Benfield School made the news recently, as pupils adopted a new scheme which sees them lock their phones away until home time. The story caught attention well beyond the school gates, and points to a wider question that people are starting to ask: how much time are we handing over to our phones, and what is it costing us? There's a growing recognition that our relationship with our devices, particularly smartphones, is something that needs to be actively managed as it can have significant effects on our mood, sleep and ability to concentrate.
 

The evidence stacks up

Research published by King's College found that teenagers with problematic smartphone use were twice as likely to experience anxiety, and one in eight said they actively wanted help cutting down. Anxiety, disrupted sleep and difficulty focusing have become so commonplace among young people that they can start to seem like fixed features of adolescence rather than things that might be directly attributable to scrolling and the constant ping of notifications. What schools like Benfield are discovering is that when you remove the device, something else can emerge: conversation, daydreaming, presence. These are not small things, and for many, they have become increasingly rare, crowded out by a screen that is always on and asking for something.
 

Adults are navigating this too

For adults reading about Benfield, the struggles will likely feel familiar. Most of us are navigating that same dynamic every day: scrolling instead of sleeping, checking the phone before we've said good morning, half-present in conversations because something is always pinging in the background. According to Ofcom's most recent Online Nation report, UK adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online each day, most of it on a smartphone, and that figure has risen year on year. The difference is that, as adults, we have fewer structures in place and no one locking the phone away on our behalf. It's not until we try to stop that we notice how automatic the habit has become.
 

Where to start with your phone habits

Change rarely comes from willpower alone, and the goal isn't to ditch your phone altogether. Small, consistent shifts tend to make more difference than dramatic ones.
 

1. Keep the first hour of the morning screen-free. The way you start the day shapes how the rest of it feels.
2. Leave your phone out of the bedroom at night. Sleep quality is one of the first things to suffer from heavy phone use, and the bedroom is a great place to draw a clear boundary.
3. Turn off non-essential notifications. Many alerts don't need an immediate response, and each interruption costs attention.
4. Notice what you're feeling before reaching for your phone. Boredom, anxiety, avoidance: the urge to check can mask a lot of different things, and paying attention to that moment is often more useful than the scroll that follows.
5. If you have children, make the rules household-wide. Boundaries are easier to sustain when they apply to everyone, and modelling the behaviour tends to land better than policing it.