Is phone addiction real?

People type “is phone addiction real” into the very device in question, often late at night, which is a small joke in itself. The honest answer has two halves, and both matter. As a medical diagnosis, no, phone addiction is not real: it is not in the manuals clinicians use. As an experience, yes, it is real enough: a lot of people, adults and children, find their phone use hard to control and wish it were otherwise. (This is general information, not medical advice.)

This page is about the label and the evidence. For what makes phones so gripping in the first place, see why are phones so addictive?

Is phone addiction a real diagnosis?

No. The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR does not include smartphone addiction. The nearest thing it contains is Internet Gaming Disorder, and that sits in the section for conditions that need further research. The APA says explicitly that the proposed condition is limited to gaming and does not cover general internet use, social media or smartphones.^[1]

The World Health Organization’s ICD-11, in effect since 2022, goes further on gaming: it includes gaming disorder, marked by impaired control, gaming taking priority over other interests, and carrying on despite harm, usually for at least 12 months and with significant impairment to daily life.^[2] It does not include smartphone addiction. So if someone tells you phone addiction is “officially recognised”, they have mixed it up with gaming.

What do researchers call phone addiction?

2 terms do most of the work. The first is problematic smartphone use, the phrase many researchers now prefer. The second is smartphone addiction, which survives in the names of measurement tools such as the Smartphone Addiction Scale, published in 2013 and described by its authors as the first of its kind.^[7] You will also meet nomophobia, meaning anxiety about being without your phone. None of these is a diagnosis.

The choice of word is not just academic tidiness. In a 2018 review titled, bluntly, “Is smartphone addiction really an addiction?”, Tayana Panova and Xavier Carbonell went through the research and concluded there was not sufficient support to confirm that smartphone addiction exists. The behaviours were better described as problematic or maladaptive use, and their consequences did not reach the severity seen in addiction.^[3]

When did people start talking about phone addiction?

2013 is a useful marker. That year South Korean researchers published the Smartphone Addiction Scale, one of the first tools built to measure it, and scales like it have been widely used in the research since.^[7] The caveat is that the idea spread faster than the evidence. The 2018 review noted that most studies in the field simply declared smartphones addictive, or took smartphone addiction as a given, rather than testing whether it met the criteria for addiction.^[3]

Is phone addiction similar to drug addiction?

No, on the current evidence. The 2018 review makes the key point: a habit can look like an addiction, with excessive use, trouble stopping and negative consequences, without being one.^[3] Addiction, as clinicians use the word, involves severe harm to physical and psychological health. Most people who feel they check their phone too often are describing something milder. That is a relief, and it also points to the fix: redesigning a habit, rather than treating a disease.

How common is problematic phone use?

23.3% is the median figure from a 2019 review of 41 studies covering 41,871 children and young people, roughly one in four.^[4] The caveat is large: the studies used different questionnaires and cut-offs, and most were cross-sectional, so the range across studies was wide.

The same review found problematic use was associated with higher odds of depression, anxiety, stress and poor sleep.^[4] Associated is the key word. It cannot tell us whether the phone use led to the low mood, the low mood led to the phone use, or both.

In the UK, the picture is less about diagnosis and more about unease. Ofcom’s 2026 report found that 37% of 8 to 17-year-olds think they spend too much time on screens, and 55% of their parents think their child’s screen time is too high.^[5] In the US, a 2023 Pew survey found 38% of teens and 47% of parents said they spend too much time on their own smartphones.^[6] Feeling you use your phone too much is common. It is not the same as addiction, but it is worth listening to.

Can you be addicted to your phone, then?

Yes, in the everyday sense of the word, and no, in the clinical one. If you feel pulled to the phone against your own wishes, lose time you meant to spend elsewhere, and feel uneasy without it, that is a real pattern worth taking seriously. Calling it problematic use rather than addiction does not shrink it. It just describes it more accurately, and it keeps the stronger word for the far rarer cases that genuinely need clinical help.

If you want to look at your own use honestly, without a quiz that tells you you are doomed, we have a calm self-check in signs of phone addiction. If it is a child you are worried about, see what to do if your child seems addicted to their phone. And if your phone use is tangled up with low mood, anxiety or poor sleep, talk to your GP. That is what they are there for.

For the practical side, our guide on how to do a digital detox is a sensible place to start. And if what you are really missing is the quiet the phone has crowded out, that is the subject of our small book, How to Be Bored Again.