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On the heels of two large Apple investors urging the company to address kids' phone addiction, many parents may be wondering: How do I know if my child is addicted to his or her smartphone? And how can I prevent problematic overuse? There are reasons for concern. A 2016 survey from Common Sense Media found that half of teenagers felt addicted to their devices, and 78 percent checked their devices at least hourly. Seventy-two percent of teens felt pressured to respond immediately to texts, notifications and social media messaging. A 2015 Pew Research report found that 73 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds had their own smartphones or had access to one, and 24 percent said they were online "almost constantly.""

"Some experts think people can become addicted to playing video games, much in the same way people are addicted to physical substances, but is that really possible? If you are a gamer, what motivates you to play? How do you resist temptation when you need to? If you don't play video games, is there another behavior that you think it would be possible to be addicted to?"

"A lot of us must be wondering if we're hooked on our tech: Searches for "phone addiction" have risen steadily in the past five years, according to Google Trends, and "social media addiction" trails it closely. "

" People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we've also been hooked on technologies, like Instagram, Netflix, Facebook, Fitbit, Twitter, and email-platforms we've adopted because we assume they'll make our lives better. These inventions have profound upsides, but their appeal isn't an accident. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end."

"People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we've also been hooked on technologies, like Instagram, Netflix, Facebook, Fitbit, Twitter, and email-platforms we've adopted because we assume they'll make our lives better. These inventions have profound upsides, but their appeal isn't an accident. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end. Tracing addiction through history, Alter shows that we're only just beginning to understand the epidemic of behavioral addiction gripping society. He takes us inside the human brain at the very moment we score points on a smartphone game, or see that someone has liked a photo we've posted on Instagram. But more than that, Alter heads the problem off at the pass, letting us know what we can do to step away from the screen. He lays out the options we have to address this problem before it truly consumes us. After all, who among us hasn't struggled to ignore the ding of a new email, the next episode in a TV series, or the desire to play a game just one more time?"

"'Teens turn to, and are obsessed with, whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. Most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other.'"

"Maybe you are. How exactly would you know? The digital police aren't going to flag you when you've met your technology threshold. On the other hand, constant use has become normalized. The toddler tinkering with a tablet, the teen locked away in their room tied to their computer, and to the adult buried in their phone at a social engagement are just a few examples of ordinary use. In our present day, the increase in popularity and integration of technology in our daily lives prompts one to ponder the potential of developing an addiction to technology. At what point are we at risk for crossing the fine line from general use to problematic use?"

"Are you addicted to technology? I'm certainly not. In my first sitting reading Adam Alter's Irresistible, an investigation into why we can't stop scrolling and clicking and surfing online, I only paused to check my phone four times. Because someone might have emailed me. Or texted me. One time I stopped to download an app Alter mentioned (research) and the final time I had to check the shares on my play brokerage app, Best Brokers (let's call this one "business")."

"Can you read this entire article without checking your phone? Most teens can't. The majority of teens have a growing smartphone addiction, creating fear or anxiety when not using their devices. Repetitive smartphone use has led to health issues and new medical terminology such as "nomophobia," "text claw," and "iPosture." Unfortunately, many teens text or check social media while they drive, endangering themselves and others."

"Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention"

"Mass shootings -- like those at Newtown, Columbine, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater -- and everyday street violence, like what's going on in Chicago, can be addressed immediately by legislation. But background checks and assault rifle bans will not free us from our most debilitating shackle, and that is our numbness, if not addiction, to violence, particularly in film."

"Yassiry Gonzalez goes to bed early. But often she wakes up around 1 or 2 in the morning. And from then on, sometimes all the way through dawn, the New York City high school student is on her phone - on FaceTime with close friends, or looking through Instagram. "Sometimes, I'm so tired that I'll just fall asleep in school." She estimates the all-nighters happen once or twice a week. And on the weekends? "There's no sleep. No sleep." Looking back, 2018 may be the year that a critical mass of people started wondering: Am I spending too much time on my phone? The World Health Organization officially designated "Internet Gaming Disorder," as a diagnosis similar to gambling addiction. And after Apple shareholders asked the company to address compulsive use of the iPhone, CEO Tim Cook announced new tools to track your use. Cook told NPR's Steve Inskeep in June: "I think there are cases in life where anything good, used to the extreme, becomes not good. I can eat healthy food all day, but if I eat too much it's no longer good anymore.""

