Do you feel reluctant to be without your smartphone, even for a short time
Do you find yourself mindlessly passing time on a regular basis by staring at your phone
Do you seem to lose track of time when you’re on your smartphone
Do you find yourself viewing and answering texts, tweets and emails at all hours of the day and night – even if it means interrupting other things you are doing
When you eat meals, is your smartphone always part of the table place setting
When your smartphone rings, beeps or buzzes, do you feel an intense urge to check for texts, tweets, emails, updates and so on?
Are you addicted to your phone? Don’t think so Take a look at the questions above. They’re excerpts from the Smartphone Compulsion Test, developed by Dr David Greenfield of the Center For Technology And Internet Addiction, and if you answer yes to more than half of them (and who wouldn’t?) then congratulations: you are one of the millions of smartphone users who meets the criteria for a behavioural addiction.
This may sound over dramatic but consider the following: UK adults check their phones about 33 times per day (for younger people, it’s closer to 90). On average, Britons are spending more than two hours a day on their phones – that’s 14 hours a week, or 30 full days a year. More than a third of UK adults look at their phones within five minutes of waking and over half do so within 15 minutes.
Swap “alcohol” or “cigarettes” for phones and it would be hard to argue this isn’t worrisome. Just because a behaviour is “normal” doesn’t mean that it’s okay.
The idea that we’re suffering from a mass addiction becomes even more credible when you consider the brain chemistry involved. Phone cravings are triggered by the same brain chemicals and reward circuits that keep a compulsive gambler at the card table and inspire drug addicts to seek out their next hit.
Whenever we check our phones and find something waiting for us (a news update, a comment on a post, an irritating email), our brains release a chemical called dopamine.
One of dopamine’s many purposes is to help us make sense of our environments by indicating what we should remember and pay attention to – which tend to be things that arouse some sort of emotion, whether it be pleasure or outrage or concern.
As anyone who’s spent 30 seconds on social media is aware, our phones can trigger all these emotions and more. As a result, it doesn’t take long before our brains begin to associate checking our phones with receiving some sort of emotional reward. These don’t necessarily need to be positive.
Eventually the association becomes so strong that dopamine is released any time we even think about our phones, which makes us crave them. Once that happens we’re hooked: the very act of checking our phones makes our brain want to check even more.
App makers are well aware of dopamine’s role in habits (and addictions) and they deliberately pack their products with features that trigger its release. Social media apps could display posts on a series of separate pages, like Google displays search results, but that’s a “stopping cue” – something that jolts us out of our trance and forces us to make a proactive choice in order to continue. Instead the feeds are endless and we keep scrolling in search of our next dopamine hit.
Sometimes the features are even more manipulative. Instagram, for example, has developed algorithms that can hold back “likes” until the very moment when the algorithm predicts that you – as in you, not your best friend – are about to quit the app. At that point your pending “likes” are delivered in one satisfying rush, triggering your brain to release, you guessed it, dopamine – and making it less likely that you’re going to quit.
Features like these explain why Tristan Harris, design ethicist and co-founder of a movement called Time Well Spent, likens smartphones to slot machines that we keep in our pockets. As he has written, “When we pull our phones out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got. When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.”
It’s a disturbing comparison, considering slot machines are widely considered to be one of the most addictive machines ever invented.
Thankfully, a recent series of events suggests that awareness of the negative aspects of smartphones is on the rise. In December, Facebook co-founder Sean Parker made waves when he spoke out openly against the very platform he had helped to create. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” said Parker. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” In January two of Apple’s major investors wrote an open letter to the company asking that it provide “more choices and tools” for parental controls.
Just last week, Harris and other activists announced the establishment of The Center For Humane Technology, a coalition of tech experts and insiders determined to raise awareness around addiction and encourage companies to design products with users’ best interests in mind.
These comments and initiatives are heartening for anyone who’s concerned about the long-term impact of so much screen time. But they don’t answer the question of what we, as individuals, can actually do about it.
It’s an issue I’ve thought a lot about over the past year, as I researched and wrote my book, How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life. I wanted to figure out a way to tame my own addiction to my phone and establish healthier habits. The point wasn’t to get rid of my phone; it was to create a healthier relationship with it.
Calling upon my experience as a health and science journalist, I researched subjects including neuroplasticity, mindfulness, habits, choice architecture, behavioural addictions, meditation and the history of technology. After enlisting nearly 150 volunteers to try out my ideas and provide feedback the result was a customisable, evidence-backed, 30-day plan that’s been proven to help people change their habits and take back control.
The first step is to get a handle on your own phone usage by installing a time-tracking app, such as Moment or (OFFTIME) to determine how much of your life you’re currently spending on your phone. With this data in hand, the next step is to ask yourself what you actually want to be paying attention to. What relationships and activities, in other words, bring you the most meaning and joy
This is a crucial question. We only experience and remember what we pay attention to, which means that when we make a decision about how to spend our attention, we are making a broader decision about how we want to live our lives.
And our attention is valuable to others, too. The more of it that app makers can capture, the more money they make from showing us ads. Ever wonder why social media platforms are free
It’s because we’re not customers. Advertisers are their customers, and our attention is the product that’s being sold.
Once you’re back in touch with your actual priorities in life, you need to start figuring out when and why you typically reach for your phone. What emotions and situations are your triggers
Armed with this knowledge, you can begin to change your environment to remove these triggers and add new ones that encourage you to live up to your intentions.
IF YOU want to read more, then create a charging station that’s not in your bedroom (removing a trigger) and leave a book on your bedside table (adding a trigger). You’re not going to figure out your triggers unless you’re aware of your cravings. So create “speed bumps”, small obstacles that force you to slow down and go in a different direction. You could put a rubber band around your phone as a physical prompt, or change your lock screen image to something that reminds you to check in with yourself before proceeding.
It’s more than two years since I began my own phone break-up and I’m still impressed by the impact it’s had on my life. I still take my phone nearly everywhere and use it for both practical purposes and, yes, mindless distraction. But I’ve realised that, just as light will fade a photograph, spending too much time on my phone saps colour from my life. The more I pay attention to the actual world around me, the more vividness returns.
Catherine Price is the author of How To Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan To Take Back Your Life (£12.99, Orion Books). For free resources, visit phonebreakup.com check list Addiction