When the alarm on my phone starts to screech each weekday morning at around quarter past seven, I reach over, bleary-eyed, to switch it off and then, without fail, I succumb to the urge to scroll.

Twitter, Instagram, email, WhatsApp – within moments of waking, I’m bombarded with information: sad news story, a meme, the holiday photos of someone I went to school with and haven’t seen in more than a decade. And, of course, reminders of everything I need to do over the coming 12 hours or so.

Surely starting the day with this onslaught of stimuli can’t be healthy, and yet I’m far from alone in kicking each morning off in this way. In 2013, a study found that 80% of smartphone users reached for their phone within 15 minutes of waking, and bear in mind that was 10 years ago, when we were all still using chunky borders on Instagram and updating our Facebook statuses. Our phones have surely become an even bigger part of our lives since then.

It’s not just first thing in the morning that digital dependency can be a problem. You might find that your work-life boundaries have been blurred thanks to a steady stream of work-related WhatsApps lighting up your home screen when you’re off the clock. You might feel compelled to check your work emails last thing at night – even though part of you knows that you’ll spend the next few hours mulling any particularly stress-inducing messages over again and again, rather than sleeping. Or maybe you just feel under pressure to respond to missives from your friends almost instantly, because they’ll keep assailing you with memes until you do so.

Need better digital boundaries? These are 7 expert-approved ways to improve your relationship with your phone