- - Please visit: Legacy Horn Experience - -
This past week I noted an article, “Study: Too much screen time harmful on molecular level.” Likely you have heard that overall, it is a good idea to control your screen time, especially outside of work hours. What caught my attention though was the article looked at a study done at my own university, and it had a brand new angle on the topic.
The basic suggestion from this article, which summarizes a recent study, is to limit screen time to less than 75 minutes in a day. Or at least try not to go over 2 hours. From the article,
The World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend no more than one hour of screen time per day for children 5 and under. There is no consensus on a safe amount of screen time for adults, but connections between well-being and digital technology use show harmful effects on individuals engaging in more than two hours of daily screen time.
Of course, you are reading these words on a screen of some sort and I think that is good! But there is a big topic here. With the pandemic and remote work, a LOT of people have been working online. Two years ago this week, I had to change to teaching all my lessons online. We have all had a lot of screen time since then, and people are starting to study the consequences of this.
Conventional wisdom for years has been that lots of screen time is bad for your eyes. But in the study they found that too much screen time actually is harmful to your health in general, in some very specific ways. From the conclusion of the article, quoting the study itself,
Our results indicate that individuals with more than 75 minutes of daily screen time had microbiome and metabolome profiles consistent with obesity, Type I diabetes, myocardial infarction, chronic fatigue syndrome and a host of digestive disorders.
Yikes! So not only will you help your eyes and such by reducing screen time, also, in the big picture, you will live longer and better.
What is the first step?
Even before reading the article on the study I had been wanting to reduce my screen time, and now I have additional motivation — and maybe all of us should pause a moment and think about this topic. Screen time creeps up on you, and elements of work and life the past two years have pushed us all into extensive use of screens.
The first step is to pause and think about what life might look like with less screen time, and what it might feel like. In some cases (most even) we can’t reduce it to the recommended 75 minutes. But likely we can reduce it significantly, and perhaps find a way to get at least one day a week down to that level or even less. It could make a difference on many levels of life, physically and mentally.
What about horn playing?
In terms of horn playing, it is a great analog activity to embrace. We should all practice more and watch screens less! With printed music when you can.
But all kinds of analog activities are things we should be doing more. I realize some of my best memories of the pandemic were working on the horn building project during my sabbatical. No screens, horn related and interesting, and gave extra focus to my practice too.
Other things we can focus on
I’m now making an effort to listen more to the radio, podcasts, or music, to read physical books and magazines, and focus again on analog hobbies. I started over spring break a new horn building project — that was a great break from everything — and went for walks or hikes every day.
This whole topic area is one I’ll be curious to follow in the coming years as more studies are done. Whatever you decide to do, I think there is a win-win situation to be found in reducing your screen time and increasing the horn time, give it some thought.
