Do You Spend More Time On Your Phone Than The Average Person?

Unless you're super-disciplined or attempting an enforced break from your favourite social media, you probably feel as though you spend a little too much time on your phone.

After all, even if you find scrolling through your Instagram feed kind of depressing, it can be hard to put down your phone once and for all and focus completely on something else.

So it could be comforting to check out new research which found that the average Brit spends three hours and 25 minutes on their phone every day – including 52 minutes looking at social media.

Nearly six in ten Smartphone users who responded to a survey by AO Mobile said they were "too reliant" on their phones. More than seven in ten said they "can't bear" to be away from their handsets.

Around three in ten of the 2,000 Brits who responded to the survey said they check their phone as soon as they wake up. Two in ten said they check their phones while dining out at restaurants, and one in ten said they had even checked their phone in the cinema.

"The last decade has witnessed the unprecedented technological uprising of the phone industry, to the point where these devices have become the predominant accompaniment and assistant to our daily lives," said AO Mobile's managing director Richard Baxendale.

"As their usage has become more widespread so has their functionality, and our hunger for more data to feed this functionality has only increased."

Sadly, the survey didn't ask people what is possibly the ultimate mobile phone usage question: do you check yours during sex?

In a Refinery29 article titled "Why I Check My Phone During Sex", Hayley Macmillen wrote a few years ago: "A phone’s immediate promise of potential connection with the seven billion people not having sex with me casts it as a more likely contender for my undivided attention. It’s almost plausible that I’d be more interested in what’s happening on my screen than in the sex I’m simultaneously having."

The take-away from all this? You're probably not quite as reliant on your phone as you think, and there's almost certainly someone out there who spends more time on theirs than you do. Phew.