Are you reading this on your smartphone in between texting your group chat, scanning headlines, responding to your boss on Slack, doing Wordle, and checking the status of your Instagram post to ease your worry about how it’s being received—all before tucking the phone into your pocket only to reflexively tap it to make sure it’s still there?
You’re certainly not alone. But you also may have a problematic relationship with your phone—something that would be understandable, say experts.
“It's hard not to resist picking it up and swiping it open,” Gloria Mark, chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives, tells Fortune. “There's often not a clear reason for doing it. It's a habit.”
But sometimes, that habit can cross over into problematic territory.
Researchers have, over the years, come up with ways of measuring what’s been referred to as smartphone addiction—including the 2013 Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS), in part based on the earlier Internet Addiction Test.
In 2023, University of Toronto researchers used the SAS to conduct the largest-ever study of smartphone addiction—surveying over 50,000 participants ages 18 to 90 in 195 countries and finding that women and younger people were most prone to the addiction, especially in Southeast Asian countries.
“People try to avoid negative emotions by using their phone,” lead researcher Jay Olson said in a press release about the findings. “Kind of like an adult pacifier.”
But is it really a smartphone “addiction”?
In this context, “addiction” is a word that many technology researchers, including Mark, tend to stay away from.
“I would be careful with using the word 'addiction,'” Mark, author of the new Attention Span, says. “Addiction happens when it really interferes with a person's life, like they can't work anymore.”
Researchers in Barcelona questioned this language in a 2018 study, concluding that “a behavior may have a similar presentation as addiction in terms of excessive use, impulse control problems, and negative consequences, but that does not mean that it should be considered an addiction,” and instead suggested referring to “problematic use.”
Similarly, Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and an expert in the psychology of technology, tells Fortune that “when you use that term, people start to think that everything is classified as an addiction,” which this is not (yet)—at least according to the psychiatric diagnosis bible, the DSM-5. There, the potential diagnosis of internet gaming disorder (IGD) appears in the appendix and is the closest example.
“I look at it in a sort of simplistic way of how screens affect people in either one of two directions—either a direction of needing to do more, or an addiction direction,” Rosen tells Fortune about how he sees problematic smartphone use. “Or, what I would call an obsession direction, which is also biochemically based in the brain, but with different chemicals.”
In the addiction-like situation, he says, you’re chasing a high from dopamine and serotonin, which are “the chemicals that you keep needing more of to feel just as good,” such as by wanting to repeatedly play a game on your phone. Another problem, though, which Rosen believes is “more prevalent,” is the anxiety-based obsession—when you post something on TikTok, for example, and then worry about how people are reacting to it, prompting an anxiety reaction with a rush of cortisol.
“They can work in conjunction,” he says of the addiction-obsession. “And that's what I would call the lethal case. That's the most difficult one, because that's when part of your biochemistry is saying, ‘You have to get back on and check!’ and the other part of your biochemistry is saying, ‘But I need more and more and more of these things to feel good enough to go check.’”
And there’s what’s been dubbed “nomophobia”
“Nomophobia is ‘no mobile phone phobia’—it’s a funky term that basically means what you do when you don’t have your phone: You panic,” says Rosen. “And it also then includes things like phantom pocket vibrations, because, again, that's kind of a panic, anxiety-based reaction.”
That nuance is why Rosen argues that addiction is not quite the right word—and why the panic you experience when you’re away from your phone is not the same as the panic a drug addict feels when unable to get a fix.
“I would argue that addicts, yes, if they can't get the drugs, they do get anxious, they need the drugs. But the reason that they need the drugs is because they need more and more to feel the same high,” he explains, whereas not having your phone causes anxiety because you think you’re missing out on something.
“It should be AOMO, anxiety about missing out. That is really an anxiety-based disorder,” he says. “It’s like we have an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s the reason that people carry their phone in their pocket and continually tap their pocket all day long to make sure it's still there.”
How do you know if you have a smartphone problem?
