The Screen Time Struggle: How Three High School Students Reclaimed Their Lives

Meet the Students Behind the Screens

In the bustling hallways of Clifton High School in New Jersey, three students represent a generation caught in the digital crossfire. Gianna Colon, a dedicated senior who balances three different sports, Sebastian Fazio, a sophomore with a passion for mathematics and baseball, and Hamza Ramach, another sophomore who plays goalie for the hockey team while participating in band—these aren’t struggling students or digital outcasts. They’re productive, engaged young people who share a common challenge that defines their generation: an overwhelming dependence on their smartphones. Colon perfectly captured the feeling many teenagers experience but struggle to articulate when she told CBS News that excessive scrolling leaves her feeling “drained.” It’s a word that resonates deeply—not energized, not entertained, but depleted. These three students bravely opened up about their daily reality, admitting they spend anywhere between four and thirteen hours glued to their phone screens each day. That’s not just a significant chunk of their waking hours; for some, it represents more time than they spend sleeping, studying, or interacting with the physical world around them.

When Night Falls: The Bedroom Battle

The most revealing confession from these students centered on bedtime—that crucial period when our bodies and minds need to power down and recharge. Instead, it’s become the battleground where good intentions go to die. Sebastian Fazio’s admission strikes at the heart of the problem: “Sometimes, when I’m going to bed, I watch for a little bit, but then I get a little addicted.” That word “addicted” wasn’t used casually or for dramatic effect. It reflects a genuine recognition that what starts as a few minutes of innocent scrolling transforms into hours of compulsive consumption. Even more concerning was Hamza Ramach’s stark honesty when he confessed that he didn’t believe he could reduce his screen time through willpower alone. This wasn’t teenage defeatism or laziness speaking—it was a surprisingly mature acknowledgment that the problem had grown beyond individual self-control. When a motivated student-athlete involved in multiple activities admits he feels powerless against the pull of his device, it signals something profound about the nature of smartphone design and social media algorithms. These platforms aren’t accidentally engaging; they’re engineered by some of the brightest minds in technology specifically to be irresistible, to hack our attention, and to keep us coming back for just one more scroll, one more video, one more notification.

The Week-Long Experiment: Three Tools, Three Approaches

Recognizing that awareness without action changes nothing, these three students agreed to participate in a week-long experiment that would test different approaches to reclaiming their attention and their lives. The challenge had two components: first, none of them would take their phones to bed for an entire week, and second, each would try a different tool designed to reduce daytime screen dependency. Gianna Colon tested a device called Brick—a cleverly named square-shaped gadget that exists separately from your phone but works in tandem with it. The Brick can block specific applications that users identify as their biggest time-wasters. The genius of this approach lies in its physicality: to unblock those tempting apps, you must physically tap your phone against the Brick device. When Colon left the Brick at home during her school day, the apps remained blocked no matter how strong the urge to check them became. Hamza Ramach took a different approach with ScreenZen, a free application that introduces mindfulness into the equation. Rather than completely blocking access to distracting apps, ScreenZen makes users pause and wait before opening them—a small intervention that interrupts the automatic, unconscious reaching for distraction. Sebastian Fazio’s method was perhaps the simplest yet surprisingly effective: grayscale mode, which strips all color from the phone’s display, rendering everything in black and white. His immediate reaction upon seeing Instagram transformed into shades of gray was telling: “It does not look good… It takes away all the joy in it.” That’s precisely the point. Much of social media’s addictive pull comes from its vibrant, carefully designed visual appeal. Remove the color, and you remove a significant portion of the dopamine trigger.

Three Days In: Early Signs of Change

Halfway through the experiment, the three students recorded video diaries that revealed surprising early results. These weren’t scripted testimonials or forced positivity—they were genuine reflections from teenagers who were discovering that life beyond the screen had more to offer than they remembered. Gianna Colon had taken up diamond painting, a detail-oriented craft hobby that requires focus and provides tangible results—the opposite of infinite scrolling through content that disappears from memory moments after viewing. Hamza Ramach reported improvements in the fundamentals that every student struggles with: he was focusing more effectively on schoolwork, experiencing fewer distractions throughout his day, and getting more sleep. These aren’t minor adjustments; they’re foundational changes that affect academic performance, mental health, and physical wellbeing. Sebastian Fazio noticed he was “more energetic waking up” and felt he’d “been communicating more with family and friends.” This observation is particularly significant because it highlights what screen addiction displaces—not just productive time, but human connection. The irony of social media is that these supposedly social platforms often make us less social in the ways that matter most, reducing face-to-face interactions and meaningful conversations with the people physically present in our lives.

The Week Concludes: Lasting Impressions and Real Results

After seven full days, the students reconvened to share their complete experiences, and the results were even more impressive than their mid-week check-ins suggested. Gianna Colon gave the Brick device high marks, explaining that it “definitely” eliminated the temptation to use certain apps because there was a physical barrier she couldn’t overcome while at school. “It was honestly pretty good,” she reflected. “It definitely helped me be more productive without my phone.” The physical separation created by the Brick proved more powerful than any amount of self-discipline or good intentions could achieve. Hamza Ramach declared his experience with ScreenZen “great,” acknowledging that while the temptation to unblock apps remained, he persevered through those moments of discomfort. Perhaps most meaningfully, his father noticed positive changes in his behavior without being told about the experiment. The morning that Hamza expressed eagerness to attend hockey practice early, his father’s surprised reaction—”In the morning, what?”—spoke volumes about how screen addiction had been affecting his motivation and engagement with activities he genuinely enjoyed. Sebastian Fazio reported the most dramatic quantifiable results with the grayscale approach, describing his experience as “pretty good” and noting that his screen use “went down a lot.” The numbers were staggering: he’d dropped from three hours of daily screen time to just twenty minutes per day—a reduction of over 90 percent. “Great” was how he described feeling about that difference, a simple word that conveyed genuine relief and rediscovery of time he didn’t realize he’d been missing.

The Bigger Picture: Lessons Beyond One Week

When asked what wisdom she wanted to share with other teenagers facing similar struggles, Gianna Colon’s response cut to the heart of what this experiment revealed: “You don’t need to depend on your phone for everything. Like there’s so much more out in the world…besides just sitting on your phone for hours and scrolling through TikTok or Instagram.” This statement from a seventeen or eighteen-year-old carries weight because it comes from lived experience, not parental lecturing or adult concern-trolling about “kids these days.” These three students discovered something profoundly important: the apps and platforms competing for their attention aren’t providing proportional value in return. The tools they tested—Brick’s physical barrier, ScreenZen’s mindful pause, and grayscale’s visual de-escalation—each worked through different mechanisms but shared a common goal: creating friction between impulse and action. In a digital landscape engineered to be frictionless, to make consumption as effortless as possible, introducing even small obstacles proved remarkably effective. The experiment at Clifton High School offers hope not just for these three students but for millions of teenagers and adults struggling with similar challenges. The solution isn’t necessarily abandoning smartphones entirely or retreating to a pre-digital existence—it’s about intentionality, about using technology as a tool rather than being used by it. As these students demonstrated, reclaiming your attention doesn’t require superhuman willpower or dramatic life changes. Sometimes it just requires the right strategy, the willingness to try something different, and the courage to acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place.