The Three Phases of Smartphone Addiction.

Published in

The Versatile Designer

7 min readJan 21, 2018

Smartphone addiction is present in 2–3 out of 10 young adults. Can you read the signs?

Christian Montag, a researcher at the Institute of Psychology and Education in Ulm, Germany, observes that “[j]ust one generation ago, people left their homes without any form of electronic device; made plans in person; wrote personal, hand-written letters; and knocked on neighbours’ doors to see if they were home. These things, of course, still happen” (Source). But today, “more than 95 percent of American adults have a cell phone of some kind, and for people under the age of 44, that number is closer to 97 percent” (Source). In short – we are always connected, anytime, with everybody and anything. So what’s the problem?

There is growing evidence that Smartphone usage can manipulate human cognition and brain’s ‘chemistry’, with negative and lasting impacts on a users’ ability to think, remember, pay attention, and regulate emotion. You have probably noticed already, just by casually observing your close friends or family members, that Smartphones severely interfere with focus on mental and physical tasks. We are progressively becoming distracted by technology everywhere and at every given time point in our lives.

In this article I explore the three stages people go through before developing a mature addiction to their Smartphones. While I draw on some key concepts and research findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and embodied cognition, I do so in a fairly informal way. After all, this is meant to be a light, introductory article that simply aims to challenge you to start thinking about your own Smartphone usage patterns.

“Availability, frequency, endogenous and exogenous motivational triggers are key factors in shaping your Smartphone addiction.”

Addictive Characteristics

Before analyzing human interactions with cell phones, it is important to understand what constitutes addiction and addictive characteristics. Research suggests that all entities capable of stimulating a person can be addictive. A recent academic paper, “Behavioural addiction versus substance addiction: Correspondence of psychiatric and psychological views” (Source), notes that “whenever a habit changes into an obligation, it can be considered as an addiction.” Indeed, experiments conducted by the United States Department of Internal Medicine confirm that “[b]ehavioural addiction such as internet addiction is similar to drug addiction except that in the former, the individual is not addicted to a substance but the behaviour or the feeling brought about by the relevant action” (Source).

We know that smartphone overuse shares some features of internet addiction, including prominence, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse (Van Rooij et al., 2010; Weinstein and Lejoyeux, 2010; Kwon et al., 2013; Lin et al., 2014, see Sources below). Accordingly, researchers, such as Joël Billieux, maintain that problematic use of the mobile phone should be viewed as a disorder and conceptualized as an addictive behaviour (Source). Unsurprisingly, Smartphone addiction will soon get it’s own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, despite it’s strong overlap with ADHD and depression (Source).

Equipped with an awareness of the existing distinction between behavioural and substance addiction, as well as Internet and Smartphone addiction, let’s now explore our affection of Smartphones. As I suggested, the development of an addiction to our mobile device of choice generally follows three phases; those of a Smartphone ‘novice’, a Smartphone ‘mutant’ and a Smartphone ‘zombie’.

Phase One – Smartphone Novice

You just switched from a feature phone to a Smartphone and your daily routine hasn’t changed all that much….yet. Most of your automated processes, which are controlled primarily by your unconsciousness (System One, D. Kahneman, Source), are still undisturbed and uninterrupted by your new device. You get up, go to work, get home …If someone calls or sends you an ‘old school’ SMS text message during the day, you find your phone, pick it up, reply, and end the conversation by putting the phone back in some place where it is not bothering you anymore.

This is the typical sequence that describes the key, traditional stages of phone usage from ‘back in the day’. If you alter any one of these stages in some way, you can increase or decrease your addiction. It’s really simple. Or is it?

Apps should encourage you to adjust your contact times for better well-being.

Phase Two – Smartphone Mutant

You have now entered the second stage of your Smartphone addiction. Getting here takes about two to four months, depending on your lifestyle, your work, your social life, and you. The extent to which you are actively ‘open minded’ and curious about trying out new apps influences the time it takes for you to get to this point. By now, you have altered some of the key stages of the above ‘traditional’ phone usage sequence noted earlier, and integrated WhatsApp (or any other popular conversational app) as a convenient way to respond to incoming messages. That app of your choice– in combination with your Smartphone device – has made you a better, more spontaneous communicator by allowing you to enrich your own messages by adding fun emoticons, media files, creative doodles and even stream whole video sequences of your current life in an instant way. Your brain is delighted and sends out chemicals as a rewarding mechanism to make you feel good and positive about your new inner self.

