“Someone deep in a TikTok session is not that different from someone under hypnosis”: A psychologist on how to counter smartphone addiction

You’ve studied the psychology of sleep, placebos and magic tricks. How did smartphones enter the mix? I’m naturally a slow adopter of technology. My friends had smartphones before I did, and I noticed them complaining about being glued to their devices and enjoying real life less. When I got an iPhone in the early 2010s, I wanted to figure out how to get the benefits without all the downsides. There wasn’t much practical research on it, so my team enrolled more than 100 people to try 10 different strategies for healthy phone use, like tracking screen time and hiding social media apps.

Which strategies worked best? The big one is reducing notifications; the constant buzzing automatically captures your attention. Also, people who sleep with their phones outside their bedroom report better rest and self-control. There’s good evidence that using greyscale—putting your phone in black-and-white mode—reduces smartphone overuse too. But we also know that people really don’t like greyscale.

Related: How smartphone addiction is ruining our lives

You’ve surveyed 50,000 people of all ages in practically every country about problematic smartphone use. What have you found? About a third of people worldwide meet the criteria for cellphone addiction, and that figure is increasing. We were surprised to find that, regardless of age or location, women have higher rates of smartphone addiction than men. That could be because women tend to be heavier users of social media, which tends to be more habitual.

What’s the difference between the occasional late-night doomscroll and full-blown addiction? At the minor end, problematic smartphone use interferes with people’s work and concentration. At the more extreme end, people with smartphone addictions are often using their phones well into the night, and it’s interfering with their sleep. That can make them feel depressed, anxious and lonely. The smartphone swallows up in-person socialization—they’re seeing a lot of algorithm-curated content, and it can skew their views of reality. They drift further and further from the face-to-face world.

Related: This mom is on a mission to keep kids smartphone-free

You’ve also found an unlikely connection between smartphone addiction and hypnosis. We ran some crazy studies when I was in grad school. We were looking at people’s varying degrees of suggestibility to hypnosis, and I had a fairly baseless hunch that hypnotic suggestibility might correlate with problematic smartphone use. After having participants listen to a soft-spoken hypnosis recording, we had them fill out our standard smartphone-addiction questionnaire. We were right: there was a small but consistent correlation between hypnotizability and problematic smartphone use.

So our phones are hypnotizing us? I can’t scientifically say that, but there are rough similarities between the two: time distortion, intense absorption. Take someone who’s deep into a TikTok session. It’s 3 a.m., and they’ve lost track of time and forgotten about the world around them. That’s not so different from somebody who’s in hypnosis, automatically responding to suggestions.

Should we all switch to flip phones then? Moderate smartphone use is the best way forward. Trying to use smartphones effectively, in a healthy way, is a better long-term plan than switching to a dumb phone, which doesn’t usually last. I know very few people who have made the switch permanently.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.