If you are looking for the year phone overuse became a problem, there isn't one. It built up in stages over roughly two decades, and each stage made the one before it harder to ignore.
Here is the timeline, with what the research says at each point.
Did the mechanism exist before phones?
Yes, by about fifty years.
In 1957, Ferster and Skinner's Schedules of Reinforcement described variable-ratio schedules, where a reward arrives unpredictably. They produced the highest and most persistent response rates. Later work found that dopamine neurons respond most to uncertain rewards.
None of that was about phones. It describes why checking for something that might be there is hard to stop, and a feed is built almost exactly that way.
Source: Ferster & Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement (1957). Fiorillo, Tobler & Schultz, Science, 2003.
When did social media addiction start?
It started when social platforms became something ordinary people used daily, in the mid-2000s.
Facebook was founded in 2004 and opened to the general public in 2006, the same year it introduced the News Feed, which turned the site into a stream that refreshes. Other platforms followed quickly. This is plain observation rather than research.
How did phone addiction start?
With the smartphone, from 2007.
The iPhone launched in 2007 and the App Store arrived in 2008. Social media stopped being a place you went to and became something that came with you, in a pocket, at all hours. The gap between wanting to check and checking shrank to a few seconds.
A feed that needs a computer is a habit. A feed that is always within reach is a different thing.
When did researchers start noticing?
Around 2009 and 2010, once the phone had been in people's hands for a couple of years.
Two findings from that period are worth knowing:
- In 2009, Ophir, Nass and Wagner found that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on task-switching and filtering tests than light ones. This was an association, so it cannot say which came first.
- In 2010, Rothberg and colleagues reported in the BMJ that 68% of surveyed hospital staff had felt phantom vibrations, the sense that a phone buzzed when it hadn't.
Source: Ophir, Nass & Wagner, PNAS, 2009. Rothberg et al., BMJ, 2010.
When did it start to look like the phone itself was the problem?
By 2017, when the question moved from how people use phones to what a phone does just by being nearby.
Ward, Duke, Gneezy and Bos found that people did best on working-memory and fluid-intelligence tests with their phone in another room and worst with it on the desk, even when it was silenced and unused. The effect was larger for people who were more phone-dependent. Later replications found smaller or mixed effects, so treat it as one study rather than settled fact.
Later, in 2021, observational work by Heitmayer and Lahlou found that about 89% of smartphone interactions were started by the user, not prompted by a notification.
Source: Ward et al., Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017. Heitmayer & Lahlou, Computers in Human Behavior, 2021.
What changed with short-form video?
The feed no longer needed you to choose anything.
Short-form video apps reached a worldwide audience in the late 2010s, with TikTok going global around 2018. Where earlier feeds asked you to scroll, these play one clip after another and the next one starts on its own. Again that is plain observation, but the research that followed is more pointed than anything before it.
In 2025, Nguyen and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 71 studies and about 98,299 people. Heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control. It was also linked to more stress and anxiety. These are correlations, so the studies cannot show that the videos caused the effects.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2025.
Has anyone shown that cutting back helps?
A randomised trial has, and it came late.
In 2025, Castelo and colleagues published in PNAS Nexus: 467 participants had mobile internet blocked on their phones for two weeks. Sustained attention, mental health and subjective well-being all improved, and the attention gain was comparable to about ten years of age-related decline. Calls and texts still worked. More nightly sleep was one of the mechanisms.
That is the useful part of the history. The problem built up slowly, but the trial that tested stepping back found measurable change in two weeks.
Source: Castelo et al., PNAS Nexus, 2025.
So when did it become a problem?
Depends on what you mean by problem:
- As a mechanism: 1957, when the reward pattern was described.
- As a product: 2006 to 2008, when feeds met the smartphone.
- As a research topic: 2009 to 2010, with findings on multitasking and phantom vibrations.
- As a measurable effect on attention: 2017 onwards, and most clearly in the large 2025 meta-analysis.
It is also worth saying what this history does not show. The research above links heavy use to worse outcomes and shows a two-week break can help. It does not prove that everyone who scrolls a lot is addicted, and none of it is a verdict on you.
What can you do with this?
If you want to test it for yourself, borrow the logic of the trial rather than the whole thing.
- Block the apps in your phone's own settings, at the times you scroll most.
- Notice who starts the check. Most phone checks are started by the user rather than a notification, so it is worth noticing what you were doing just before you reached.
- Let the first urge pass without reaching. See what happens.
If you want company for that first gap, Boredom's Daily Reset is three guided minutes placed inside it. Everything else you can do for free.
The short version
Phone and social media overuse did not arrive on one date. The reward mechanism was known in 1957, the feed met the pocket in 2007, and the research followed from 2009 through to a large meta-analysis in 2025.
The most useful fact in the whole timeline is the last one: when people in a trial stepped back, two weeks was enough to measure the difference.