Think you’re addicted to your phone? Find out how you compare with the rest of the UK
Key Points
- A new quiz published by British telco Virgin Media O2 analyses how much you use your smartphone to determine how you compare with others in the UK.
- The quiz asks 10 questions about your smartphone usage to determine whether you are dependent on your smartphone and spend too much time unintentionally using your device.
- Research commissioned by the company found that the average Briton will spend almost five of their waking years scrolling unintentionally on their smartphone.
- Doomscrolling, or using your phone unintentionally, can have adverse effects on your sleep, focus, and mental health.
People in the UK, and around the world generally, are becoming increasingly dependent on and addicted to smartphones.
More specifically, an increasing proportion of people are unintentionally using their smartphones for extended periods of time, ‘doomscrolling’ on social media applications which have developed algorithms designed to trap and keep your attention.
British telco Virgin Media O2 has highlighted the negative impact of unintentional smartphone usage, noting that the average person in the UK will spend almost five years of their life mindlessly scrolling or consuming media on their handset.
To raise awareness of this issue, the company has launched an online quiz which helps users to understand how much time they spend using their smartphone and how they compare with the wider population.
If you think you are among those who are more connected with reality and spend relatively little time on your smartphone, you may be surprised by the results.
Take the Digital Intentionality Score on the Virgin Media O2 website.
Measuring smartphone usage on Android and iOS
The quiz asks users ten questions and provides them with a score that ranks their unintentional smartphone usage on a scale from 1 to 100, measuring them against the average UK user.
While it relies on the user’s anecdotal experience, the quiz also advises users to check their digital wellbeing statistics on their smartphone itself.
To help you better understand your smartphone habits, iPhone and Android both offer the ability to track your screen time and even impose limits on your smartphone usage.
On iPhone, these statistics can be accessed under Screen Time in the Settings menu. Android users can find their usage data under the Digital Wellbeing section of the Settings menu.
These tools show how much screen time you record every day, as well as how many times you open or pick up your phone throughout the day.
Used in conjunction with Virgin Media O2’s Digital Intentionality Score, this can be a useful indicator of how much time you spend doomscrolling compared to the rest of the UK population.
How doomscrolling impacts your life
The research commissioned by Virgin Media O2 looked at the smartphone usage habits of more than 6,000 people in the UK and surveyed them over how unintentional smartphone use affected them.
According to the study, 41% of people report that their sleep is impacted by their unintentional phone usage, and 23% say their attention span is shorter than it was before.
In total, the study found that 74% of people in the UK are experiencing at least one negative effect linked to their smartphone use, pointing to an endemic problem in the modern digital world.
A further 41% of people said they had little or no control over how they use their phone or the internet.
