© iStock Sorry textWe spend an average of three hours each day fixated on our phones. And all that quality time with those tiny screens, MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle toldTech Insider, comes at a hefty price: our empathy and solitude.

The author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation told the publication our loss of empathy isn't just some silly side effect of nonstop texting. "It's that you're not getting practice in the stuff that gives you empathy," she explained.

When it comes to saying "I'm sorry," for example, face-to-face apologies lend themselves to genuine empathy development. "I soften because I get to see that you're genuinely upset, [and] you get to see that I have compassion for you," Turkle said. "But if you type 'I'm sorry' and hit Send, nothing happens."

In other words, while texting an apology isn't exactly a "toxic gesture," she said, it does strip you of your ability to train and strengthen your empathy muscles.

Solitude, too, is constructive over time—but our constant connection to the world and our friends through our phones keeps us from getting comfortable by ourselves.

"We literally turn being alone into a problem that we want technology to solve," Turkle said. "We use technology to solve it by giving us something on a screen to take our attention off ourselves." There's panic in loneliness, she said, and that's tragic because solitude helps us establish a sense of self and intrapersonal comfort that aids us other outside relationships.

Turkle explained, "Solitude is the capacity to be alone with yourself, to gather yourself. … [It's] where the knitting together of our stable autobiographical past happens. Those moments of solitude and boredom are where you have an opportunity to knit together who you are, what your history has been."

The lesson, then, Turkle said, is that we must put down our smartphones in order to be empathetic, confident people. "You need to be able to sit with your own thoughts and not pull out your phone in order to become the kind of person who can be comfortable and good with people," she said.