Smartphone Addiction Facts & Phone Usage Statistics

The official name for smartphone addiction is Nomophobia which is defined as having a fear of not being with your phone. Cell phones have been around for years though, so why the sudden increase in personal dependence? Well quite simply, its defined by the nature of the content on the device… we’re talking internet, social networks, apps, video, music and so on.

Popular impulse driven triggers:

• Social media networks and relationship driven content.
• Overexposure to information and data e.g. games, surfing, apps.
• Internet pornography, cybersex and dating apps.
• Shopping, gambling, stock trading, and auctions.

All the research and studies we examined found that a phone usage dependence can impact both physical and mental health attributes of your daily life.

• Anxiety – Simply having your phone near you will decrease your productivity, the impact snowballs with the level of the users’ addiction.
• Stress – Higher stress levels were found in business orientated roles where work life is connected to the personas device e.g. emails
• Narcissism – People on their phones who get addicted to social media will begin to display self-absorption traits derived from posting constantly about their life or selfies.
• Depression and loneliness – mainly stemming from people on their phones with high social media use (higher numbers in teens).
• Attention deficit disorder – The flow of information can impact the brains’ ability to stay focused on one task for more than a couple of minutes
• Sleep deprivation – Impacting your sleep can have long-term mental health, memory and learning skills.

By the time you finish reading this you might want to sell your iPhone or trade in your cell phone and get an old brick phone, but later on, in chapter 5 we’ll cover how to break up with your phone using methods to reduce use.

Do you get any of the following feelings or feel any of these statements relate to you? These are all the most common observations of people with various levels of smartphone addiction.

• Do you have difficulty completing chores or work due to concentration issues?
• Seclusion from family and friends or using your phone when in conversation
• Do you mask your smartphone use, e.g. sneak off to the bathroom at work?
• Do you worry that you’re missing out on something when you’re not with your phone?
• Do you feel anxious or irritable if you’re not with your phone?
• Do you have sleep problems?

BankMyCell asked Anya Pechko, a Digital Wellness Coach from New York and founder of Project Be, what she thought of the current state of smartphone addiction:

We can all agree that, in general, people are spending too much time on their phones, but how much time are we actually spending consuming content on our mobile devices? There have been multiple surveys carried out around the world which shows that every country has a different level of daily use, below are the countries in order by the average time from all sources.

Top 10 Countries with Smartphone Usage

1. Brazil
2. China
3. United States
4. Italy
5. Spain
6. South Korea
7. Canada
8. United Kingdom
9. Germany
10. France

Key cell phone usage statistic: The average time for people on their phones in the US is 4 hours a day (including tablets). As these devices become more integrated into our personal and digital lives, this increase in time is a depiction of both a culture and technology shift.

Key cell phone usage statistic: The average user in Brazil spends over 5 hours a day on their device, if you really think about it this is crazy… Every 1/5 days is spend on their phone.

When looking to resolve teen phone addiction, the obvious option of taking your child’s phone away often don’t work. As mentioned in the chapters above, this can just result in the withdrawal symptoms of the internet and technology addiction. You, your child or teenager, will lack the maturity to realize the bigger picture, so you’re going to have to try some other tactics to evoke healthier usage.

How to stop kids being addicted to their phone:

Use apps to monitor use: The new iOS Digital Health and Androids usage tracking can help you to know how much your child is actually using the device as well as the nature of the use, e.g. apps, emails, messaging.

Manage your own use: You need to be the role model in this situation, if you spend hours looking at your phone, check it during conversations and let it come between you and family interactions then you’re setting a poor example.

Create rules around the house: By restricting the use of smartphones in certain areas of the house or certain times you can create a much healthier environment. For example, no phones at the dinner table or after a certain time at night, perhaps even ban them from having phones in their rooms at night.

Nurture other interests: Another way to reduce how kids are addicted to phones is to involve them in more social and physical activities (sports/hobbies) to help them develop real interactions and reduce stress through exercise.

Communicate: Spend time as a family without mobile devices, communicate and be close enough with your child to know if there are underlying problems that the overuse of smartphones is masking issues such as depression or stress relating to issues at home or school.

It’s no shock that phone addiction has gripped America, in fact, the US is the ranked the 3rd highest country for smartphone usage behind Brazil and China. We began pairing up phrases like ‘help’ and ‘support’ with cell phone addiction-related terms to measure chronological search volume increases across the United States.

Below is the collective US search intent data trends from January 2004 to June 2019:

*The numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the United States. A value of 100 would be considered the peak popularity, 50 would be half of the collective terms volume.

The above data shows a vast increase in the average American’s desire to fix their phone overuse.

• From 2014 to present we can see an accelerated upwards trend, this reflects a greater adoption of smartphones versus regular phones coupled with technological advances increasing the addictiveness of the devices.
• In 2018 we see the highest percentile of the chart, this was the year where leading operating systems iOS and Android released software updates for users to visualize and monitor their use (or overuse).