Breaking Up....With Your Phone

Do you occasionally spend more time with your phone than intended? Do you scroll without any sense of direction? Do you find yourself communicating more with people via your phone, rather than in real life? Do you keep your phone switched on in bed? Do you tend to stop what you’re doing so you can respond to something on your phone?

If you answer “yes” to questions like these, chances are you’re addicted to your phone.

This may seem harmless and common enough, but in truth, all that time spent staring at the phone screen is not healthy. Not only will constantly using a smartphone will prevent from being aware of what’s happening around you. Much more seriously, these phones are addictive because they are designed to be that way. Using them for a little bit is fine but letting your phone usage accumulate can become a big problem.

Would you agree that, if you made a decision to “break up with your phone”, you wouldn’t know how to get the most out of all that free time you’ll find yourself with?

Whichever way you look today you’ll most likely see people- including children – glued to their phones.

This is not just an anecdote. There is clear data. The average American checks his or her phone an average of 47 times each day. In the 18-24 age bracket, this number shoots up to a whooping 82 times per day. This means Americans spend and average of 4 hours a day with their phones. That’s 28 hours per week, essentially the same thing as having a fairly busy part-time job!

Most of the time on the phone is spent on social media – which relies on the presence of a certain hormone in the brain called dopamine. When dopamine is released, it attaches to pleasure receptors in the brain and we experience pleasure. When a specific activity, such as looking at social media, causes dopamine to be released, we engage with it more often.

The downside to dopamine, however, is that it can also generate undesirable addictions and cravings.

Dopamine Labs, which creates algorithms for social media apps, claims each algorithm is designed to trigger a dopamine release in the brain of the individual user. That way, they’ll keep using their phones and continue interacting with the specific app for longer periods of time and the user becomes hooked.

You may get on your phone to make a phone call or send a text and an ad, link or pop-up may appear on your screen. Before you know it, you’re surfing the web or checking emails, rather than doing what you intended.

Phones can interfere with your short-term memory

Every time you glance at your phone, your short-term memory is prevented from retaining information about what’s going on in the real world. After all, the working memory can only keep track of a few things at the same time. Good luck remembering who you just met at a networking party if you’re receiving a stream of notifications via social media.

Not only do you not need your phone in bed, you should try to avoid it in the hours before going to bed as well. It may surprise you to know that sleep disruption, as caused by phones, can lead to chronic fatigue. This can result in more severe illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease.

If you decide you want to reduce your phone usage, there are tracking apps like Moment or Offtime that can record how often you look at your phone, and the amount of time you spend on your phone each day.

Breaking up with your phone could, for instance, give you the opportunity to learn a new language, or to spend quality time with loved ones. The choice is yours.

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