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 phon.