I recently learned through Apple’s Screen Time app that I was spending about eight hours a week on my phone browsing Reddit and Instagram. That’s 17.3 days a year spent consuming entertaining but ultimately pointless fluff. So my piece looking for solutions for phone addicts was highly personal.
The warning signs are if your phone is the first thing you look at in the morning and the last thing you look at in bed, says Prof Marcantonio Spada, emeritus professor of addictive behaviours and mental health at London South Bank University and chief clinical officer at Onebright, who I spoke to for my article.
That’s a tick for me and, I suspect, a lot of readers. Too many of us have “outsourced our brain to California”, Spada says, but that’s not completely our fault: “There are behavioural scientists and neuroscientists who are working daily to ensure that it’s outsourced. I know some of them really well.”
The point of using any of the techniques outlined in the piece is to see what we’re missing, he says, not just to act on a puritanical urge to purge technology from our lives for the sake of it. “I’m generation X, so I had the benefit of access to the real world, real emotions, the heart racing in anticipation of meeting somebody, which has been numbed by virtual existence,” he says. “Stay there [in the real world] long enough, and you can get massive rewards.”
Phones also suck our time. “We all complain: ‘I don’t have time to exercise, cook healthy food or read novels,’” says Hilda Burke, psychotherapist and author of