You might be addicted to your phone. Here’s what it’s doing to you — and how to kick it

You wake up and you check your phone. You commute to work or school and scroll on your phone. You text, post and search all day, then, before bed, you scroll once more.

If this experience sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Almost two-thirds of Canadians used their phones at least once an hour in 2020, according to , and a separate found roughly 30 per cent of people around the world are at high risk of phone addiction. All this phone use is wreaking real havoc on our lives.



with concentration and sleep, and is correlated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, stress and loneliness. “Because smartphones are necessary in some components of life and they have positive effects in some, the negative parts kind of get mixed in,” said Jay Olson, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Toronto who studies smartphone addiction. “We’re kind of lured in by the convenience and some of the social validation, and then we end up having some of these negative effects.

” It’s not all bad news. Kicking your phone addiction doesn’t have to be complicated — and it can bring big changes to your well-being. Medically speaking, phone addiction is not an official condition.

It isn’t found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, better known as the DSM, or other related manuals, according to Olson. In the psychology field, it’s referred to as “problematic smartphone use” and is defined by compulsive habits — like checking your phone for new notifications — that interfere with daily life, whether it be work, family, sleep or something else. “There’s a bunch of really smart people trying to make us spend as much time as they can on those apps,” said Noah Castelo, a professor at the University of Alberta who researches the psychology of technology, “and (are) largely succeeding.

” Phone addiction is most prevalent in younger people, with use seeming to peak around university age, Olson said. It’s also seen more often in women than men. Olson recommends a site he developed with a team of researchers, , where people can take a survey to determine how their phone use stacks up against their demographic.

Problematic phone use is correlated with depression, anxiety and loneliness. This link, Olson and Castelo stress, is more correlation than causation. It could be that people with poor mental health are drawn to social media, not that social media causes poor mental health, Castelo said.

But there’s a stronger cause-and-effect link between phones and concentration, according to Olson. A found that just hearing the sound or feeling the vibration of a notification decreased performance on attention-based tasks. Another showed that simply leaving a phone on the desk may be “sufficiently distracting.

” Sleep quality also has a clearer cause-and-effect link, Olson said. A of more than 1,000 participants found that, of the participants with a phone addiction, roughly 69 per cent also had poor sleep quality, compared to 57 per cent of those without a phone addiction. In short, using your phone less is shown to lead to a reversal of these effects — meaning improved mental health, attention and sleep.

Castelo was the lead author of a that used an app to block all internet access from participants’ phones for two weeks, while still allowing texts and calls. In the end, 91 per cent of participants saw some sort of improvement. Some said they had decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression, while some reported they were in a better mood more often.

And after the two-week intervention, the researchers found dramatic improvements in participants’ attention span — the “same magnitude” as getting 10 years younger. Anecdotally, Olson said people are often surprised by how much free time they have. “One of our participants said that he had wanted to polish his boots for years,” Olson wrote in an email.

“Once he reduced his screen time, he found he had plenty of time to do so!” Olson said his focus is on moderating phone use, not eliminating it entirely. While some suggest totally ditching your iPhone or Android and replacing it with a flip-phone, that’s “not really feasible” for most people. And not all phone use is bad, either.

Research shows relationships with other people have some of the most positive impacts on our health, both physical and mental, and social media can be a great tool to build and maintain relationships, Castelo said. That’s why screen time alone isn’t the best indicator of an unhealthy relationship with your phone. If you spend four hours on a FaceTime call with your grandma, that’s not a bad thing, Olson said — but 30 minutes spent scrolling X before sleep will likely have more negative effects.

“It depends on the context. It depends on the app,” Olson said. “It also depends on what kinds of activities the phone is interfering with, or helping, or replacing.

” The big difference is active use, such as communicating with friends, versus passive use, like scrolling social media. “The context really matters,” Olson said. In a , Olson and his co-authors used small changes to reduce problematic phone use, screen time and depressive symptoms, as well as improved sleep quality.

These are the strategies Olson suggests: More strategies are available on . Castelo suggests using external apps. One, Freedom, allows you to temporarily block websites and apps.

Another, one sec, prompts you with an “intervention” before opening a distracting app. Research suggests just taking a pause is an effective deterrent, Castelo said. Another option is a digital detox, when you don’t use your phone or other screens for a set amount of time.

This can be a good opportunity to reset your habits, Olson said. Olson recommends mixing and matching strategies to find what works for you. “Use a bunch of these strategies,” he said.

“Find a way of using your smartphone in a more healthy way, without completely removing it.”.