NO TEXTING? –
June 27, 2026 – On a bad day, Marios, a personal trainer, can spend more than 14 hours staring at his screen (Instagram, he says, is the killer for him). But now, he is trying a 12-session course of private therapy to try to curb this compulsion, which he believes is driven by loneliness. One look at my screen time statistics tells me I checked my phone 116 times yesterday. I also spent over three hours gawping at it.
Is Marios addicted? Am I addicted?
It’s difficult to know.Phone addiction does not yet exist as an official condition, but in a recent survey of 1,000 adults by Deloitte, 70% of respondents said they spent too much time on their phones. As a growing number of academics warn that smartphones are changing our brain chemistry, experts in addiction have told me they are seeing more clients completely dependent on their devices.
