It’s early evening on any given day. Amy* takes out her phone and checks for new messages.
About half an hour later, Amy checked her device eight times. An hour has passed. Amy checked her cell phone 17 times.
For many of us, checking our phones may have become an unconscious reflex, akin to breathing or blinking. Like Amy, the character who illustrates common cell phone usage patterns, we interact with our phones a large number of times.
Quickly looking at your cell phone can start to undermine your cognitive abilities when you get past a certain threshold. Studies from Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom and Keimyung University in South Korea found that checking your cell phone about 110 times a day may indicate high risk or problematic use.
Over eight years of research involving teens and millennials, Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University Dominguez Hills, noted that participants checked or unlocked their smartphones between 50 and more than 100 times a day, on average every 10 to 20 minutes while awake. Both Android and iOS devices allow users to check the number of unlocks — called “captures” — in their settings.
“Cell phones and digital media enhance our brains, activating the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol,” says Anna Lembke, MD, professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Cell phones create a compulsive habit cycle where we unconsciously check and feel withdrawn when we don’t check our phones or don’t have access to them.”
According to a May YouGov poll on cell phone use, when Americans were asked where they put their devices before bed, eight in 10 said they kept them in their bedrooms, usually next to their bed.
People reduce the number of times they check their cell phones. When asked in the same survey how many times they used their devices daily, most participants thought they did so about ten times.
The focus was broken
A study from Singapore Management University found that frequent interruptions to check our devices lead to more lapses in attention and memory. In contrast to total screen time, frequency of smartphone checking is a much stronger predictor of daily cognitive failure.
Constantly having your cell phone open forces your brain to quickly switch between tasks, eroding your ability to focus on just one task. Decades ago, the influential computer scientist Gerald M. Weinberg found that working on multiple tasks and switching between them frequently can reduce productivity by up to 80%.
The habit is widespread. YouGov found that more than half of Americans check their cell phones multiple times during social activities, such as eating with others or meeting up with friends.
At work, during a 30-minute meeting, one in four people admitted to checking their mobile phone at least once. After each workplace interruption, it can take more than 25 minutes to regain focus, says Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine.
Most people receive push notifications throughout the day, such as messages, emails, and alerts, many of which originate from social media platforms. “Our constant need for connection increases our brain biochemistry, especially anxiety chemicals like cortisol, which bother us more than 100 times a day,” Rosen explains.
In addition to young people
Life has changed since modern smartphones entered our lives in 2007 with the launch of Apple’s iPhone. Today, most American adults own one of these devices, and nine out of 10 use the Internet daily, according to a recent Pew study.
The habit of picking up a cell phone has spanned many generations. “Any generational differences that were studied with the arrival of the smartphone and social media are now minimal,” says Rosen. “We are all subject to the connections that the smartphone provides.”
German researchers at the University of Heidelberg found that after just 72 hours of not using a smartphone, brain activity began to reflect patterns typically seen in substance withdrawal. Research suggests that short breaks from smartphone use can help reduce problematic habits by reorganizing our reward circuits, making them more resilient.
Experts offer simple ways to break harmful device habits. “Make your phone less supportive by turning off notifications, deleting all but the most important apps, switching to grayscale, and turning your phone off between uses. I also recommend leaving your phone behind every once in a while, just to remind ourselves that we can still navigate the world without our phones,” Lembke says.
“Take back control of how often we check and set breaks with technology we control, not our phones,” recommends Rosen.
*Amy is a composite character that illustrates common cell phone usage patterns. His example in this story is based on aggregated daily data collected from dozens of high-frequency American users who shared their hourly cell phone usage patterns on a weekday. For each device, the ratio of telephone checks per hour compared to the total number of checks recorded per day was calculated, which ranged from 100 to 225. This calculation was then used to average the values given in the example.
The spread of phone checks over a one-hour period, shown at the beginning of this story, is intended to be an example representative of a time when checking is highly frequent. The period from 5pm to 6pm was chosen because it corresponds, on average, to the time when the greatest number of examinations are performed among participants.
The YouGov phone usage survey was conducted May 23-26 among 1,129 respondents selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of U.S. adults. The high-stakes validation level is indicated according to the studies “Negative objective measures in assessing problematic smartphone use: a systematic review” (Department of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, 2020) and “Analysis of behavioral characteristics of smartphone addiction using data mining” (Tabollarasa College, Keimyung University, 2018).