Our advocacy project tackled the sensitive but protruding issue of debilitating social media and overall phone usage time in the Penn State population. After doing significant research for my own benefit as well as my issue brief, I noticed a relationship between the increased phone time spent by our generation and rising rates of mental illness like generalized anxiety and depression in millennials and generation Z.  Mental health is something that has significantly affected both of us throughout our lives, and we wanted to do all we could to stop this increasing trend and preserve the happiness of the upcoming and current college generations.  We quickly became passionate about making a change.

Although we first thought about using government as a means of implementing change, we quickly realized that we could make a much swifter and significant impact by simply presenting our peers with undeniable facts which would cause them to self-reflect and make the changes in their own lives by using tools already at their disposal. Brainstorming solutions was difficult because phones have become an absolute necessity in our society today, and no one would find it reasonable to completely give them up or disconnect from most social media. This meant that villainizing social media or bluntly asking students to delete their social media were not realistic options.

 We ourselves struggle with wasting precious time on social media and we needed to relate to other students by giving them a more moderate option. This led us to Apple’s newly added screen time feature. This setting, recently introduced by Apple, gives users the ability to set a limit on the amount of time they can spend on a specific category of apps like social media or entertainment. After some brief research, we found that Android also offered a similar feature in their phones. Our goal now was to make students aware of this feature and give them a reason to limit their time every day.