Are you addicted to your phone?

Have a look at any social event these days and you will see the accepted norm - everyone around the table is either talking on their cellphone, holding their cellphone, or has their cellphone within easy arm's reach.

As soon as the phone starts to vibrate or the new message indicator light starts flashing, a built-in instinct overpowers us, and we have to reach for that phone. No matter what we are busy with, the phone takes priority. It has become a subconscious move.

Leslie Perlow, PhD, professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, conducted a survey among 1 600 managers and professionals, and found:

* Seventy percent said they check their smartphone within an hour of getting up.
* Fifty-six percent check their phone within an hour of going to sleep.
* Forty-eight percent check over the weekend, including on Friday and Saturday nights.
* Fifty-one percent check continuously during vacation.
* Forty-four percent said they would experience "a great deal of anxiety" if they lost their phone and couldn't replace it for a week.

Basically, it seems like our lives are very much like this video.

If you have grabbed your phone out of your pocket or out of your bag, thinking that it just rang or vibrated, only to find that it didn't, then you are perfectly normal. According to a study, 80% of us do this regularly. We are so used to interacting with our phone and hate missing calls or messages that our brain has to make a perceptual judgment about whether our phone is really vibrating or not. Since we would rather not miss the call or incoming message, our brain sometimes gives us a false-positive message so we over-check our phone.

We simply cannot miss anything. Our mobile phone is our drug of choice.

The word addicted is rather strong. People are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Are we addicted to our phone or do we just overuse it?

While researching this topic, I came across David Greenfield's book: Virtual Addiction: Help for Netheads, Cyber Freaks, and Those Who Love Them(Amazon). Greenfield says: "A true addiction entails a growing tolerance to a substance (eg, drugs or alcohol) so you need more to get 'high' with uncomfortable symptoms during withdrawal, and a harmful impact on your life." He goes on to say that technologies can be addictive "because they're 'psychoactive', they alter mood and often trigger enjoyable feelings."

In other words, we like the feeling of getting satisfying phone calls, great e-mails, replies to our tweets and constant notifications, and so we keep checking our devices to get more of those messages. We like the positive reinforcement we get with positive comments on our pics, and so we upload more. And tweet more. And e-mail more. So we can check for replies more.

Our phone is the gateway to achieve that psychoactive high, so when we have a non-working phone, we feel left out. When we don't get a reply, we feel ignored. As soon as we do get that reply, we are back to the "high" state. And we want more.

So, how do you break this habit? Here are some tips to regain control over the tech.

1. No dinner phone - start simple: don't put the phone on the dinner table. We all tell ourselves that we need the phone "in case of emergencies, like babysitter calls", but realistically, checking Twitter does not count as an emergency. Talk to the people around you. If they are on their phone, ask them nicely to put it down. If someone calls you while midsentence, ignore the call. You are in the middle of a conversation; it's just rude to the people you are with to stop and talk to someone else who is clearly more important.

2. See with your eyes - we are so busy trying to photograph everything that we just see everything though the screen instead of just looking up and seeing the sights. It's okay to just tell people what you saw instead of whipping out the phone and firing up Instagram. When you describe the sight, you relive it.

3. Less is more - apps are driving us insane. They constantly send "push notifications" to wake up the phone and remind us that they are there. We don't need to constantly know about updates to Subway Surfers, and do we really need to know that so-and-so is now following so-and-so on Twitter? We use around 10 apps, so uninstall those other apps that you don't use and just irritate you with pointless messaging.

4. Timing - checking the phone just before going to be bed or in the middle of the night en route to the bathroom just increases anxiety. If you receive a work-related message at 23:48, you tell yourself that you will deal with it in the morning, but inevitably, it plays on your mind and you struggle to switch off and go to bed. The phone is not the last thing you should be kissing goodnight before falling asleep. Using the phone as the alarm clock is fine, but avoid checking your messages just as you wake up. Ease into the day.

5. Search later - in the past, we had conversations where we didn't know all the facts and figures to everything. And it was okay. We survived. Now it seems like you can't have a conversation without someone whipping out the phone to "just Google it quickly". Not everything needs to be searched for instantly. Unless it's essential to the conversation, talk now, search later.

Of course, these are just basic suggestions and by no means a diagnosis to a serious addiction problem (for that, seek proper counselling). We need to break the dependency habit - it is okay to leave the phone on the desk while stepping away for three minutes to make a cup of coffee. Now with waterproof phones, I fear that it's just a matter of time before we start hearing water gushing as people start answering their phone while showering.

Just don't do it.