Gen Z are grappling with doomscrolling but some are pushing back

Oliver Breadmore first downloaded a social media app when he was 13 years old.

Now, more than a decade later, the 25-year-old Brisbane man has spent the past year trying to overcome his phone dependency.

"I looked at my phone usage and it said six hours a day and I remember being like, 'That is insane, what am I actually doing on my phone for six hours a day?'" he said.

"I just felt horrible, I felt shame."

This digital fatigue has led Mr Breadmore on a journey to distance himself from his phone, and he has now been off social media for about six months.

"I think the value that I got from seeing my friends on social media was so vastly outweighed by how I felt after I scrolled on short-form videos," he said.

It is a trend that digital wellbeing researcher Dr Jo Orlando has noticed: Gen Z are pushing back against being tied to their phones.

"It's kind of the first generation that we've really seen this with," she said.

"They're very aware of the need to kind of find balance in their life."

Dr Orlando said people in their 20s had experienced the "intensification of the online space" since having phones and social media from their early teenage years.

"They're feeling the pressure of having many years throughout their adolescence, those real formative years, of being online, and are very aware that that might have skewed worldview and what's important and what's not important," she said.

"They're kind of feeling, 'We've grown up in a world [that's] digital, we've all lost our privacy.'"

Breaking the cycle

Being on social media for hours a day has been shown to cause mental health problems.

A study published in June by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute found that Australian kids between 12 and 18 who used social media for two hours a day were at increased risk of high depressive symptoms and poor wellbeing.

But some people are taking action.

A UK study by Deloitte, published last year, found that 29 per cent of Gen Zs deleted a social media app in the previous 12 months, citing that it consumed too much time and had impacted their mental health.

Half of them said they had turned notifications off to reduce their screen time.

Mr Breadmore said when he first tried to reduce his social media use, it was not easy.

"I failed so many times, I re-downloaded it and re-downloaded it and re-downloaded it,"

he said.

Dr Orlando said people were not necessarily addicted to their devices.

"But there are a lot of addictive techniques that are built into those [apps] and that's why we spend so much time on there," she said.

Ironically, how to break one's phone dependency is a trend on social media.

No longer using a phone to 'fill a gap'

Mr Breadmore said putting his phone in a different room was the biggest turning point, and embracing boredom has been the best outcome.

"When you don't have the phone and when you're not actively filling a gap, I feel like you notice so much more," he said.

Dr Orlando said deleting apps from your phone was a great idea as well as switching to using the apps on your desktop PC to reduce doomscrolling.

She also said setting your device to greyscale could help, or simply turning your phone off.

In December, Australia banned social media usage for teenagers under the age of 16.

But Dr Orlando said the conversation should be expanded.

"All of us are feeling the weight, particularly now, of just how much intrusion technology is having in our lives,"

she said.

"A lot of us feel like we want to be taken care of a bit more, so while all the policy and legislation seem to be going towards children, I think it needs to be going towards people of all ages."

She said younger generations were more conscious of what their phone habits were doing to them, compared to older Australians.

"[People in their 50s and above] have fully embraced it, they're not thinking critically necessarily about what it's doing to them or their world, they're enjoying social media, they're enjoying the kind of content, but not thinking, 'What is this doing to me?'" she said.