Screen Time Self-Assessment
Answer 10 honest questions to discover your relationship with technology. No judgment, just awareness.
How often do you check your phone within 10 minutes of waking up?
Do you feel anxious when your phone battery is low or you've left it at home?
How often do you pick up your phone without a specific reason?
Do you use your phone during meals with others?
How often do you scroll social media or news apps when you have a free moment?
Have you ever lost track of time scrolling and felt bad about it?
Do you check your phone during conversations with people?
How's your sleep routine with screens?
Can you sit and do nothing for 5 minutes without reaching for a device?
How would you describe your overall relationship with technology?
What this quiz is, and what it isn’t
It is ten self-report questions scored on a simple scale, and it is not a diagnostic instrument. Neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11 recognises phone addiction as a condition, and the research scales that do exist define the thing differently enough that the estimate moves with the instrument. A systematic review of 41 studies covering 41,871 children and young people put median prevalence of “problematic smartphone usage” at 23.3%, with most studies landing between 10% and 30%, and its authors’ own conclusion was that an accepted and validated diagnostic definition is needed before anyone can reliably identify who is affected. That review covers young people rather than adults, so it does not put a number on you either. A score here is a prompt for reflection, not a finding.
It also inherits the weakness of everything self-reported. When researchers compared people’s own estimates of their media use against device logs, the two tracked each other only loosely, and errors ran in both directions. If you want a measurement rather than an impression, your phone’s own dashboard is the better instrument, and the calculator turns that figure into something easier to picture.
What it is actually asking about
The questions probe four things, and they are worth separating because they respond to different fixes:
- Reflexive reaching. Picking up the phone without deciding to. This is the most common pattern and the one that responds to friction rather than to blocking.
- Tolerance for stillness. Whether a queue, a lift or a gap between tasks feels like something to fill. This one predicts how hard the first few days of any change will be.
- Displacement. Whether the phone is taking time from sleep, meals, conversations or work you meant to do. This is the axis where the cost is real regardless of the hours.
- Felt loss of control. The gap between what you intend and what you do. A high score here with low hours still matters; low hours are not reassurance if the time does not feel chosen.
What to do with the result
The bands are deliberately coarse, and the boundary between two of them is not meaningful. What is meaningful is which questions you answered at the high end, because that points at a different first step. Mostly reflexive reaching suggests adding a delay before the apps you open without thinking. Mostly displacement suggests moving the phone out of one specific place, usually the bedroom, rather than trying to use it less overall.
If a single change is what you are after, the blocker finder narrows the tools by what you are actually trying to stop, and the challenges are structured around the displacement problem rather than the total. If the felt loss of control is the axis you scored highest on, and it has been costing you something for months, the line between a habit and a problem is worth reading before any of them. Nothing you answer here is stored or sent anywhere; the scoring runs in your browser and is gone when you close the tab.