According to a survey, the average smartphone user scrolls the equivalent of 78 miles a year, that's three marathons, maybe good exercise for your finger, but there is evidence it may be hurting your brain.

Meg Oliver has tonight's.

Eye on America.

Katie P. Drosenberg, a freshman at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Recently realized what too much scrolling was doing to her.

How many hours were you spending on your phone?

Oh God, probably like nine, I was just kind of constantly on it.

Nine hours.

You may have heard stories like hers before.

I wasn't able to focus.

Because I would have to take out my phone every couple of minutes.

But now you can actually see the science behind it.

Smartphones have wide reaching changes.

All over the brain, and specifically grows here and it shrinks there.

Psychiatrist Brent Nelson is applying this new science at Newport Healthcare, which has mental health treatment centers for teens across the country.

This is a brain that's addicted to a smartphone.

These are MRI images from a recent study in Korea, all the red indicates increases in brain activity, the effects of smartphone addiction.

Do you want your brain to be this colorful?

You don't.

Why?

Well, because this is showing where the brain is working extra hard.

Compared to a non-addicted brain when asked to do actually a pretty simple task.

Addicted smartphone users brains were so colorful, so active, it made them less attentive and more easily distracted, what's now informally called brain rot.

What does that look like in real life?

Yeah, let's take a school for example.

Sitting in class and you're trying to focus, they're going to be looking around, not attending to what the teacher is trying to teach them.

Dr. Nelson says emerging research points to even greater risks.

We're just starting to see these changes and we know they're connected to behavioral changes, depression, anxiety, the dangers are are hiding in there.

Social media had really influenced me in a lot of ways.

Tik Tok would kind of push these videos of people popping an edible before school and I was like, if I do this, maybe I'll be cool and I started self-medicating.

To deal with that, last year she checked into a treatment facility.

If you hadn't gone to treatment, where would you be today?

I don't think I'd be here.

It was really bad.

Katie had to give up her phone in treatment.

There she found other outlets from drawing to playing guitar, it helped rewire her Gen Z brain.

The key perhaps, analog antidotes reminiscent of another generation.

Playing in the dirt, drinking from the hose.

Sort of the Gen X kind of mentality.

Is shown to actually allow folks to recover, to feel better, to to to make it easier to kind of go about their day.

In short, it's good to stop scrolling and start strumming.

For Eye on America, I'm Meg Oliver in Asheville, North Carolina.

Katie used to spend nine hours a day on her phone, now she is down to less than two, good for her.