Am I Addicted to My Phone —
free, 15 questions
How automatic the reach has become, how often the pull wins, and what it has been taking — fifteen questions about where the phone sits in your whole day, not what your screen time says.
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15 quick questions · 3 min
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The science behind it
Start with the word, because the title borrowed it. Strictly speaking, phone use is not an addiction: no diagnostic manual lists it, there is no agreed threshold, and the comparisons with substances are looser than the headlines suggest. But the borrowed word is pointing at something real, and dismissing it as a moral panic misses that thing. These products are built to be hard to put down. Infinite scroll exists because a page with a bottom is a page people leave. Autoplay exists because it measurably increases watch time. Variable reward — the pull-to-refresh that sometimes gives you something and sometimes does not — is the same schedule that makes slot machines work, and it is in your notifications on purpose. None of that is accidental, and none of it is a comment on your character. So this check does not count hours or score you against a threshold. It reads three things over the last two weeks: how automatic the reach has become, how often the pull wins once the phone is open, and what it has been costing in sleep, attention and the people in front of you. Fifteen items written for MoodyWonder. It is not the Smartphone Addiction Scale or any licensed instrument, it is not a diagnosis of anything, and it does not claim to be. Read the full methodology →
This is a screening-style questionnaire, not a diagnosis. It reads how often certain experiences happen to you and compares that with other people; only a clinician can assess what it means for you. If the result worries you, take it to one.
What you get — free
- ✓Your three facet scores against other people's — the reach, the pull, the cost
- ✓Whether a high reach is a problem in your case, or just what living in this decade looks like
- ✓Why the screen time figure is the wrong measure, and the question that is the right one
A sample from Attachment Style — the layout is the same for every test.
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Common questions
Is phone addiction a real thing?
Not in the strict sense, and it is worth being precise rather than dismissive. There is no entry for it in any diagnostic manual, no criteria list, no agreed threshold, and comparing a phone with a substance is looser than the headlines make it sound. The word got borrowed anyway, and it stuck because it points at something true: these products are designed to be hard to stop. Infinite scroll, autoplay and variable reward are deliberate, tested choices, not accidents, and they were tested against people exactly as tired as you are. That cuts both ways, which is the part most writing on this subject gets wrong. It is not a character flaw, so the weak-willed framing is useless. And it is not entirely out of your hands either, because the design is not going to change on your behalf and the small decisions about where the charger goes are still yours. This test is written between those two.
How is this different from the test about staying up late?
That one answers a narrower question: why you are not going to bed when you are tired. It sorts between four reasons and the phone is only one of them — plenty of people stay up for the hours they feel owed, or because the bedtime routine is a procedure they cannot start, or because the light going off is what starts tomorrow. It is a sorter, it lives entirely in the hour before sleep, and it measures no severity at all. This one is about where the phone sits in the whole day: the queue, the red light, the first thing in the morning, the middle of a sentence someone was saying to you. If your answer is mostly about nights, take that one. If the phone turns up everywhere, take this one. Taking both is reasonable and they will not repeat each other.
My screen time says a lot of hours. Is that bad?
The number on its own tells you almost nothing, which is awkward, because it is the number every article about this uses to frighten people. Four hours of video calls with family in another country, photographs of a niece, reading, maps, a language app and work messages is not the same four hours as infinite scroll, and the counter cannot tell them apart. Two better questions. Was this time chosen — did you decide to spend it that way, or did it happen to you? And when you put the phone down, do you feel a bit better or a bit worse? Those two answers will tell you more than any figure in the settings app. If the time was yours and you get up feeling fine, a large number is not a problem to solve.
I need my phone. Isn't cutting down unrealistic?
For a lot of people, yes, and advice that ignores it is useless advice. The phone is the only social contact some people have, and the map, the bank, the work inbox, the alarm, the way a prescription gets ordered and the accessibility tool that makes a day possible. Digital detoxes and week-long fasts are written for people whose lives can absorb them, and they are a poor fit for anyone living alone, managing a chronic condition, or holding a relationship together across a time zone. Nothing on this page asks you to use the phone less as a goal in itself. The goal is that the use is chosen. An hour you picked is fine at any length; ninety minutes that happened to you is the thing worth changing, whatever the total says.
What about my child or my teenager?
That is a different subject and this test does not cover it. The questions here are written for adults about their own use, the comparisons are against adult answers, and the evidence about young people, phones and development is genuinely contested rather than settled — it deserves better than a fifteen-item questionnaire built for something else. If your worry is about a child, read something written for that, and treat anyone who sounds completely certain in either direction with some caution.
Putting my phone down makes me genuinely anxious. Is that normal?
Some restlessness is ordinary and passes in a few minutes. What is worth taking more seriously is the stronger version: real agitation, a racing heart, a feeling of not being able to tolerate it, or checking driven by dread rather than interest. That pattern is usually less about the phone than about what the phone has been holding off, and anxiety is the most common thing underneath it. The anxiety check reads that directly and this page does not. It is a better use of your next two minutes than anything on this one.
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