Picture this: Audrey Hepburn in a black dress, looking over her shoulder with her eyes wide, and holding... no, not a cigarette holder, but a diamanté encrusted iPhone.

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Not quite the picture you probably had in mind, but undoubtedly a more likely scenario if you transplanted a young Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s into modern life.

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The image, captioned with Hepburn’s famous quote, “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other”, is part of an exhibition by PINS, a London-based artist and clothing designer, titled “No Face like Phone”. It’s a telling body of work exploring the modern relationships we have with mobiles, and the culture surrounding them.

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PINS, whose work is a mixture of bold pop-culture references and Warhol-style colours, says that he was inspired by the subject after a dinner party; “I was just trying to have a conversation with my friend. And she was on her phone, just updating social networks and stuff... I found it a bit rude.” Realising that many others must be experiencing the same, he set about examining phone culture, in an effort to produce an entire body of work dedicated to the subject.

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Alongside Audrey Hepburn, the exhibition, currently at DigitasLBi on Brick Lane in Shoreditch, features other well-known cultural references: from Beyoncé in the video for Telephone to “Girl With the Pearl Phone”, interspersed with pop art style versions of Amber Rose and Kim Kardashian’s most liked Instagram photos. It highlights the ways in which smartphones have wiggled their way into everything we do and see.

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Those mini computers that we carry about with us have become an extension of our very selves, and whether we’re checking Instagram, Facebook or emails, they’re part of our daily lifestyles.

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But what if you were told that the constant need to check your phone was something more than curiosity? Nomophobia, otherwise known as no mobile phone phobia, sounds extreme. But it’s a term coined by the Post Office, following a study by YouGov in 2008, to describe the irrational fear of being separated from your mobile – something that is probably very familiar.

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Lucy Cooper, a London student, doesn’t believe that she is nomophobic, but says that she would be lost without her phone. “I use it to check the weather so I know what to wear, transport so I know how to get somewhere and to contact my friends constantly,” she explains. She admits though, that she would feel worried if she realised she’d left the house without her phone.

 

“Fifty-eight per cent of respondents said that they always felt worried or anxious if they left the house without their smartphone”

 

Cooper is far from alone. In fact, the study conducted by the Post Office showed that even in 2008, 53 per cent of people asked felt panicked when they were without their mobile phone, with a further 14 per cent describing themselves as feeling “desperate”. Today, the addiction has only worsened: in a survey carried out by Pressed, an overwhelming 58 per cent of respondents said that they always felt worried or anxious if they left the house without their smartphone, with a further 30 per cent admitting that they felt this anxiety only sometimes. Only 14 per cent claimed to never feel anxious about leaving their phone at home.

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But nomophobia can have many more effects than just worrying when you’ve forgotten your phone. We’ve all heard the warnings about green light causing problems for switching off at night, and like all lit screens, it’s not great for your eyesight. Often by the evening, Cooper says: “My eyes just feel so tired – and I know it’s from staring at the screen all day.”

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Digital Awareness UK, an online support group, tells youngsters to switch off all technical devices with green light screens (that includes mobiles, laptops, iPods and tablets) an hour and a half before bed, in an effort to sleep and feel better. But as Emma Robertson, who co-founded the company with her sister Charlotte admits, it’s not that easy to convince teens to step away from what is essentially the centre of their social life.

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She says: “Many sleep with their devices either under their pillow or right next to their heads to make sure they don’t miss out on anything. FOMO (fear of missing out) seems to be the biggest culprit.”

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Freya Sheldon, a beauty therapist from Sheffield, says that it’s difficult forcing herself to leave her phone alone: “I constantly flip between the same four social media apps and feel anxious if I haven’t seen every single tweet or Instagram or Snapchat story on my feed.” She identifies with the term "nomophobia", although interestingly, only felt that this might be a problem when she started to consider the detail of her phone usage.

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And it’s this anxiety that Sheldon identifies which is the big problem. Caglar Yildirim is researching the effects of technology on health as part of a PhD programme at Iowa State University. He explains that the development of attachment to technology causes additional everyday stress. He says: “For most young people, having to spend a day without their smartphone is equivalent to being naked all day, and most of them think that their smartphone provides peace of mind. When they do not have that peace of mind, they are likely to feel anxious, stressed, and even unhappy, which adversely affects an individual’s psychological wellbeing.”

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As a result, of course, young people like Sheldon avoid being without their phone wherever possible. “I literally never put my phone down,” she says. “If I’m working, it’s in my pocket on loud so I can hear it and feel it vibrate if it goes off.”

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She estimates that she spends around eight hours a day on her phone, and Lucy Cooper isn’t so far behind, guessing that she spends between four to five hours in total staring at her smartphone screen.

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In fact, our survey revealed that almost 35 per cent of respondents believe that they spend between two and four hours on their phone on an average weekday, with a further 30 per cent admitting to between four and six hours.

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As PINS puts it: “This whole phone thing, it can affect your relationships and health. I’m all about balance of using your phone and having a healthy relationship with anything. It could be smoking, drinking, eating too much food. You need a balance with everything. And phones are just another thing on the list.”

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But it’s the balance that seems to be difficult - it often seems to be all or nothing. Like many high-profile celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Sheldon says that she tried to take some time off from social media after the American Election in November. She was finding that seeing so many distressing statuses and tweets was causing her mental health issues – but the anxiety that she might miss something was more overwhelming.

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“I recently tried to leave Facebook and Twitter for what I had intended to be at least a week, but even after deleting the apps from my phone, I found myself checking my notifications on the websites instead.”

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Yildirim believes that trying to quit suddenly and totally, like Sheldon, is both impossible and pointless. He says: “We cannot go cold turkey and abandon our smartphones. That is not possible. All we need to do is to stop for a moment and reflect on our smartphone use.” He suggests, instead, using meditation or choosing small daily periods, like mealtimes or face-to-face conversations, as an opportunity to step away from technology.

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So perhaps Sheldon admitting that she has a problem is a good first step to recovery. Emma Robertson thinks so: “It’s good for us to question if we are controlling our tech or if our tech is controlling us. Screen-time apps like Realizd can help us see just how much time we’re spending on our mobile devices. Once we have awareness of how much time we’re spending using these devices it’s easier to decide if it’s time to turn off notifications or delete certain apps.”

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For PINS, his exploration of the topic has pushed him to do just that. “I’m fully consciously aware of how much I use my phone now. So much so, I do a no-phone Sundays thing where every Sunday I just switch off, detach myself, and go offline. I think we need to have more switching off time – switching off to switch on.”