No, this is not a “new” way to get your 10,000 steps in. A new study looked at how much people SCROLL on their phones, and then converted the distance that you move through feeds into MILES. (They say this shows how far your THUMB travels.)
According to their data, the state that scrolls the farthest is: Arizona. People there scroll 115.4 miles per year, which is roughly the distance between Phoenix and Tucson.
That’s also the equivalent of almost NINE HOURS of screen time per day.
Washington was second at 108.2 miles, followed by Kentucky (105 miles), Missouri (102 miles), and New Mexico (96 miles).
Here’s the rest of the Top 10: Texas (95.8 miles), Maryland (95 miles), Louisiana (93 miles), South Carolina (92.8 miles), and Georgia (91 miles).
Unfortunately, they didn’t list the states that “travel” the fewest miles while scrolling. But according to one of their data sources, it looks like the bottom five would be: Kansas, Maine, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Massachusetts.
Overall, the average American spends 6 hours and 35 minutes per day on screens, which adds up to 2,403 hours annually. And people check their devices an average of 58 times a day.
(If you care, distances were calculated by converting screen time into seconds. They then used a formula which included the average length of a phone screen, and they used 6.3 inches for that.)
