You love it more than your soulmate. It spends most of the day in your pocket, begging to be used. You touch it dozens—sometimes even hundreds—of times each day. You can’t stop thinking about it even while your significant other is vying for your attention and telling you about your day. You keep choosing it over real, physical intimacy. It fogs up your mind, makes you dependent on it, gobbles up your spare time, ruins your sleep, hijacks your impulses, and consistently makes you feel worse.
Yes, we’re talking about your smartphone! If this were a fantasy book or video game, we’d call it a cursed artifact that we wouldn’t advise touching with a 10-foot pole. Now, new research shows this insidious technology’s impact runs deeper and wider than previously anticipated. The arrival of smartphones in our lives has led to eroding relationships and worse sex lives… and the repercussions are felt in bedrooms and hospital nurseries everywhere around the world.
If you’d rather scroll your social media feed or browse digital erotica than go on dates and make out with your partner, then something has gone incredibly wrong. Not just on an individual level, but on a societal one, too. And it has led to a fertility and demographic crisis, whether you planned on having kids or not. In short, fewer babies are being born, and the trend is beyond concerning.
Let’s get into exactly what’s been happening, what smartphones can be blamed for beyond ruining your relationships, what else might be causing birth rates to crash, how to get your screen time under control, and what you can do to reinvigorate and reclaim your life. All, hopefully, without breaking every tech device with a hammer and giving up screens for good. You do not need to become a hermit in the woods.
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Smartphones have fundamentally changed how people socialize and spend their free time
One recent study found that the general fertility rate in the United States dropped by a mind-melting 22% since 2007. According to the researchers, this sudden decline cannot be explained by factors such as economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing costs, childcare costs, etc.
“We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone,” the researchers state. They looked at the rollout of the very first iPhone in the US. Because the device was sold only on AT&T between June 2007 and February 2011, the researchers could examine its effect using variation in mobile broadband coverage.
“Access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. […] The diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44.”
Sudden access to smartphones meant fewer births because of a sharp drop in in-person interactions, less sex, and more pornography consumption. To be blunt, if you spend more time on your phone instead of being intimate with your partner, this naturally leads to fewer new babies being conceived.
Meanwhile, another recent study uncovered that teenage fertility cratered globally, starting around the year 2007. The researchers emphasized that this trend impacted countries all across the income and policy spectrum. Essentially, the advent of smartphones fundamentally changed how teenagers spend their time with each other. This, in turn, collapsed teen fertility.
“Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur.”
Falling smartphone prices made this technology more widely accessible. This then changed how society functions and what communication looks like. More interactions happen in a phone-mediated environment, partly replacing in-person chats. The paper showed that in-person socializing among teenagers halved while digital leisure tripled in the US. The same effect was noted in England and Wales. Another horrible side effect of the “shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium,” according to the researchers, has been a “surge in teen suicides.”
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The phenomenon has affected countries around the world, but there’s still skepticism
Both studies are part of researchers’ efforts to explain why fertility nosedived over the past couple of decades. Previously, scientists had looked at various factors such as contraception use, abortion rates, rising levels of female education, and even the popularity of the TV show ‘16 and Pregnant,’ The New York Times reports. Another potential factor for consideration was the impact of the Great Recession.
According to economist Caitlin Myers, from Middlebury College, who conducted the first study with her student, Ezekiel Hooper, the most pronounced effects of the iPhone were among teenagers and young adults aged 15 to 24.
Myers’ logic is straightforward. She argues that young people began socializing more on their phones, which meant less socializing in person. This led to less sex and, therefore, to less of a chance of getting pregnant.
Another major effect of teens and adults having access to phones is that this made pornography more accessible. This, in effect, created an easier way to reach a substitute for actual sex. Furthermore, young people could use their smartphones to easily obtain better information about avoiding pregnancy, such as the different types of contraception.
In the meantime, the authors of the second study emphasized how birth rates dropped around the globe, not just in well-off, developed societies. It was a mass phenomenon that accelerated teen fertility declines everywhere.
“Countries with very different health care systems, welfare regimes, abortion laws, religious traditions, recessions and demographic trends all saw similar breaks in the same window. Whatever caused it was something global — something that arrived in roughly the same form in all of these places at roughly the same time,” noted researchers Hernan Moscoso Boedo, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Ph.D student Nathan Hudson.
