The scrolling allowance

Not a moral judgement

It would be easy - and lazy - to score every minute of screen time as bad. Goodday doesn't. Social media gets 30 minutes free before it starts costing you anything, TV gets 60, and the cost after that is capped so one bad evening cannot wreck the whole day.

The allowance exists because the research does not say "screens are evil". It says something narrower: it depends on which screen, what you are doing, and how much of it there is.

What the studies actually show

In a controlled trial, people who limited social media to about 30 minutes a day showed real decreases in loneliness and depression over three weeks (Hunt et al., Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2018). That is the reason social media is -12 points per hour past the free half hour, not -40.

Doomscrolling the news is treated worse: 10 free minutes, then -14 per hour, capped at an hour. Following negative news closely through a stressful period has been linked with worse psychological distress (Holman et al., Health Psychology, 2020). Watching the news for ten minutes is staying informed; the app draws the line roughly there.

Screens within an hour of bed are the priciest of all at -15 per hour, because they cost you tomorrow's sleep as well as tonight's.

Why the caps matter

A day spent entirely on the sofa in front of television scores -7 per hour after the first hour, up to three hours. That is the maximum the app will charge. Beyond that, the score stops punishing and starts being useless - a zero would tell you nothing you did not already know.

The same logic protects the good stuff. You cannot earn infinite points for a walk.

The honest caveat

Most of this research is correlational or short-term. It shows that people who scroll a lot report less wellbeing, and that cutting back helps some people. It does not show that a phone causes anything on its own. If your scrolling is a sea swim with your phone in your pocket, log the sea swim.