Like many of us, I spend too much time on my phone.
And, like many of us, I am constantly aware of that fact - and often feel guilty about it.
Sometimes I leave it at the other end of the house or turn it off to use it less.
But faster than I'd like to admit, I walk down the hall for something I need, and I can only do it - or more efficiently - over the phone.
Pay the bills? By phone.
Arrange to go out for coffee with a friend? By phone.
Send a message to family who lives far away? By phone.
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Check the weather outside, jot down an idea for an article, take a photo or record a video, make a photo album, listen to a podcast, send directions for someone to reach me, do some quick math, even turn on a flashlight?
On the phone, on the phone, on the phone.
Phe's talking on a mobile phone
Martin "Marty" Cooper spoke to the BBC about the first ever mobile phone call, which he made 50 years ago on a beige brick-sized device that looks very different to today's sleek, glass-encased smartphones.
Although his device had no texting, camera and could only talk for 30 minutes after 10 hours of battery charging, he was not impressed with the modern smartphone as a phone conversation device.
"It's not a very good phone in many ways," says Cooper.
“Just think about it. You take a flat piece of plastic and glass - and place it against your cheek. You're holding your hand in a very uncomfortable position."
A recent report showed that adults in the US they check their phone an average of 344 times a day, every four minutes, and spend a total of almost three hours a day on their device.
The problem for many of us is that one quick task on the phone leads to a quick check of email or social media feeds, and suddenly we're drawn into endless scrolling.
It's a speed circuit.
The more useful our phones become, the more we use them.
The more we use them, the more neural pathways we build in the brain that lead us to reach for our phone for whatever task we're doing—and the more we feel the need to check our phone even when we don't have to.
Freaky concerns about specific aspects of our hyper-connected world, such as social media and their increasingly hyper-realistic beauty filters, what is our addiction to these devices actually doing to our brains?
Is everything just harmful for us or are there some good sides?
As you might expect, with our society's dependence on these devices accelerating each year, research is having a hard time catching up.
Watch the video: What was the first telephone conversation in Serbia like?
What we do know is that simply being distracted by checking your phone or noticing a notification can have negative consequences.
That's not too surprising; we know that, in general, multitasking hurts memory and performance.
One of the most dangerous examples is using the phone while driving.
One study found that it is the most ordinary conversation over the phone, not even texting, enough to make drivers slower to react on the road.
The same applies to everyday tasks whose stakes are not so high.
For the participants of the second study, it was enough just to hear the notification saying "ding" that the performance of the task they were performing would be much worseworse - almost as bad as participants who talked or texted while performing the task.
It's not just the use of the phone that has consequences - the way we think can be affected by just its presence.
U a recent study, for example, researchers asked participants to leave their phones next to them so that they were visible (on a desk, for example), to leave them somewhere nearby or out of sight (in a bag or pocket, for example), or in another room .
Participants then completed a series of tasks to test their ability to process or remember information, their problem-solving ability, and their focus.
It turned out that they performed much better when their phones were in another room than nearby - whether they were visible, on or off.
The same was true despite most participants claiming not to consciously think about their devices.
The mere proximity of the phone, it seems, contributes to "brain drain".
Our brains might subconsciously work hard to suppress the urge to check our phone or constantly monitor our environment to see if we should check our phone (eg waiting for a notification).
Either way, this distraction can make it difficult to do anything else.
The only "solution", the researchers found, is to leave the device in another room.
That's the bad news (some of).
But - as researchers recently discovered - our addiction to devices can have some good sides.
For example, there is a belief that reliance on phones atrophies our ability to remember.
But maybe it's not quite that simple.
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U a recent study, the volunteers were shown a screen with circles marked with numbers that they had to move to one side or the other.
The higher the number on the circle, the more the volunteer will be paid if he moves it to the right side.
In half of the test, participants were allowed to record, on their phone, which circles should go which way.
In the second half, they had to rely only on their own memory.
Not surprisingly, the ability to access digital reminders boosted their performance.
What is more surprising?
When using reminders, participants didn't just better remember the higher-value circles they wrote down—they also remembered the lower-value circles they didn't write down.
The researchers think that by entrusting the most important (high-value) information to their own device, the participants' memory was free to store lower-value information.
Downside?
When they no longer had access to the reminders, the memory of the lower value circles remained - but they could no longer remember the higher value ones.
It will take many years of research before we know exactly what our addiction to devices is doing to our willpower and cognition in the long run.
In the meantime, however, there is another way we can mitigate its effects.
And it has to do with the way we think about our own brains.
As my former colleague David Robson wrote in The Expectancy Effect, recent research has challenged the belief that if we exercise our willpower in one way (that is, subconsciously resist checking our phone), we "thin" our overall reserves and make it significantly difficult to concentrate on another task.
This may be true.
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But, he writes, it depends a lot on our belief.
Individuals who think that our brains have "limited" capacities (such as that resisting one temptation makes it harder to resist another) will indeed be more likely to exhibit this phenomenon on testing.
But for those who think that the more we resist temptation, the more we strengthen our capacity to continue resisting that temptation - our brains, in other words, have unlimited resources - exhibiting self-control or mental fatigue on one task does not negatively affect their performance on the next.
More fascinating than that, whether we have a limited or unlimited view of the brain may be largely a cultural question— Western countries like the US are more inclined to think that the mind's abilities are limited unlike other cultures, such as India.
What did I conclude based on all this?
To reduce mindless reaching for the phone, I will continue to practice leaving it in another room.
But I will also constantly remind myself that my brain has more resources than I think—and that every time I resist the temptation to check my phone, I'm building new neurological pathways that will make it easier for me to resist that temptation, and maybe others, in the future.
*While writing this article, the author paused to check her phone once and indeed found herself scrolling for the next five minutes. Considering how often she thought about phones while writing this article, she'll see it as a victory.
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