What is your phone doing to your soul?

You reach for your phone without deciding to. You open it to follow the Bible reading in church and find yourself checking your WhatsApp instead. You open a new message and surface 20 minutes later from a blur of “breaking news”, videos of performing sheep, and a fog of inconsequential information about other people’s lives.

And yes, you find it hard to visit the loo without checking your phone at the same time…

So what has gone wrong? Although we use the term "addiction" in the title of this series of articles, a better phrase for what many of us experience when we behave in this way is compulsive digital distraction.