We already know that phones before bed can ruin sleep, but what other big impacts might your mobile be having on your wellbeing? Over 1000 of you completed our survey, and the results make for some interesting discussion

For a start, it’s not just your phone. It’s your newspaper, alarm clock and camera. It’s your TV and department store. And for lots of us, it’s our gaming console, heart monitor, means of assessing how far we’ve walked and what we’ve eaten every day. It may well be the irst thing we check in the morning – maybe even before looking at the person sleeping next to us – and the last thing we look at at night. We’re so intimate with it, we’ll even take it to the loo.

It’s a dramatic change to how we behave that’s happened over a relatively short amount of time. Smartphones took of in 2001 with the introduction of 3G, but the big leap was the launch of the iPhone as recently as 2007. No sooner did these pocket-sized devices become indispensable than concerns started up that both the phones themselves and the ‘technoference’ – intrusions and interruptions – they cause are damaging our mental health. The latest study has even found a link between high levels of screen time and depression. Equally worrying is new research suggesting 24 per cent of women are ‘problem users’. We wanted to investigate how healthy readers use their phones, so we worked with Dr Daria Kuss, a cyberpsychologist at Nottingham Trent University, to create a survey to unpick what they’re doing to your wellbeing. The results make startling, if not completely surprising, reading. Over three-quarters of you say you are ‘sometimes’, ‘always’ or ‘frequently’ preoccupied with your phones and 45 per cent experience negative feelings if you can’t use your phone because you’ve forgotten it or it’s run out of charge. You also struggle to control the amount of time you spend on your phones with over 73 per cent of you saying you sometimes, always or frequently spend increasing amounts of time engaged with it. Nearly half of you – 44 per cent – have tried and failed to control your smartphone use. On average, respondents to our survey estimated spending two hours a day on their phones; however we’re not very good at judging this: a 2015 study determined that people actually use their phones twice as much as they think. Just think what else you could be doing with four hours a day.