HELLO. My name is Damian and I’m a mobile-phone addict. I am here today to face the truth about my condition and hope that by speaking out I can help others to overcome their own problems.

The casual observer probably couldn’t detect anything wrong with me. I have a respectable appearance and my behaviour in public isn’t shocking or conspicuous. I hadn’t even realised myself that I was a mobile phonoholic, until the past few days. But I have just spent two of those days conducting an experiment that has revealed the awful reality. I have suffered mentally and physically. And my experience has convinced me that I am only one of millions of fellow addicts. You may well be one yourself.

I have just attempted to live my life without a mobile phone. I was one of four people asked to eschew my phone for two days. Russell Crowe was not officially part of our group, but maybe he was trying a similar thing in a New York hotel this week. If he had used his mobile, rather than the hotel phone, to call his wife in Sydney he might have been able to secure a connection and wouldn’t have been so enraged that he (allegedly) threw a phone at a clerk and ended up handcuffed in a Manhattan court.

Mobile phones have been the biggest agent of change in the daily behaviour of Britons in the past decade. Today there are more than 55 million mobile phone subscribers in Britain, a huge leap from less than 10 million users in 1997. As the size of the handsets has diminished their influence has grown, altering the speed and frequency of our communication with each other, quickening the pace of decisionmaking and altering radically the way we plan our working and social lives.

As the coverage of mobile phones has extended, so the world has shrunk; now it has been announced that we will soon even be able to use them on the London Underground. There will be nowhere beyond their reach (and, even as an addict, I dread this. The only thing worse than a mobile phone train bore will surely be someone exposing their sweaty armpits to lift their phone to their ear and yabber: “ ’ello darlin’, I’m underground.. . . . I said I’ M UNDER-GROUND! Amazin’ innit?”).

Switching it off at the beginning of Day 1 was strange. For the past few years I have done this only when boarding an aircraft. Even on holiday — and this may strike you as rather sad — I put the phone on silent and annoy my wife by checking it at least every few hours.

Dorothy Rowe, a clinical psychologist, tells me that this sort of behaviour is consistent with extroverts “who need reassurance that other people are thinking of them. Your degree of self-confidence will determine how much you worry about it.” Worry about it? Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I check only out of idle curiosity. I’m not a needy control freak or anything.

I should have left the phone at home, or at least put it in a drawer for two days. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that, so I left it sitting on my desk. For the first few hours of abstinence I kept involuntarily picking it up and looking at the display to see if I had any messages or had missed a call, only to see that it was, of course, switched off.

When I had got used to the fact that it was off, I still picked it up, turned it over in my hand and fiddled with it, like a smoker fidgeting with a packet of cigarettes. I realised that I had a whole routine of nervous tics involving my phone and that these were exacerbated by my desire to use it. I took these to be the physical effects of undergoing the process of withdrawal.

My 40-minute walk home at the end of the day is normally a time for making calls, mostly to friends or family. Now that I was banned from doing this the phone felt as if it was torching a hole in my pocket. I was desperate to use it. My fingers twitched.

These two days were mostly office-bound and I didn’t need to use my phone to do my job. I can’t imagine how I would have been able to operate if I had been out on a story. Like anyone working on the hoof away from the office the phone is glued to my ear and I can make and receive dozens of calls a day.

How did we ever work without mobile phones? I dimly recall the beginning of my career, more than a dozen years ago, constantly searching for phone boxes, laboriously leaving messages and placing hourly check calls to my editors.

Many mobile calls we make in our private lives are certainly unnecessary. But the convenience of a phone is undeniable. I wasted 15 minutes trying to locate an address in my car because I couldn’t call and ask for directions. I also bought the wrong skin cream for my son because I couldn’t make a call home from Boots.