addiction prevalence and its predictive capacity for health-related quality of life among Filipino adolescents, also yielded unfortunate results. It said that the prevalence rate of smartphone addiction among Filipino adolescents is at a whopping 62.6 percent.

Not to mention, smartphones are known to hinder our cognitive capacity. So yeah, not exactly the most encouraging news for the country moving forward.