Is it time to tame your tech?

The average person uses their smartphone for almost 60 days a year, So how can we free ourselves from our screens, asks Yasmina Floyer

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Over the last few months, I've had the dawning realisation that I am in a toxic relationship. However, unlike all those people who seem to be dating narcissists right now, my liaison is not with a person, but with my phone. TV ad breaks mean my hands reach for the cool of my screen, my pin code typed on autopilot, apps opened, dopamine numbing my face as it basks in the blue light. My morning alarm used to signal my getting out of bed. Now it heralds the time I spend catching up on messages and notifications before I actually get up.

However, it wasn't until I saw a statistic published in The Guardian that equated one hour of phone usage a day to 15 days usage a year, that I started to rethink my phone habits. And let's be honest with ourselves: we're often on our phones for much longer than an hour a day.

A survey conducted by Statista confirms: 'In 2023, users in the United Kingdom spent an average of three hours and 50 minutes per day using their mobile devices.' That's 58 days a year. Yikes.

Neuroscientist Dr Faye Begeti, author of The Phone Fix: How to transform your smartphone habits (Apollo, £10.99), is perfectly placed to advise us on healthy boundaries when it comes to our devices. To begin with, we discuss the importance of language.

So much of my phone use feels mindless and compulsive, and as a result I have often described it as 'addictive', but she explains that phones and apps are not addictive in the medical sense.