Other researchers, who were not involved in the study, were impressed by the findings and results. However, they had some caveats to share. For example, economist Phillip B. Levine, from Wellesley College, told The New York Times that “you shouldn’t take the result so literally and say: Oh, it’s the iPhone’s fault.” He noted how “It’s an example of the kinds of social influences that have led to the decline in birth rate.”
Meanwhile, economist Theodore Joyce, from Baruch College, said that he was skeptical of both papers. He explained that teenage births have been falling since the 1990s, a time before modern technology became so widespread. From his perspective, the hypothesis about smartphones may be right but “remains speculative.” He pointed out that Myers’ research looked at only a short time period before smartphones had fully taken hold of society.
Dr. Alison Gemmill, an associate professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health, explained to CNN that people are “marrying later, partnering later, and spending less of adulthood in stable relationships, and smartphones may contribute to those trends.” She added that these things are happening alongside “major changes in housing costs, education, labor markets, gender norms, and social life.”
Furthermore, Dr. Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research, notes that if you look at the longer history of teen birth rates, you need different explanations. “If you want to say this change has been happening for 100 years, it’s probably some factor that’s been continuous for 100 years and not something that happened 15 years ago,” she said.
“The bigger picture view is that exposure to technology [such as radio and TV] sort of changes your sources of information and ideas about what kinds of families are desirable and what kind of lives are desirable more generally. The idea that you would see this very sharp effect in 2007 with a very specific technology, I’m a little more skeptical about.”
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The amount of time we spend using tech is, frankly, very worrying
According to Psychologist Michelle Drouin, the world is experiencing an intimacy famine. Physical touch is incredibly important. Something as simple as 20 seconds of hugging lowers your heart rate and blood pressure, and makes you more resilient to illnesses. Furthermore, sex is great for your cardiovascular system and brain.
That being said, Dr. Drouin told the BBC that technology does allow you to fulfill your social needs. “That’s probably why we’re also addicted to our phones, because we have basic needs for socialization and it’s easy to meet those needs when we pick up our phones and text a friend,” she said.
“What I would argue is that we need to harness the technology of these phones to then make deeper connections. Use them as the entry point, but also don’t miss out on those experiences that have defined us as humans.”
During a recent event hosted by the Digital Futures Institute, Professor Kate Devlin from King’s College London noted that technology, screens, algorithms, platforms, and data are mediating moments of desire, connection, longing, arousal and heartbreak. “This isn’t a distant future, it’s already here, and it’s how many of us live now.”
Meanwhile, when speaking about relationships with digital characters and AI companions, Dr. Chloé Locatelli, also from KCL, challenged the idea that we should exclusively prioritize human-human relationships. “I invite people to think about the ways they’ve had strong feelings towards characters around other forms of media – whether it be a film, a book, or a parasocial relationship with a celebrity that you have a crush on.”
Family life, parenting, and demographics aside for a moment, it is extremely worrying that people socialize less in person. Strong, positive relationships are linked to longevity, health, and happiness, while loneliness is harmful for your physical and mental well-being.
The loneliness crisis has reached staggering levels in some parts of the world. In China, around 20% of Chinese households are made up of people living alone. Meanwhile, around half of young people turn to virtual companions when they feel lonely.
New rules have recently come into effect, banning artificial intelligence companions for minors and restricting their marketing to adults. The Chinese government is worried about chatbots creating “emotional dependence or addiction” in users and replacing social interaction.
The global smartphone market is worth a whopping $503.06 billion in 2026, with China alone generating $118.2 billion in revenue. The market volume is predicted to reach 1.75 billion units by 2030.
Heavy screen use is worrying, and these days, it’s a habit developed from childhood. Kids aged 2 and under spend an average of 1 hour and 3 minutes using media each day. Children ages 2 to 4 spend around 2 hours and 8 minutes consuming media each day, while 5- to 8-year-olds already spend 3 hours and 38 minutes doing the same.
In the United Kingdom, adults spend roughly 7.5 hours looking at screens each day, the IPA reports in its recent survey. Time spent on phones daily (3 hours and 21 minutes) has even outpaced time spent watching TV (3 hours and 16 minutes).
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Heavy tech use doesn’t just harm your relationships. Your mind and ability to focus are at risk, too
Heavy tech use affects you in ways beyond just changing your relationship with other people. It places a huge amount of additional stress on your mind when you switch between different tasks and screens.
Researcher Gloria Mark has found that our attention spans have diminished from 2.5 minutes a couple of decades ago to a measly 40 seconds now. In other words, your ability to stay focused on a specific task, before you switch to, say, checking your phone notification, email, or message, has dropped staggeringly.
