What is your Smartphone doing to your Brain?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been contributing to a public relations campaign with the mobile network provider Three UK to help people understand what overuse of smartphones is doing to our brains. The main goal being to help everyone understand what they can do to get all the benefits of using smartphones, while circumventing the many pitfalls associated with overuse.

There’s been a huge amount of noise in the press recently about the negative impacts of excessive mobile phone use on children’s brains:

• In early 2024 a UK government petition accrued nearly 25,000 signatures in support of a proposal to ban smartphones and camera phones for under 16s. They were aiming for 100,000 at which point the topic would have been debated in parliament, however the petition had to be closed early due to the general election.
• More recently, this article makes a pretty compelling case for NOT giving into pressure to allow 9-10 year olds to have a smartphone at the very least.
• Even more recently a private members bill was introduced to Parliament in an attempt to address the problems associated with excessive doom scrolling among adolescents.

A huge amount of published academic research has accumulated over the past few years to support the suspicion that excessive use of smartphones is bad for anyone. The problem is more worrying in children because their brains have yet to finesse the specific brain pathways that support inhibitory control.

Inhibitory control (or behavioural inhibition) involves both resisting the temptation to pick up a smartphone in the first place and also regulating use to a reasonable frequency / duration on any given day. Given that many of the apps children get hooked on are specifically designed to encourage compulsive use (to maximise engagement and therefore ad revenues), when it comes to self-regulation of smartphone use, kids aren’t really given a fair chance.

But what about us adults? What are smartphones doing to our brains?

The Trouble with Smartphones

People of all ages are increasingly finding that they struggle to regulate their own smartphone use. In 2024, UK citizens spent on average 3 hours per day on their smartphone. This compares well to the global average of 3 hours and 49 minutes per day, but not so favourably with Japan, boasting an average of 2 hours per day. Data revealed in the Three UK survey showed that, while 64% of Brits said that their smartphone made their life easier, 58% admitted to struggling to regulate their own use.

We’ve all been there: you go to your smartphone with one particular goal in mind, say checking for a message you’re expecting, only to get distracted for 20 minutes looking at a variety of apps but never actually getting around to check for the message you were looking for. This kind of off-target smartphone use is an increasingly common complaint.

If you find your smartphone in your hand during without knowing how it got there, if you regularly get distracted from conversations to look at your smartphone, if you find yourself ignoring your kids because you’re so engrossed in your phone, then you should read on. You’re showing distinct signs of tech slavery, as I like to call it. You appear to be handing control of your smartphone over to autopilot. But fear not, help is at hand.

The Evidence

There’s plenty of research in the scientific literature pointing to how inappropriate smartphone use can interfere with important cognitive abilities like sustained attention, the ability to inhibit certain “autopilot” behaviours and working memory. There’s also plenty of evidence indicating that excessive use is associated with disturbances in sleep, mood and overall quality of life. Plenty of reasons to take action to find strategies to seize back control and manage your smartphone use better. But the list of drawbacks doesn’t stop there. It seems you don’t even need to be interacting with your phone for problems to arise.

Mere Presence

The term “mere presence” comes up again and again in the research literature investigating how smartphone use can have a deleterious effect on various cognitive processes. This alludes to the fact that you don’t even need to be fiddling with your phone for negative impacts to accrue. Just having a smartphone within arms reach can be sufficient to reduce performance on simple tasks, even if you don’t actually interact with it. Hence all the fuss about it’s “mere presence” being enough to cause problems.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the presence of a smartphone is also having negative impacts on our social relationships, reducing the perception of closeness, connectedness and conversation quality.

The explanation appears to be that: so loaded are our smartphones with the potential for stimulation whether in the form of messages, social media updates or gaming experiences carefully optimised to deliver maximal satisfaction, that they can get in the way of us fully focusing on what we’re doing. That they could be picked up at any moment to access a wide variety of stimulating content appears to be perfectly sufficient to derail working memory (holding information in mind for long enough to complete a task) and fluid intelligence (e.g. problem solving), even if you never actually act on the impulse.

Simply hearing a smartphone notification go “ping” while trying to do a task that requires intense focus can decimate performance. Actively ignoring the notification to continue focusing on the goal at hand, by trying to “block out” the momentary disturbance, turns out to be enough to cause interference and reduce efficiency and accuracy.

Fatal Distraction

A good way of thinking about how your smartphone might be changing the way you think is to consider the twin threat to your productivity that comes from internal (endogenous) versus external (exogenous) distractions.

Internal sources of distraction include scenarios where you find yourself less and less engaged in a task that you feel obliged to complete, say filling out a long application form, which opens the door to having your attention gradually drift towards all the much more enjoyable things you could be doing instead if only you were to pick up your smartphone. That’s the “mere presence” side of the equation.

External sources of distraction are the more obvious ways your smartphone can distract you, with a flash, beep or vibration which triggers the “circuit breaker” brain pathways of attention responsible to break your focus so that your attention can be drawn to the new stimulus. Even catching sight of your phone in the corner of your eye, seeing someone else use their smartphone or even speak about using a phone can be sufficient to derail your train of thought.

