How many times a day do you check your smartphone? For the average American, that number is 52.
According to Deloitte's Global Mobile Survey, 63 percent of respondents said they have tried to limit their smartphone usage, but only around half succeeded in cutting back.
Cal Newport, author of the new book "Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World" and an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, argues that phone use is getting in the way of too much of our lives. The main complaint he hears? People are losing their autonomy.
"This idea that they have to keep going to the phone, more than they think is useful, more than they think is healthy, to the exclusion of things they know are more important," Newport says.
Newport explains that smartphone addiction is "what a psychologist would call a 'moderate behavioral addiction,' which means if you have it around, you're probably going to use it more than is healthy." He says that definition matches many people's current relationship with their phone: the feeling of needing to look at it or have it handy at all times.