Here’s How to Battle Your Smartphone Addiction
There is bad news, but there is also good news
Can you see a smartphone right now?
Is it yours or someone else’s? Where is your smartphone? In your bag? In
your hand? You probably lost it!
If reading that paragraph just made
you a little anxious, then congratulations, you are a human alive today. And if
reading those questions made you palpitate and sweat like a perp in a lineup,
then don’t worry, you’re not alone. And you’re probably not very old, either.
In
a series of polls related to smartphone use released last week, Gallup found that
about half of smartphone users check their phones several times an hour or more
frequently; 81% of people said they keep their phones near them “almost all the
time during waking hours” and 63% do so even when they’re sleeping. The
condition is especially severe among the young, one-in-five of whom cop to
“checking their phone every few minutes.”
While that might elicit a “tsk, tsk”
from grandparents appalled by such behavior, all this checking doesn’t just
come at the cost of neglecting the world around us. Researchers have been
building a body of disheartening-but-fascinating research about the mess of
mutual dependence that is our relationship with our smartphones. They’ve
connected it to anxiety and stress and our increasing state of distraction.
There
is, however, a way we might break the cycle of addiction, even if we all have
to go through our own withdrawal montage.
But
first, the disturbing news. In a 2015 study conducted at the University of Missouri, media researcher Russell Clayton found
evidence that some people feel their phones are part of them—kind of like a leg
or an arm. In a clever ruse involving word search puzzles and a blatant lie
about signal interference, Clayton was able to get a snapshot of about 40
college students’ physiological states when their iPhones started ringing
across the room but they were unable to answer them.
“Their blood pressure and heart rate
increased. Their self-report of anxiety and unpleasantness also increased,”
says Clayton, now an assistant professor at Florida State University. The
students also became worse at doing word search puzzles, suggesting poorer
cognitive performance. Yet his eeriest finding — beyond evidence that future
generations will probably go straight into anaphylactic shock when separated
from their devices — was that people reported a physical lessening of
themselves when they did not have their phones.
“They reported feeling a loss of
identity,” he says. “When objects become possessions, when we use them a lot,
they’re potentially capable of becoming an extension of ourselves.” When
digital natives born today grow up to be toddlers who are crying because a
parent takes their iPad away, Clayton says that could leave us with interesting
questions: “Are they upset because they can’t play their game? Or are upset
because they don’t have the iPad, the object, the possession?”
Perhaps the person who has done the
most work in this field is Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California
State University. Rosen is in the middle of writing a book on our
technology-addled brains. In his research, he’s found that if there’s a phone
around—even if it’s someone else’s phone—its presence tends to make people
anxious and perform more poorly on tasks. These effects, he’s found, become
more acute among heavy users, those people checking their email and social
media every 15 minutes or walking around with their hand tucked snugly around
their phone. In a 2014 study, he separated college
students from their phones. “The heavy users, 10 minutes in they’re already
anxious and their anxiety kept going up and up,” he says. “And who are the
heavy users? They’re the young people.”
Technology tends to “overact” our
brains, draining us of unfettered, daydreaming-type creativity, he says.
Today’s average college student, a member of the first generation to really
grow up digitally native, now focuses and attends to one thing for about three
to five minutes before feeling the need to switch their attention to something
else, he says: “It makes us very tired. It makes us very miserable. It
overloads our brains. … It is not good for us.” In his work, Rosen has referred
to these gadgets by using an acronym for Wireless Mobile Devices — or WMDs, for
short.
It might seem like going cold turkey
is the best approach, but Rosen says that taking kids’ phones away or other
forms of digital detox—like going away for a week to a place with no
signal—aren’t sustainable solutions. “The real world comes back and crashes
in,” he says of kids whose parents separate them from their devices. “And then
they realize they have 400 emails, they have 30 text messages and they’ve got
100 posts from Facebook friends that they have to go back and like and comment
on. So taking the phone away or restricting them is only going to create more
anxiety and not really solve the problem.”
The good news is that Rosen does have
a plan: weaning off devices bit by bit and making a public statement that
you’re going to do so. This second part is key. Only if you’ve warned your
parents and friends that they shouldn’t take it personally when you don’t text
them back or like their picture right away, he says, will you be able to
actually relax, no longer in fear of offending anyone who expects you to be on all
the time. Meanwhile, you must wage an internal battle against your own
FOMO.
“You announce to the world that
you’re only going to check your phone once a half hour,” he says, “and then you
allow yourself a minute or two every half hour to check in, return a call, text
back, and then turn it off and put it away.” Then perhaps get bold and go up to
an hour. Then perhaps two hours, in an attempt to eventually make the phone
less like the limb it has become and more like the really cool toaster it could
be.
“A lot of it,” Rosen says, “is
self-induced anxiety.”
- Katy Steinmetz
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