If you answered yes to many or all of these questions, you may be addicted to your smartphone, or at least have a dependent relationship that may be worth addressing.

How does this relationship begin? A smartphone addiction could be explained by the idea of 'contingent communication'. Our first experience of contingent communication happens when we are babies. You cried when you were hungry, and your caregivers - hopefully - responded by feeding you. This effective and satisfying response reinforces your attachment to your caregivers. These call-and-response behaviours quickly become deeply rooted in our psychological networks, and the same thing is happening in our use of smartphones. We put out a message and, if we continually and quickly get a response, we form an attachment based on expectation of this happening each time we use our phones.

How can an attachment develop into an addiction? Rather than being comparable to an addiction to alcohol or drugs, a phone addiction is best understood as being similar to a gambling addiction. Both smartphone addiction and gambling addiction are largely rooted in the neurological impact of unpredictability. Our compulsion to check our phones is driven by the systems that govern expectation, anticipation and reward in the brain. Receiving new Instagram followers, Facebook likes, or texts from someone we like floods the brain with dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical associated with reward and is therefore pleasurable, so it's simple to understand that we would want more of it. So how do we go about chasing it down? By sustaining and ultimately increasing our smartphone use and time on social media, or wherever it is that we get our hit.

Dopamine and reward is a facet of all addiction, but it is uncertainty that connects phone addiction to gambling. We don't know if that vibration signals good news or bad news, so we always go back to check, in case it's the former. We don't know whether the email we just received needs answering as soon as possible, or what opportunities we may be missing out on. Not knowing what we might have missed on Facebook or Instagram creates excitement and anticipation in the brain, and we are compelled to log in and check, in the same way an individual with a gambling addiction may be compelled to throw the dice. We seemingly can't get enough of our social networks, emails, the Internet in general, because we cannot prescribe a predictable pattern to it. The more unpredictable something is, the more addictive it can be. This type of psychological hook goes some way to understanding the complicated nature of interpersonal emotionally manipulative or abusive relationships also: the reward can be so intense when it does arrive, that we are compelled to wait until we feel the same reward again, and tend to minimise the time and behaviour in between as it doesn't fit into the pattern we wish to see.

A further comparison with gambling involves a network called the 'Ludic Loop'. The ludic loop is something that slot machines have perfected, and we also see it happening with smartphone use. By the time you have checked Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram, it's time to check Facebook again - and on and on. This loop lulls you into a pattern which feels peaceful, and time elapses beyond your conscious estimation.

Our relationship with our smartphone, though potentially damaging, may be rooted in something intrinsically human and essentially positive - particularly in terms of social media. As explored in Psychology Today, our habitual public updates, sharing and online conversation are arguably driven by a desire for connection. We are deeply social beings, and social networks provide a platform that has the potential to satisfy our need to be seen and to be heard. A lot of how we feel, think, and behave is driven by how we see ourselves through the eyes of other people. How much this means to us is not something to be disdainful about - it's fundamental to our experience and our evolutionary make up. 'Theory of mind' is integral to normal cognitive development in early life; it's this that enables us to see through the eyes of other people, to understand their behaviours and speculate about their inner world. It is this, therefore, that enables us to be empathetic, to behave considerately, and to build and maintain healthy relationships. As our cognitive development is largely formulated around other people, it's in many ways the most normal thing in the world to seek validation and self-worth from our peers. As anyone who has felt high over the number of likes on their photo, or despaired over not being acknowledged will know, however, this can become a harmful cycle.

The ease of communicating with others can also potentially damage our relationships with those in our direct personal circle. We feel offended and/or anxious if our WhatsApp message is sent, received, and read with no immediate response. We are more curt and less polite with our colleagues, friends, and family because it costs us nothing to send a text or email; there are no practical obstacles to communicating our thoughts and wants and so we direct them towards other people without pause for thought. Many of us feel immense pressure to respond to our messages quickly, leading to anxiety when we forget to for a matter of hours or days, but many of us exert the same pressure on those around us and therefore encourage the same pattern.

You may be reading this article and thinking, 'that's all well and good, but the thing is, I need my phone, otherwise I couldn't possibly get as much done in the time I do'. This encapsulates how a lot of us feel about our smartphones, but the idea that they enable us to get more done could be a fallacy. Smartphones, which empower us to deal with multiple demands at once, to answer emails while we're doing another job, can make us feel like multi-tasking heroes.  According to Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT interviewed in the Guardian, the brain is not designed to multi-task. What we are really doing is switching from one task to another very quickly, and incurring a cognitive loss every time we do so. Multi-tasking increases the levels of the stress hormone cortisol and adrenaline in the body, increasing anxiety and leading to impulsive or aggressive behaviours. Smartphones also negatively affect our ability to concentrate. Research has shown that knowledge that an email or notification is sitting unattended to on your phone reduces your IQ by ten points when trying to focus on a different task.

What can you do to build a healthier relationship with your smartphone?

• Turn off all notifications that aren't possibly urgent
• Cut down use on most used apps: if Instagram is your cat-nip, be diligent and stick to checking it once a day
• Dedicate yourself to maintaining phone-free zones in life and in your home: during dinner, when engaged with social events, in the bedroom. Use your phone as an alarm? Buy an alarm clock
• Replace phone habits with something else: pick up a book, write a few words in a journal, listen to some music, go for a walk, do some stretching
• If you feel unable to take any of these steps, it might be worth talking to someone about it. A therapist can help you explore deep-rooted issues around anxiety, self-worth, and addictive behaviours that might be keeping you stuck in a problematic relationship with your smartphone