https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/innovation-technology/smartphones-killing-globe/

The most obvious example is all the people who are killed on our roads, not just because they were the ones stupidly looking at their phones while driving – Australians now believe it is the main reason for our rising road toll, with 32% of drivers admitting to reading text messages while driving, according to the Community Attitudes to Road Safety 2013 Survey Report – but because they ambled, zombie-like, into traffic while posting on Instagram.

The number of pedestrians killed on US roads has risen by a staggering 51% since 2009. In 2017, pedestrian fatalities in Australia jumped by 20% in a year, with police blaming the stupidity of smartphones.

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The fact is, we are, as a species, becoming addicted to both the dopamine hits of satisfaction that our smartphones give us hundreds of times a day, while being simultaneously assaulted by the dangerous levels of cortisol they send coursing through our bodies.

That combination is affecting everything from the way we sleep to our attention span, our memory, our self-esteem, decision-making skills and our physical health. You’re probably aware that many apps, and phones themselves, are designed to be habit forming. Those Likes on Facebook and Instagram are designed to trigger happy chemicals in our brains, much the way poker machines do, and thus to make us want to keep checking them, endlessly.

No less an authority than Google noted in a report that: “Mobile devices loaded with social media, email and news apps” create “a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress”.