Your brain and body just crossed a key barrier: they learned that certain activities, in combination with the use of a specific, physical device make you feel great. And you guessed it – whenever your brain feels good about something, it wants more. Based on my own humble understanding of embodied cognition and Smartphone usage observations, I concluded that it is the combination of a highly transportable, physical device (touching feels good) with the use of addictive software applications which makes it so easy for our memory system to encode powerful, addictive behavioural patterns in a short period of time.

At this stage, your unconsciousness (System One) is more often seeking out this moment of instant social gratification by using your new, technology enhanced superpowers. We already know that generalized Internet addiction is characterized by procrastinating over important daily tasks by aimlessly surfing or posting on online social networks. This is also likely to apply to Smartphone addiction, although further empirical evidence is necessary to establish this link conclusively.

Of course, it goes without saying that the ‘right amount’ of technological use, including Smartphone usage, can make us more productive. However, technology can clearly be overused in certain contexts. According to Montag & Walla’s research (2016, Source), we reach the point of overuse when we get distracted on a minute-to-minute basis. From now on, it will become increasingly more challenging for us to reach the state of deep concentration characterized by positive emotions accompanying ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989, Source), or a state of being hyper-focused. A recent study by Kushlev and Dunn (2015, Source) demonstrated that answering your emails at a few preset time points during the day (in contrast to answering them whenever you like) significantly reduces stress and heightens well-being.

Phase Three – Smartphone Zombie

Welcome to the zombie zone; a place where about 20% of Smartphone users find themselves. You keep your phone always with you. It’s the first thing you check when you get up in the morning. It’s the thing you touch and hold most frequently, for the longest periods of time in your day to day life. It’s the thing you believe is most relevant for keeping in touch with your peers. These are the top three behaviours that signify your obsession to your Smartphone. The official and by researchers now widely accepted Smartphone Addiction Scale for Adolescents (SAS-SV, Source), will provide a few more question that help you assess your device addiction levels. Knowing this, makes you feel even more anxious, worried and lonely.

By this stage, you have officially rewired your key organs with longterm impact on your reptilian brain (More Info). Built upon the reptilian brain is the old, ancient mammalian brain including several primary affective systems driving our behaviour. Jaak Panksepp (1998, Source) studied the primary emotional systems anchored in the mammalian brain and carved out four circuits which are associated with positive emotionality (Seek, Lust, Care and Play) and three circuits with negative emotionality (Fear, Sadness and Rage). By studying our emotional circuitry, we gain insight into those aspects which are necessary to fulfill all criteria of happy lives.

“The mammalian brain, or ‘Limbic System’ is the center of emotion and learning. Nourishing and stimulating this ancient part of our brain with rich, social interactions will lead to a better, more balanced development and overall human well-being.”

Now imagine, you are feeding, more and more often, these key emotional circuits of your mammalian brain with less emotionally nuanced interactions, by subtracting core social and motoric skills on a minute-to-minute basis. What would you like more: Support via WhatsApp – someone is sending you a supportive emoticon – or a real hug from a person? Which of these two interactions could potentially have a more positive effect on the development of your brain, your social and motoric skills?

Summary

Research already shows, and most of us rationally understand, that Smartphones are clearly not sufficient to nourish the needs of our ancient emotional systems, even if we need further empirical evidence to back this up. Several studies are currently trying to prove and explain further the consequences of Smartphone overuse. Some of these studies are considering not only the link between such overuse and addiction, other pathologies and time waste, but also, its potential to cause damage to one’s social functioning. A number of key emotion-related capacities that humans possess, such as reading expressions in someone else’s face and listening to varying affective speech melody while being actively engaged in direct communication, have evolved as a result of our sociality. With our modern, technology-mediated ways of socializing, we could gradually lose those capacities and, with them, our ability to comprehend and even detect emotions; both, our own and somebody else’s.

Additional resources and research papers used in this article:

The Three Phases of Smartphone Addiction.

Written by Marc-Oliver