I had the misfortune of acquiring a concussion the very first weekend back from school. The average person knows what this means: no screen time, no cognitively heavy activities, and a strong emphasis on shutting your brain off for a few days to weeks of time. In summary, a UofT student’s worst nightmare. While I can’t say I’m grateful to have spent days shuffling my way across campus for a week looking like a hungover vampire with shades and scarves shielding my eyes, I certainly gained an appreciation for the chance to seek purely restful activities. Face masks are a great way to kill time, if anyone’s curious. Yet the concussion symptoms became a sort of alarm system for activities I thought relaxing or useful methods of procrastination: reading, writing, drawing, doing puzzles, grocery shopping, and most notably, perusing my phone.
How many times a day do you go to your phone for a break from schoolwork? Check notifications, see your latest Instagram posts, doom scroll on Tiktok, watch Netflix, or some other streaming service on TV. These so-called brainless activities may not be as much of a brain break as you thought.
Researchers at Rutgers University set out to explore the effects of intermittent phone breaks between or during tasks—specifically, solving anagrams. Undergraduate participants were split into four groups of various break types—phone, computer, paper for doodling, and no break at all—where they were provided with an arbitrary shopping task before returning to the second half of their anagram puzzles. In support of their hypothesis that students who took a phone break would experience more cognitive depletion and poorer task performance, researchers found that “cell phone breaks resulted in the same levels of cognitive depletion as not taking any break at all.” Now you can imagine my astonishment after my various phone breaks throughout writing this article as I learned that my “phone breaks” were secretly sabotaging my writing efficiency. It goes without saying that taking breaks during a cognitively difficult task, say, writing a research paper or doing a math problem set, can provide much-needed rest and recovery time. From a creative problem-solving standpoint, the recharge breaks provide much-needed incubation time to process the task at hand and inspire new ideas, momentarily reducing your cognitive overload and thus boosting future performance. Yet clearly, when numerous notification bubbles and tantalising buzzes are all calling for your valuable attention, they cancel whatever benefits you expect from your average brain break. Phone usage then isn’t so much a break from schoolwork as it is a different kind of cognitive task.
Naturally, the next question is what drives the distraction and subsequent poorer performance. Nobody needs to be told phones are distracting. We’ve all taken the TTC and witnessed the many passengers glued to their glowing screens like ostriches stuck in the sand, but the magnitude of the distraction goes beyond phone use. In recent years, researchers have found that the mere presence of a face-down cellphone in your work environment utilises cognitive energy, even when no notifications are coming through. The same logic underscores the attentional interference of phones on already cognitive-heavy tasks, as a recent 2023 study in Germany revealed: “The mere presence of one’s smartphone consumes cognitive resources, without willingly shifting attention or actively using the smartphone.” In summary, it’s not the notifications themselves that are the distraction but the potential of receiving them. Think about when you’re waiting on an important email and how much mental energy goes towards your “waiting mode” mentality as you sit and wonder when the email will arrive. When cognitive resources are inherently limited, with a set restriction on how many things our short-term memory can handle at a time, the cellphone’s role in our daily lives becomes all the more substantial. Further, the same researchers found that “it is not sufficient to cover the screen of the smartphone or to turn it off. However, placing the smartphone in a different room is sufficient to avoid the negative effects on attention performance.” Perhaps the secret behind achieving a brain break requires a break from the mere sight of our cellular devices.
Yet, realistically speaking, we cannot cut phones out of our lives altogether. We have friends to text, professors to email, comics to read, and things to do. For my concussion-recovering self in particular, no screen time meant logging into Outlook to tell professors I couldn’t handle screen time, to take a photo of a doctor’s note I’d be all but ridiculous to physically mail.
There has been an interesting amount of controversy over whether or not to prohibit screen time during concussion recovery partially because of those very social ramifications. A recent study from UBC Psychology and the University of Calgary suggests a “Goldilocks Effect”—that too little screen time may be just as bad as too much. One of the researchers points to the social repercussions, noting that “kids use smartphones and computers to stay connected with peers, so complete removal of those screens could lead to feelings of disconnection, loneliness and not having social support…those things are likely to have a negative effect on kids’ mental health, and that can make recovery take longer.” After many disheartening, Siri-mediated voice messages sent to friends in my early vampiric days, I can certainly resonate with the emotional cons. So, while limiting screen time in the first 48 hours is crucial to making a speedy recovery, particularly with so many unknowns about the lasting effects of screen time in the early recovery period, clinicians should be careful about banning phones altogether in the first week. Be it through a frustrating number of “Hey Siri”s or the average texting exchange, phones play an undeniable role in the social lives of young teens in a digital world where FOMO runs rampant.
Now, I’m not here to give you the age-old boomer lecture about how phones are bad for you or how you’re wasting your life away on screens—your screen time is your business. Perhaps, with the newfound information regarding the impact of phone usage on workflow and the brain fog their presence incurs, you may be inspired to throw your phone onto your bed while reading those 800 pages of Anna Karenina. Dare I say, the subtext of this reflection may inspire you to avoid getting concussed. At most, I hope to impart the dutiful A&C reader with the humble musings of an English and Psychology major who had a full week of way too much free time— getting concussed so you don’t have to!