That all depends on how you’re measuring it.
If you’re using the IGD’s guidelines as they appear in the DSM-5, you’ll be looking for symptoms that include preoccupation, unpleasant feelings when your phone is taken away, a buildup of tolerance (needing more and more for the same amount of pleasure), the inability to control your usage, abandonment of other activities, deception about how much you use the device, and negative consequences, such as losing a job or relationship over the issue.
The Smartphone Addiction Scale, meanwhile, presents 11 statements for self-evaluation—including “I am addicted to my smartphone,” “I have a hard time concentrating in class…or while working due to smartphone use,” “I have my smartphone on my mind even when not using it”—and asks you to rate each on a scale of 1 to 6, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
Then there’s the 2016 proposed diagnostic criteria for smartphone addiction, created by a group of psychiatrists. That’s based on how you rate on 16 criteria, including preoccupation with smartphone use, recurrent failure to resist smartphone use, a marked increase in tolerance, withdrawal experienced as anxiety or irritability, smartphone use for longer than intended, and loss of previous interests.
Marks has a simpler measuring stick: “It becomes a problem when people can't do the things they're supposed to be doing—when you can’t conduct your work and when … you can't even have a conversation with another person without the phone interfering,” she says. “And also when people just can't stop these behaviors,” despite the problems they cause.
How to deal with a smartphone problem
Start by simply raising your self-awareness, suggests Rosen.
“Go look at screen time. Chart it out—put it on a spreadsheet, write it on a piece of paper. Keep track, so you're aware of how much time you're actually spending and where you're spending it. Look at where you tap first, when you open up your phone, how many times you open up your phone. Just be aware.”
Next, try to take what Rosen calls “tech breaks,” meaning to take breaks from what you should be focusing on—work, family—to quickly look at whatever you want on your phone.
“Start timing yourself,” he says. “Look at whatever you want and set your phone to time it for one minute. Once you've looked at everything that you want, close anything that you don't need for your work—flick it away.” Then set your timer for 15 minutes, which will help your brain “to not leak cortisol,” because you know you’ll be able to get to it soon, and allow yourself another minute of browsing.
Keep doing this, gradually increasing to 30 minutes and then up from there.
“Just keep doing this, until the alarm goes off and you say to yourself, ‘Wait, wait, wait, I want to finish this paragraph, whatever I'm doing,” until, hopefully, you will be able to become engrossed enough to not need or want to keep going to the phone. Just be sure to tell people you’re practicing tech breaks, Rosen suggests, so people don’t get annoyed if you don’t respond to texts or calls instantly.
“Say, ‘I will call you during my next tech break,” he says, as integrating the words “tech break” into your language will help you stick to the plan.
Mark suggests simply training yourself to always leave your phone in another room, maybe putting it in a drawer, especially when you have work to do.
“Make it very hard to access the phone,” she says. “At first, people might jump up and run into the other room to check, but after a while, you know, you'll slowly become used to the idea of not having your phone next to you. Do that as a practice.”
But think twice before stashing it in a timed lockbox à la The Social Dilemma.
Rosen approves of the devices—especially when used in schools—but cautions against setting the lock’s timer for too long when you’re at home. “Because what happens is those things nag at you,” he says. “And you may think you're putting all your attention into studying, but part of your attention has been fractioned off to thinking about who might have texted you, or TikTok, or Instagram.” It’s why he also advises parents against using the phone or screen as an object to take away as punishment, he says, “because all that's going to do is lead to tantrums and anxiety.”
Mark is against lockboxes altogether.
“I am not a fan of using these because it's outsourcing the behavior to something else. And I'm really a big advocate of people developing their own sense of agency to be able to control their behavior,” she explains. “If you look into the science of behavior change, it's about agency in developing new behaviors, and sort of retraining ourselves.”
More on screen time:
- Americans check their phones 144 times a day. Here's how to cut back
- Teen social media use: crisis or moral panic?
- Too much social media can hurt your health—this app can help you cut back
