A therapist has finally put a number on the thing we all suspected: the average Briton now spends fourteen hours a day glued to their phone, a figure that would have been considered a medical emergency in the days when we still had the attention span to boil an egg. Actually, it is a medical emergency. But in 2025, it is the kind of medical emergency you have to book three weeks in advance and then cancel because you are too busy scrolling past pictures of your ex's new puppy while waiting for a train that is, inevitably, delayed by signal failure.
I spoke to one such professional, a woman called Dr. Penelope Higginbotham, who runs a clinic in the trendy part of Hackney where the air smells of artisan bread and mild desperation. 'Fourteen hours,' she said, blinking slowly as if the number itself gave her a mild migraine. 'That's more screen time than most of us spend asleep. And the sleep we do get is poor, because we've just spent two hours watching a man with a comb-over explain geopolitical instability via interpretive dance on TikTok.'
Higginbotham's patients are a cross-section of modern Britain: the insomniac stockbroker who checks his portfolio hourly, the teenager who hasn't looked up from her phone since 2019, and a retired colonel who insists his 'research' into lizard people requires constant vigilance. They all share the same hollow look, the same thumb cramps, the same feeling that somewhere between the sixth and seventh hour of daily scrolling they lost something essential. Their souls, perhaps. Or their sense of humor.
The mental health crisis, we are told, is deepening. But what does that mean? It means our GPs are now prescribing 'digital detoxes' that last exactly as long as it takes to run out of battery. It means the government has formed a committee to 'look into' the problem, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of putting a plaster on a bullet wound. It means we have reached a point where the only thing that can drag your eyes away from the screen is the appearance of a notification about said screen time. 'You have reached your daily limit,' your phone informs you, just as you are about to fall asleep. So you let it charge on the bedside table and dream of algorithm-friendly dawns.
What is to be done? The therapist suggests 'mindfulness' and 'setting boundaries', which is the 21st-century equivalent of telling someone with a broken leg to 'walk it off'. My own solution is simpler: a national subscription to the gin of the month club, a complete ban on WiFi in tunnels, and a tax on any tweet that contains the phrase 'thoughts and prayers'. It's not a perfect fix, but it's a start. In the meantime, I shall be applying my own phone to my ear for at least forty minutes a day, purely for the sake of mental health. The therapist said it's not ideal. But then, neither is the world.
