Am I Addicted to My Phone · type
The Wide Orbit
The phone is mostly a tool. You go around it and you come back, and going away is not something you have to win an argument about.
What this type is
Your answers over the last two weeks describe a phone that is largely doing what a phone is for. The reach may well be automatic — most people's is, and that on its own is not a finding — but once it is open you can close it, and what it is taking from the rest of the day is small. That is a more interesting result than it sounds, because it separates two things that usually get scored together: how much you use the phone, and whether the phone is using you. A high reach with a low cost is the common shape among people who simply live in this decade. It is not a condition. It is what it looks like when the map, the bank, the messages, the camera and the radio are all one object in your pocket.
Which is why the thing to read here is the bars rather than the band. If your reach bar is well above the others and the cost bar is low, the honest reading is that you touch the phone often and it is not charging you for it, and the correct response to that is nothing. If the cost bar is the one standing up while the other two are quiet, that is worth a look on its own — it usually means the phone is landing on one specific thing, most often sleep or the person in the room, and a single targeted change fixes more than a general resolution to use it less. And the measure to ignore entirely is the screen time figure. Four hours of calls with family abroad, photographs, reading and maps is not the four hours the number is imagining. What it cannot see is whether you chose the time, which is the only part that matters.
Two limits on this reading. It is a two-week window, and these scores move with how much is going on: a dull fortnight, a stretch of travel, a week where the work was all on the phone anyway. Keep this as your picture of what in-hand looked like, so that if a month arrives where the evenings vanish you can tell it is a change rather than a fact about you. And if the description of the pull in the questions felt more familiar than your score suggests — if you read them and thought yes, that is me, while answering rarely — trust the recognition over the number and look again at the middle bar. This test is easy to answer from the version of the fortnight you remember rather than the one that happened.
What people with this result notice
Four of the eight notes the test writes for this type; the rest come with your own result.
📊 The screen time number is not the measure
Four hours of calls with family abroad, photographs, reading and maps is not the four hours that number is imagining, and the counter cannot tell them apart. Two better questions: was this time chosen, and do you get up feeling a bit better or a bit worse? A large number you chose is not a problem waiting to be solved.
📱 Using it a lot is not the same as a problem
Your reach bar may be high. Almost everyone's is — the map, the bank, the messages and the camera are one object now, and touching it often is what this decade looks like rather than a condition. The bar that decides whether there is anything here is the cost one, and yours is quiet.
What produces this result
Every answer feeds one overall score, and that score falls into one of 3 bands. The bands are levels of the same thing, not different kinds of person.
The automatic reachNot being able to stopWhat it is taking
This is a screening-style questionnaire, not a diagnosis. A high score is a reason to talk to someone who can assess properly.
Is this you?
The Am I Addicted to My Phone test is 15 questions and takes about 3 minutes. Your result carries your own numbers, not just the name.
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