In a nutshell, the human brain is built for focusing on one thing at a time and is absolutely abysmal at multitasking. When it is forced to switch attention between different ‘schema,’ it becomes exhausted. Your productivity drops. You become more stressed. You make more mistakes.
A few simple (but not easy) ways to improve your attention span are to create an environment where you can work during your natural peaks of attention and properly focus. The name of the game is minimizing distractions. You should silence the notifications on your phone and computer, and block your social media.
In the meantime, your ability to maintain attention on one thing gets stronger the more you practice it. That might, for example, mean reading long-form content without checking your phone. What’s more, practicing mindfulness several times a week can positively affect your attention, memory, and resilience to stress.
Another recent issue related to over-the-top tech use is linked to artificial intelligence. Specifically, ‘AI brain fry’ is worrying researchers. In short, excessive AI use, rather than leading to greater efficiency, is pushing people to their cognitive limits. The Harvard Business Review stresses that constant task-switching and multitasking thanks to heavy AI tool use lead to mental fatigue, strain, brain fog, slower decision-making, headaches, problems focusing, and a bigger desire to quit.
“Contrary to the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI. Unsurprisingly, workers are finding themselves up against the limits of their cognitive abilities when working this way,” HBR states.
And yet, despite these cognitive downsides, AI use can lead to benefits when it comes to reducing emotional exhaustion. Specifically, when you thoughtfully use AI tools to replace unenjoyable, unpleasant, routine, and repetitive tasks, you can actually improve social connection and motivation, and leave more room for joyful and creative tasks.
Underpinning excessive tech, screen, and AI use is the idea that you are rapidly exhausting your very limited cognitive resources when you constantly switch your focus. In other words, the issue lies not with your smartphone, per se, but with how you allow it to consistently distract you. (If you checked your phone at any point while reading this, you know exactly what we’re talking about here.)
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You are definitely not powerless against the “intimacy famine.” Here’s how to begin taming your bad habits right now
Whether or not you plan to have children, it should concern you if you spend more time on your phone than socializing with your friends in person or being emotionally and physically intimate with your partner. If you prefer only online interactions, you are robbing yourself of emotional depth and stronger connections. Convenience is great, and we can no longer imagine a world without smartphones, but this comes at a steep cost.
The difference between healthy and unhealthy tech use is intent. If you feel in control of your phone use, then there’s no issue. However, if you feel constant FOMO, feel compelled to check notifications, feel anxious when you don’t have your phone with you, keep thinking about your online relationships, escape social awkwardness by taking out your phone, and find that all that scrolling harms your ability to lead a regular life, then you are likely addicted. Heavy smartphone use can worsen your anxiety, stress, depression, and loneliness. And sudden withdrawal can lead to restlessness, irritability, anger, problems sleeping and concentrating, and cravings for tech devices.
Aside from reaching out to a good therapist (which we recommend), here’s what you can realistically do today. For one, get some usable data. Track your phone and screen use, so you see the size of the problem. Then, think about doing the following: cut down on your notifications, make your screen less visually engaging, physically place your phone out of reach so it’s not easy to mindlessly pick it up, put a rubber band on your phone, install some apps that limit screen time, and consider getting a dumb(er) phone.
From personal experience, I can tell you that muting group chats, uninstalling (some!) social media apps, and putting my phone on ‘do not disturb’ mode have given me more breathing room. Putting my phone in another room or in my backpack works great, too. My brain isn’t as fried when I choose when to use my phone, instead of it beckoning me over every time someone decides to send me a spam email or a meme (even if they are hilarious).
In the meantime, proactively schedule chunks of time when you intentionally avoid screens altogether. Start super small and humble, and grow your tolerance for focusing on one activity at a time or being bored without jumping straight to your phone. Complex positive habits take longer to form than simple ones. But roughly speaking, it takes around 2 months to develop a new habit. Use that tech-free time to spend quality time with your partner. Go on an old-school date, rediscover each other, and find new interests. There are tons of opportunities to (re)connect when you look up from your phone and genuinely put in the effort to get to know someone better.
The very unsexy strategy you should pursue is to simply (but not easily) put your phone down. Ignore it for a while. Don’t obsess over it. Put it out of your mind. Spend some quality time with your partner, family, and friends. Now repeat that daily until you change your habits and priorities. Spending less time touching a glowing piece of plastic and glass is the right thing to do for your health, whether you care about global demographics and fertility rates or just want to be happier. Besides, sex is more fun than surfing the internet will ever be.
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