Are you reading this on your smartphone in between texting your group chat, scanning headlines, responding to your boss on Slack, doing Wordle, and checking the status of your Instagram post to ease your worry about how it’s being received—all before tucking the phone into your pocket only to reflexively tap it to make sure it’s still there? You’re certainly not alone. But you also may have a problematic relationship with your phone —something that would be understandable, say experts. “It’s hard not to resist picking it up and swiping it open,” Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives, tells Fortune.
“There’s often not a clear reason for doing it. It’s a habit.” But sometimes, that habit can cross over into problematic territory.
Researchers have, over the years, come up with ways of measuring what’s been referred to as smartphone addiction—including the 2013 Smartphone Addiction Scale (SAS), in part based on the earlier Internet Addiction Test . In 2023, University of Toronto researchers used the SAS to conduct the largest ever study of smartphone addiction —surveying over 50,000 participants ages 18 to 90 in 195 countries and finding that women and younger people were most prone to the addiction, especially in Southeast Asian countries. “People try to avoid negative emotions by using their phone,” lead researcher Jay Olson said .