I’ll call it compassionate surveillance. It’s what I do when I’m worried about a loved one who is on the move. I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Be they travelling by plane, train or automobile, I will keep tabs on them. I can’t help myself. If my daughters – who are highly competent grownups – make a long car journey, by means of some smartphone hocus-pocus I’ll know where they are. I should point out that this is done with consent: they know that I know where they are. In my mum’s case, this is less true, if only because she has long given up trying to make head or tail of location sharing and other such sorcery.

I cross my heart and hope to die when I swear to you that I only do this when they are in transit. Honestly, I never look up where they are on a night out or whatever. That would be weird – or weirder, anyway. But when they get in a car, I get the fear. The catastrophising begins. It’s a big world and their car is small. A million other cars, buses and lorries share the roads on which they are motoring. In this, as in all things, overthinking is calamitous. The more you think about what could go wrong, the more your imagination obliges with a steady stream of ghastly possibilities.

The answer is simple: stop being an idiot, stop torturing yourself, stop thinking about it and think about something else. Sometimes, I achieve this. More often, I don’t. I resist the temptation to check the tech for as long as possible, but invariably I give in. I’ve yet to find anything absorbing enough to distract me from the paranoia. I can be sitting at a football match, in a live radio studio, in an intense conversation, and that will work only for a while before a sick feeling strikes and I’m wondering if my loved ones are all right.

The irony, of course, is that if I had no means of checking, I’d barely be dwelling on it. Just like in the olden days, when there were no mobiles and there would be one phone call home a week and all worries would have to be parked up and set aside until then. Ignorance was bliss. Information can be the opposite.

I know this, but before long I’m tracking them anyway. They’re reduced to an avatar on my phone screen, moving, it seems to me, with alarming speed. They’re often on a route I know well, so before long I’m basically in the car with them, worrying about the road narrowing here, a nasty bend coming up there and so on. Before long, I can’t take it any more and I leave them to it, before checking in again – and again.

Flights are worse. I’ve got an app, obviously, so I can see the plane they’re on and everything about that plane. So much to worry about. Ten years old? Eh?! Is that even legal? And what do you mean it’s already been to Nice and back today? Doesn’t it need to have a rest, cool down, or something?

Then it takes off, into alarmingly crowded skies. When you zoom out on the app, you can barely see the ground for all the planes! When you zoom in to track the metal tube conveying your loved ones, at great speed, at thirtysomething thousand feet, it’s scarier still. Other planes head towards them. Frantically, I check an incomer’s altitude. It’s going to miss. That’s a relief. Probably couldn’t have informed air traffic control in time anyway.

Eventually, obviously, it lands (and I can barely write that for fear I’m tempting fate). Relief. And I wonder if this is what it’s really all about – as much as I worry for loved ones, perhaps I’m just slaking a thirst for tension and the subsequent release from it. Thrill-seeking, in other words; needing the endless cycle of fear and relief just to feel alive. It can’t be good for you.

• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist

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