The Impact of Phone Addiction on Teen Health

What causes Phone Addiction?

“These days we have Smartphones, Smart cars, Smartboards, Smart everything, but consider this: if the technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?”- Rebecca McNutt 

The world’s first touchscreen smartphone, the IBM Simon was released in 1994. 30 years later, life seems impossible without using them because everything has been made digital. We use it not only for just necessary things but things like social media, games and chatting with others. This becomes a problem when people start using them for a long time. On average, teenangers have been found to spend around seven hours a day on their phones, this is almost two times the screen time of adults which is around 4 hours a day. To understand why teenangers are so addicted to their phones, we need to understand the brain’s reward system.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released in our brain when we experience pleasure such as receiving positive feedback or achieving a goal. It reinforces these behaviors and motivates us to seek them again. Earlier people got a hit of dopamine after doing a hard task or simply from eating a delicious food. However, nowadays we get a hit of dopamine very easily by using technology. Everytime you get a notification, everytime you check your messages and every single time you scroll on TikTok, you get a rush of dopamine. Like I said before, dopamine motivates us to seek pleasure inducing activity again. 

Our brain is wired to be in a particular system: put in effort-enjoy the reward. However, if your brain is receiving pleasure all the time without any challenge, it is going to think that it has plenty of dopamine and will start producing less. Technology has removed the effort part of the effort-reward loop. This then results in people seeking dopamine from external sources like smartphones and the cycle continues. 

Think of the teenanger who comes home after school and starts using their phone: flipping through their apps, scrolling on social media and texting their friends. This results in a huge rush of dopamine in the brain for hours! Now, when they are finally starting to study or complete their homework, their brain is trying to rebalance after the dopamine rush. Now they have to go through the discomfort of the withdrawal of dopamine and the teen, not liking it, keeps using their phone although they are supposed to be studying.

Why are teens more addicted to their phones than adults?

Tenangers’ brains are still developing, specifically in areas related to reward processing. This makes them more vulnerable to the immediate gratification of smartphones. Below is a first hand statement made by a teenanger about phone addiction. 

“I do not necessarily feel that it would be impossible for me to live without my phone. I only check my phone when I am bored or feel under stimulated. Another reason why I and many others use our phones so often is to not feel left out from group chat conversations. However, I do lose track of my time when I am scrolling through social media or checking my Snapchat. When I realize that I wasted so much of my time, I feel really bad about myself. It is really hard for me to concentrate on my homework or any work in general once I have used my phone. I tried to stop using it once, but it did not work out.”

                                                                                                                        -Anonymous

Impact of Phone Addiction on Teen Health

• They start staying up late to use their phone before bed. This keeps the brain active for more time than it should be.

• They stop spending time outdoors with their friends

• Lower self-esteems from comparing themselves to others

• Feeling more depressed

• Blurry vision and eye strain

• Loss of appetite

• Fear of Missing Out(FOMO)

• False Perception or Phantom Vibration Syndrome- Perceiving your phone to be vibrating even when it is really not

• Anxiety and Psychological stress

• Feeling tired all the time

Some ways you can control your addiction

• Limit checking your phone

• Schedule when you can use your smartphone

• Turn off your phone during important tasks

• Don’t bring your tablet or smartphone to bed

• Replace your smartphone with other activities like meditating, socialising with others or reading a book

• Use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy(CBT)

Citations

Shoukat, Sehar. "Cell phone addiction and psychological and physiological health in adolescents."

    National Institute of Medicine, 4 Feb. 2019, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6449671/.

    Accessed 16 Mar. 2025.

Marshall, Mallika, MD. "Excessive smartphone use can negatively impact teen's mental health,

    researchers find." CBS News, 5 Aug. 2024, www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/

    smartphone-use-negative-teen-mental-health/. Accessed 16 Mar. 2025.