Opinion: ‘You’re addicted to your phone – it’s a bit like heroin’

"We all know we spend too long on our smartphones every day – so why is it so difficult to put them down?"

OPINION

It’s 11.30pm and I am about to go to sleep. At least, I intend to. What I am actually doing is perching on the edge of my bed, hunched over my phone. I might be catching up on messages — a Sisyphean task. Or I might be scrolling through Instagram, watching shuffle dance tutorials. The algorithm is correct to assume I love these.

I should switch off, but instead I’m now scrolling through every holiday snap posted by someone I knew 20 years ago. Should I be worried? I happen to think so. I repeatedly go to bed later than planned, thanks to the minutes stolen by my phone at night. Then there are all the daytime moments eaten by my scrolling habit. OK, compulsion. OK, addiction.

I always thought I was fortunate not to have an addictive personality. I have never slipped into a nightly “wine o’clock”; never strayed close to a nicotine addiction despite years of “social” smoking.

But smartphone overuse is negatively impacting my life. Arguably, all our lives. It removes us from the present moment and wastes time that could be more profitably and purposefully spent. Imagine, at the end of your life, receiving a balance sheet stating the number of your hours on Earth lost to scrolling.

Too much screen time, moreover, has been linked to depression, anxiety, sleep problems and even cognitive changes in the brain. Excessive smartphone and social media use can raise “mental distress, self-injurious behaviour and suicidality among youth”, according to research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2020. Smartphone addiction has also been associated with increased loneliness. Add to all this the apparently deleterious effect it has on our attention spans.

Wired generation

We understand a bit about how this works. We know that responding to the push notification rewards us with dopamine, the brain chemical that makes us happy. “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation,” Dr Anna Lembke, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, California, wrote in her book Dopamine Nation in 2021.

Hence why I find myself scrolling at night instead of sleeping.

“What’s probably happening is mental masturbation,” Dr Lembke tells me, not reassuringly. “The scrolling and visual stimuli release dopamine in our brain’s reward pathways, and the way our brain compensates for overstimulation is [by entering] a dopamine deficit state. Once we’re in that state we continue scrolling to try and bring those dopamine levels back up to baseline, so we get into a place where we’re chasing our tail. We’re chasing dopamine.”

It’s been almost two years since Dopamine Nation was published; almost three since The Social Dilemma — the chilling Netflix documentary that exposed how social media nurtures addictive behaviour for profit. In his 2018 book Stand Out of Our Light, former Google strategist James Williams emphasised the misalignment between what we want for our lives and what tech platforms drive us towards. “The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time,” he wrote. “We therefore have an obligation to rewire this system of intelligent, adversarial persuasion before it rewires us.”

Cognitive impairment

So why aren’t we taking our addiction more seriously? The answer may lie in how difficult it is to function in the modern world unplugged. Our whole lives now exist on our phones.

Experts disagree on the dangers, and some believe it’s too soon to know the long-term effects for certain; but various studies have shown the presence of our smartphones makes us perform worse at cognitive tasks. In 2021, research from Eotvos Loránd University in Hungary indicated the use of smartphones and tablets was even rewiring children’s brains, making them less able to see the bigger picture beyond specific details.

Some neuroscientists argue if we constantly outsource remembering tasks to our smartphones, we will make our own memory worse, while reliance on our phones for navigation may reduce grey matter density in the hippocampus — which can in turn increase the risk of depression and dementia.

Yet still we scroll. Last month, research commissioned by price comparison website Uswitch found the average smartphone user scrolled through the equivalent of 3 miles (about 5km) of content annually. Research last year from App Annie, an app-monitoring firm, found we spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on our mobile phones.

I make resolutions to ration my own use, then helplessly watch myself break them. So why does my phone have this grip on me that nothing else ever has?

“It’s a little bit like heroin,” Dr Lembke tells me. “Anyone who took heroin every day would have difficulty stopping. You don’t have to have much innate vulnerability to addiction to get addicted to your phone.”

She believes we are all “somewhere on the spectrum” of addiction now when it comes to our digital drugs.

“We’re compulsively overconsuming these devices to the detriment of ourselves and those around us, and are struggling to figure out a healthier relationship with the technology.”

Our 24-hour access, and our smartphone’s portability, make it particularly easy to become hooked on the dopamine rewards it offers, she argues.

Constant reactivity

This epidemic of dependency was illustrated last week when the exams regulator Ofqual warned teenagers were so reluctant to be parted from their mobiles, they would rather risk being punished for cheating than leave them at home. There were 1845 penalties for mobile phone or smartwatch malpractice in GCSE and A levels last year, compared with 1385 in 2019.

Why don’t pupils just leave their devices at home for once? According to exam officers, they feel “bereft” without them.

Several children in my nine-year-old son’s class already own a mobile. One friend tells me of an eight-year-old who brought his phone to her son’s birthday party and spent the entire time watching videos on it.

My own peer group, in their late 30s and early 40s, are no less attached to their devices. “I get itchy when my phone isn’t within reach,” says one friend. “I have caught myself tapping things that aren’t my phone, such as books, expecting them to light up with updates,” says another.

Is it making us stupid, this addiction? Robbing us of our ability to think deeply? “It’s clear these digital devices have affected our ability to sustain attention,” says Dr Lembke. “We’re constantly in a mode of reactivity because we’re constantly responding to external stimuli, depriving us of our ability to have sustained thought.”

"The goal isn’t eliminating the technology, because that is impossible. It is, how can we develop a healthy relationship with it?” Photo / Getty Images

Catnip

In her recent book Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, draws on almost two decades of research to conclude that our attention spans have declined to just 47 seconds on any screen.

Dr Jane Gilmour, consultant clinical psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital and author of How to Have Incredible Conversations with your Child, describes phones as “catnip” for teenagers because they offer constant access to “friends and trends” — two crucial drives for the developing adolescent brain linked to the quest for independence.

But using the phone as a comfort blanket doesn’t seem all that healthy at any age.

“It’s potentially problematic for us all because we know the mere presence of a phone has an impact on our cognitive functioning,” says Dr Gilmour.

But Dr Lembke sounds cautiously optimistic. “We’re at least now having the conversation about the dark side of the technology,” she notes.

Re-establishing connection

And there are signs some of us are tiring of the magnetic pull of our mobiles. Last month, the British Phonographic Industry reported the total number of sales of cassette tapes had risen from 3823 in 2012 to more than 195,000 last year. Sales of vinyl have also been growing for the past 15 years, reaching £116.8 million in 2022. Which perhaps suggests, among other things, a latent desire to re-establish our connection to a world that is tangible.

In 2017, France became the first country to introduce a legal “right to disconnect”, enabling employees to avoid work emails outside business hours — an act of resistance against an “always on” culture that tethers us to our devices.

Indeed, breaking our addiction requires some self-regulation but cannot all be put on the individual, Dr Lembke believes. “We also need top-down strategies, from government, from schools, from the corporations that profit from these digital drugs. They need to help mitigate the harms. It’s a collective problem.”

It is, as well, among the most common family problems parents consult Dr Gilmour about. But she believes it can be overcome, with the right interventions.

Dr Lembke likewise offers a hopeful prognosis for our future. “Humans are amazingly adaptable,” she says. “The goal isn’t eliminating the technology, because that is impossible. It is, how can we develop a healthy relationship with it?”