In an essay published last week, the Princess of Wales said that smartphones had become a “source of constant distraction, fragmenting our focus” and leading to “an epidemic of disconnection”.

But even the man who co-authored that essay has admitted that he often gets “lost” in his iPhone and he finds himself mindlessly scrolling at the breakfast table.

Dr Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard School of Medicine, said: “Sometimes my wife Jennifer and I will come to the kitchen in the morning and we’ll realise that she’s looking at her email and I’m on my phone checking the news and we haven’t looked at each other.

“We haven’t even said ‘good morning’ and we have to stop and put the screens away and really just pay attention.”

Robert Waldinger in a suit sitting on a chair against a background of yellow and blue patterned tiles.

Dr Robert Waldinger

ISABEL PERMUY/ALAMY

Waldinger, who directs the longest-running study on adult wellbeing, said it was unrealistic to expect people to give up their devices entirely.

“I feel like that’s a great aspiration. I wish we could do that but I think that’s just not realistic, given where we’ve gone as a society — but we can protect the time that is precious to us,” he said.

Waldinger, 74, has social media accounts on several platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, mainly used to promote his Zen Buddhist beliefs.

His essay with Catherine, which was published on Thursday, sets out how a person’s ability to form connections is developed at an early age, and that excessive scrolling harms that faculty.

Titled The Power of Human Connection in a Distracted World, it was written over the course of ten days. Waldinger, who lives in Massachusetts, and Catherine exchanged dozens of emails and wrote five drafts.

“It was fun. It is a pleasure to work with thoughtful people and what was clear was her genuine passion for these issues,” he said.

The pair also argued that parental inattentiveness was causing long-term damage to children’s health and happiness. “When we check our phones during conversations, scroll through social media during family dinners or respond to emails while playing with our children, we’re not just being distracted, we are withdrawing the basic form of love that human connection requires,” the essay concludes.

Waldinger first met Catherine at a conference in November 2023 organised by her Shaping Us campaign, which highlights the importance of early childhood experiences, and which she has described as her “life’s work”.

Harvard’s study, which began in 1938, made the groundbreaking discovery in the 1980s that good relationships with friends, family and partners keep people much healthier into their old age. Loneliness, on the other hand, can make people physically ill. A TED talk he gave on the subject in 2016 has been watched almost 80 million times.

Waldinger said parents could be “really frightened” by mobile phones, but urged them not to overreact. “They think, ‘I need to be connected with my child every moment of the day’. Well, I grew up in a time when there were no such things and we all survived just fine,” he said.

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Amid the moral panic over our unwillingness to put down our digital devices, there is some hope that young people are finding ways to develop those crucial relationships through the internet.

“There are more and more young people who are not out in the real world very much,” he said. “They are mostly in the digital world but many of them say that they’ve built communities there, online. We don’t know what that means yet, if your whole emotional life is invested in a group of people who you’ve never actually met in person, but it’s a fascinating question.”

For now, Waldinger’s advice is simple. “Instead of throwing away our phones, find ways to manage them that can make a difference in how healthy we are and, ultimately, how connected we are to one another.”

He recommends setting up guardrails to help to reduce time spent staring at screens. Dozens of apps have been developed to cut back on so-called doomscrolling, by blocking social media after ten minutes or during certain hours of the day.

It is, he argues, part of a wider problem. Although the advent of the internet “accelerated” our isolation, Waldinger said it was a trend long before social media. “We realised in our study that when the television was introduced to living rooms in the 1950s it coincided with people stopping going out or joining clubs. This isn’t just about the digital world.”