"In the modern economy of tablets and apps, our attention has become the most valuable commodity. Tech companies have armies of behavioral researchers whose sole job is to apply principles like Skinner's variable rewards to grab and hold our focus as often and long as possible. But some people are starting to fight back. A small but growing number of behavioral scientists and former Silicon Valley developers have begun trying to counterprogram those news alerts, friend requests and updates crowding our waking hours."

"ast September, Apple proudly rolled out a Screen Time feature that was designed to help people manage how much they use their devices, and even get away from them altogether with a related Downtime setting. This was a canny marketing move from the maker of the most attractive and addictive screen ever invented. And it came against the backdrop of Apple's unusually public campaign against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Screen Time's promotional materials prominently featured both Facebook and Instagram, as if suggesting these two apps in particular might be a waste of your time. Never mind that Facebook's very real privacy liabilities aren't connected to how often you use the product. Apple had an opportunity to position itself on the higher ground of the branding battlefield, and it took it."

"The cost of being always available. The cost of having fragmented conversation. The cost of a rewired brain. The cost of our privacy. The literal, spiraling cost of buying the latest technology. For these and other economic reasons, sales of iPhones and other smartphones have recently plateaued and even declined. At the same time, some people have gone back to the simpler, less addictive phones used in the late 1990s and early 2000s: the flip phone, the "candybar" phone, and other basic "feature" phones that can only talk and text."

"The actor is not new to addressing toxic masculinity; he has been advocating against men's allegiance to harmful gender roles for years. His 2014 book, Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live With One, traced the actor's experiences with living alongside an alcoholic father, admitting to a pornography addiction, and slowly abandoning the "Marlboro Man" ideal of masculinity. But now he has named himself as an affected party rather than just an enthusiastic ally."

"A cognition crisis is not defined by a lack of information, knowledge or skills. We have done a fine job in accumulating those and passing them along across millennia. Rather, this a crisis at the core of what makes us human: the dynamic interplay between our brain and our environment - the ever-present cycle between how we perceive our surroundings, integrate this information, and act upon it. This ancient perception-action cycle ensured our earliest survival by allowing our primordial predecessors to seek nutrients and avoid toxins. It is from these humble beginnings that the human brain evolved to pursue more diverse resources and elude more inventive threats. It is from here that human cognition emerged to support our success in an increasingly complex and competitive environment: attention, memory, perception, creativity, imagination, reasoning, decision making, emotion and aggression regulation, empathy, compassion, and wisdom. And it is here that our crisis exists. Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world seek medical assistance for serious impairments in their cognition: major depressive disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addiction, dementia, and more. In the United States alone, depression affects 16.2 million adults, anxiety 18.7 million, and dementia 5.7 million - a number that is expected to nearly triple in the coming decades."

"The average adult checks their phone 50 to 300 times each day, Greenfield says. And smartphones use psychological tricks that encourage our continued high usage - some of the same tricks slot machines use to hook gamblers. "For example, every time you look at your phone, you don't know what you're going to find - how relevant or desirable a message is going to be," Greenfield says. "So you keep checking it over and over again because every once in a while, there's something good there." (This is called a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement. Animal studies suggest it makes dopamine skyrocket in the brain's reward circuity and is possibly one reason people keep playing slot machines.) A growing number of doctors and psychologists are concerned about our relationship with the phone. There's a debate about what to call the problem. Some say "disorder" or "problematic behavior." Others think over-reliance on a smartphone can become a behavioral addiction, like gambling."

"Studies have shown that spending too much time on your phone is bad for your focus and mental health. As 2018 kicks off, there are some easy ways to build better digital habits. Try turning off notifications, kicking your phone out of your bedroom and even turning on grayscale"

"The Atlantic piece "The Binge Breaker" explores Tristan Harris's plan to stop smartphone addiction. He's a former Google employee and the founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that wants the world to disengage more easily from devices. In this interview with PBS Newshour, Harris explains how companies profit from keeping people entranced with their phones. "For any company whose business model is advertising, or engagement-based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product, they make more money the more time people spend," he says. "These services are in competition with where we would want to spend our time, whether that's our sleep or with our friends. There's this war going on to get as much attention as possible.""