"It's built to hook me"

At some point in the last few years you'll have read that none of this is your fault. The apps are designed by clever people whose job is to keep you looking. The feed has no bottom, the next video starts by itself, and the red badge with a number in it is red for a reason. You're one person against a building full of engineers.

A good deal of that is true. Most of the apps in your loop are free, and they earn their money from advertising, so their income rises with the time you spend in them. Features that lengthen your stay get kept. A feed that never ends removes the natural stopping point that a newspaper has on its last page. Notifications pull you back in when you've left. It would be strange if all that effort had no effect, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't.

It matters for this book in one specific way. It explains why a reach, once begun, tends to run on. The design does its work after the phone is in your hand.

It explains much less about why the phone got into your hand. Here the best evidence I know comes from a study at the London School of Economics. Thirty-seven people wore small video cameras that recorded their day from their own point of view. The researchers collected about 200 hours of footage and went through it with the wearers afterwards. They counted 1,130 separate uses of a phone. In 89 per cent of them, the person had picked up the phone unprompted. Only 11 per cent began with a notification. They also found that the time between one use and the next stayed much the same wherever people were. It made little difference whether they were at home or at work, alone or in company. The authors' conclusion was that the disruption comes mainly from habits the users have learned, more than from the devices.

That finding has a consequence. If you've switched off your notifications and found that you still reach as much as ever, this is why. Switching them off is worth doing, and chapter 12 includes it. But it deals with one reach in nine. The other eight start with you, in a gap, with no prompt from anyone.

I find that encouraging, though it may not sound it. You can't redesign an app. A learned habit is within your reach to change, because it lives in your routines and your pockets and not in a building in California. You can be angry at the companies and I think some anger is justified. It just doesn't do anything about the next time the kettle is on.

This is also the place to deal with the word addiction. People use it freely about phones, usually about themselves, and usually half joking. Two researchers in Barcelona reviewed the studies on so-called smartphone addiction and asked whether the label was earned. They concluded that it wasn't. Heavy use can look like addiction from the outside, with loss of control and some harm. But the consequences don't reach the severity that the word implies in medicine. They recommended calling it problematic use, and looking at what the use is doing for the person. Not every researcher agrees, and the argument continues.

I side with them for a practical reason. If you believe you're addicted, you'll expect a fight with cravings, and you'll think in terms of quitting and relapsing. You'll also look for a remedy built for a much heavier problem. If you see a habit, you'll look at cues and routines, and you'll expect to change it the way habits are changed. The people interviewed for the checking study in chapter 5 had it about right when they called their checking an annoyance. The next chapter is about how annoyances of this kind get changed.