Managing Distractions

There are different tactics that can be used to address each source of distraction. Regarding the external ones, putting your smartphone on silent or airplane mode for a few hours every morning, afternoon and evening can be a simple but effect way of ensuring that YOU are the one who decides when it’s time to check for messages and updates, as opposed to allowing your tech to dictate to you what you do when.

Regarding the internal distractions it starts with increasing your awareness of the frequency with which you give into the temptation to pick up and fiddle with your smartphone each day. How often do find your smartphone in hand with no idea how it got there? To fight back against this kind of autopilot behaviour it can be helpful to get angry. If you can channel the anger arises when you contemplate how thoroughly brainwashed you have become – consuming technology like a mindless zombie – it could provide the very impetus you need to actually take steps to mitigate against this unpleasant reality.

How often you look at your phone when in the company of friends, family or colleagues? This kind of behaviour used to be seen as extremely rude, yet in recent times many people seem to think it is perfectly reasonable. After all, if everybody else is doing it, how can it possibly be wrong? (There are many excellent examples of atrocious human behaviour that was fuelled with this kind of attitude, but I’ll let you mull that over on your own).

A good way to fight back against this aspect of endogenous tech distraction is to re-define your own personal sense of etiquette to view doing things on your phone while in the company of other people to be disgustingly inappropriate. As soon as you notice yourself picking up your phone when in the company of other people, use it as a cue you used to trigger the response of: immediately putting it away. Make a rule for yourself that you only look at your phone when alone. It may sound crazy but being strict with this kind of goal can quickly help to bring your screen time right down.

If you find yourself ignoring your kids to scroll aimlessly and endlessly on your smartphone, then you need to think about the example you are setting. Whatever adults do, kids will mimic. So exhibiting addictive smartphone behaviours will result in kids wanting to copy that behaviour. This significantly increases the likelihood that they will have difficulty sleeping properly (with potentially disastrous impacts on their neurodevelopment) and possibly develop debilitating mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Do you really want that for your children? Do you really want to be responsible? Put it away! Do it for their sake if not your own!

Consider thinking of your phone use as a scandalous and dirty secret. Treat smartphone use like masturbation – a solo enterprise that should strictly take place behind closed doors. Would you consume pornography in public? In front of your children? Or would you try to keep it private? If you can keep your smartphone use private you will find, very quickly, that you can bring your frequency and duration right down. Treat it like a game. A game that, unlike most games, can have very serious real life consequences.

Smartphone Addicts

We all know somebody who is guilty of vastly overusing their smartphone. These people often really seem to struggle to resist the temptation to look at their phone at all times, picking it up when they should really be paying attention to something else. Being able to resist the urge to do something is known as inhibitory control. And if you compare the electroencephalogram (EEG) detected brain responses of smartphone over-users to those whose smartphone use is not particularly excessive – in the context of the Go-No Go test (a classic test of inhibitory control) – it is possible to discern a significant difference.

The N2 component signifies the struggle to switch from one set of rules to another e.g. “hit the button when you see a green light” is switched over to “hit the button when you see a red light”. Everyone struggles to adhere to the new rule immediately after the rule switch has been instigated and the size of the N2 EEG signal appears to increase with the greater difficulty in preventing the original response from being triggered. Heavy smartphone users seem to have a more pronounced N2 signal compared to normal. In other words, heavy smartphone users seem to lack the cognitive flexibility required to update their behaviour in a way that is desirable to stop doing something they shouldn’t be doing any more. They get stuck in a rut more easily.

Were they always that way? Or have they become that way as a result of their intensive smartphone use? The appropriate studies haven’t yet been conducted to say for sure, but my money is on the latter. Anything we do regularly, intensively and over long periods of time is likely to physically rewire the brain pathways involved in that cognitive capacity and smartphone use clearly falls squarely into this category.

Separation Anxiety

People who have become dependent on their smartphone struggle to function properly in the absence of their phone. In a hideous transgression against the conventions of naming of medical conditions this is known as Nomophobia, a contraction of “no-mobile-phobia.” The typical smartphone addict cannot mitigate against the cognitively crippling influence of their smartphone being to hand by leaving it in another room, like the rest of us can. The physical separation from the beloved smartphone is sufficient in itself to have a negative impact on mental shifting and behavioural inhibition. It is unclear what advice to offer such unfortunately folk. In all likelihood a lengthy period of abstinence, during which the person learns through personal experience that life continues, the sky doesn’t fall down and the Earth continues to spin on its axis, is the only hope for hitting some kind of proverbial reset button on their compulsive smartphone use.

There is so much more fascinating evidence out there about our use of smartphone and other screens. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But I’ll share more in the weeks and months to come. If you liked this, please follow me on X, Insta and LinkedIn to make sure you catch my next brain blog.