Ping, bleep, buzz. There always seems to be some alert or some noise trying to attract my attention away from what I am doing and draw it to my phone. 

No matter where I am—at my desk, at home in bed, or even in the bathroom—there’s no escaping it. 

Sometimes I feel like my phone is glued to my hand. 

I attended a business networking event last month that involved a panel discussion on mental health in the workplace. One of the guest speakers was talking about ways to bring down our stress levels and mentioned not spending so much time on our phones (among many other things). He said that we needed to be honest with ourselves about how much time we spent on our devices. He even joked that one day there would be meetings in church halls with people sitting in circles talking about their phone usage, akin to an AA or NA meeting. 

“Hello, I am Matt, and I spend six hours per day on my phone,” he told the crowd. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or being serious. I mean, six hours—that sounds like a lot, I thought. 

I probably sleep for six hours some nights. Surely he couldn’t be spending that much time per day on his phone? 

I tried to brush the thought aside, but then I read another article about a campaign to make our children’s childhoods smartphone-free. This included some alarming facts about how much time is spent on phones and how that is negatively affecting young people’s mental health. 

Then, wherever I went, there were people glued to their devices. People on the bus glued to their screens, people waiting for the bus looking at their phones, people walking down the street looking down. Staff in every shop either looking at devices or hiding them when someone walks in. Café workers leaning on tills, ignoring dirty tables to scroll. I saw footage of someone crossing the road, oblivious—phone in hand—and nearly getting run down. I went to Paultons Park, and there was a man on a rollercoaster on his phone. I went to a spa, and guess what? Everyone was on their phones, relaxing in their robes—even someone in the hot tub. 

I decided to look at my own usage, and with iPhones, there’s a way in your settings to see how much time you’ve spent on your device and what you’ve been doing. It’s in settings under screen time. I was horrified to see that some days I had spent more than FOUR hours on my phone. Some days I had received nearly 400 notifications from apps. Some days I had picked up my device more than 100 times. Mind-blowing numbers. 

Most of the time, I was on either social media—Facebook and TikTok being the biggest culprits—or on email. Other times, I was on Chrome looking at things, reading stories, answering my own questions, and other times I was on Spotify listening to music or using Google Maps to find my way to places. 

I decided to impose strict limits on my social media times, restricting them to 30 minutes per day, and I also decided to delete email apps from my phone. I also put strict time limits on so that no app could ping after 9 p.m. or before 6 a.m. 

I thought that would be enough to improve my mental health; however, what happened was that I was a mess. I did not know what I was doing, where I was meant to be, or what I had agreed to. (Sorry to those of you whom I missed when I was supposed to be stationed as a marshal along the Walk the Watercress Way on Sunday.) 

It’s been really difficult to stick to the limits, and I feel myself, like an addict, saying to my device, “just one more hit” as I press the “ignore limit” button in order to look something up after 9 p.m. or scroll through social media one last time before bed. I have reinstalled email onto my phone as that was probably a step too far—maybe too soon. Perhaps I need to work gradually on this addiction. Is there a methadone alternative for a smartphone? 

If I feel like this at age 42, heaven only knows what I would have been like at age 16. I mean, it was bad enough when, at age 19, one of my bills for my contract mobile phone came in at £120 due to the number of text messages I had been sending (remember when they were 12p each?!). 

So, the point is, maybe Matthew Holman from Simpila Health was right when he said we need to start being honest about our smartphone usage, as that’s the only way we can start to address it. If we recognize that our behaviour is being modeled by children—who seem to instinctively know how to use a phone as they’ve watched us so many times—and that this is causing them to be anxious and creating a bad state of being, then perhaps that’s the first step. We can’t do much about the wider world, but we can start with ourselves—so go into your settings and take a peep at your phone usage if you’re brave enough. The statistics might just shock you.