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Tips for Breaking Free of Compulsive Smartphone Use
While a smartphone, tablet or computer can be a hugely productive tool, compulsive use of these devices can interfere with your daily life, work and relationships. When you spend more time on social media or playing games than you do interacting with real people, or you can't stop yourself from repeatedly checking texts, emails, news feeds, websites or apps — even when it has negative consequences in your life — it may be time to reassess your technology use. By learning about the signs and symptoms of smartphone and Internet addiction and the ways to break free of the habit, you can better balance your life, online and off.
What is smartphone addiction?
Smartphone addiction, sometimes colloquially known as nomophobia (fear of being without a mobile phone), is often fuelled by an internet-overuse problem or internet-addiction disorder. After all, it's rarely the phone or tablet itself that creates the compulsion, but rather the games, apps and online worlds it connects you to. Smartphone addiction can encompass a variety of impulse-control problems, including the following.
Virtual Relationships
Addiction to social networking, dating apps, texting and messaging can extend to the point where virtual, online friends become more important than real-life relationships. Everyone's seen the couples sitting together in a coffee shop or restaurant, ignoring each other and engaging with their smartphones instead. While the internet can be a great place to meet new people, reconnect with old friends or even start romantic relationships, online relationships are not a healthy substitute for real-life interactions. Online friends tend to exist in a bubble, not subject to the same demands or stresses as messy real-world relationships. Since few real-life relationships can compete with these neat, virtual relationships, you may find yourself spending more and more time with online friends, retreating from your real world family and friends. Compulsive use of dating apps can change your focus to short-term hook-ups instead of developing long-term relationships.
Online Compulsions
Online compulsions, such as gaming, gambling, stock trading, online shopping or bidding on auction sites like eBay can often lead to financial and job-related problems. While gambling addiction has been a well-documented problem for years, the availability of internet gambling has made gambling far more accessible. Compulsive stock trading or online shopping can be just as financially and socially damaging. eBay addicts may wake up at strange hours in order to be online for the last remaining minutes of an auction. You may purchase things you don't need and can't afford just to experience the excitement of placing the winning bid.
Information Overload
Compulsive web surfing, watching videos, playing games or checking news feeds can lead to lower productivity at work or school and isolate you for hours at a time. All this compulsive use of the internet and smartphone apps can cause you to neglect other aspects of your life, from real-world relationships to hobbies and social pursuits.
Cybersex Addiction
Compulsive use of internet pornography, sexting, nude-swapping, adult chat rooms or messaging services can impact negatively on your real-life intimate relationships and overall emotional health. While online pornography and cybersex addictions are types of sexual addiction, the internet makes it more accessible, relatively anonymous and very convenient. It's easy to spend hours on a smartphone or tablet engaging in fantasies impossible in real life. Excessive use of sex and dating apps that facilitate casual sex can make it more difficult to develop long-term intimate relationships or damage an existing relationship.
While you can experience these impulse-control problems with a laptop or even desktop computer, the size and convenience of smartphones and tablets means that people can take them just about anywhere and gratify their compulsions. In fact, studies suggest that most people are rarely ever more than five steps away from their smartphones. Many people admit to regularly using them in theatres, while driving, during religious services, business meetings, kids' school performances, in the shower and even during sex — so what causes the obsession with these always-connected devices?
Smartphones, tablets or the internet can be addictive because their use, just like the use of drugs and alcohol, can trigger the release of the brain chemical dopamine and alter mood. Just like using drugs and alcohol, you can rapidly build up tolerance so that it takes more and more time in front of these screens to derive the same pleasurable reward.
Effects of Smartphone Addiction
While heavy phone use can often be symptomatic of other underlying problems — such as stress, anxiety, depression or loneliness — it can also exacerbate these problems. If you use your smartphone as a "security blanket" to relieve feelings of anxiety, loneliness or awkwardness in social situations, for example, you'll succeed only in cutting yourself off further from the people around you. Staring at your phone will deny you the face-to-face interactions that can help to meaningfully connect you to others, alleviate anxiety and boost your mood. In other words, the remedy you're choosing for your anxiety (engaging with your smartphone), is actually making your anxiety worse.
Smartphone or Internet addiction can also negatively impact your life by doing the following:
- Increasing Loneliness and Depression: While it may seem that losing yourself online will temporarily make feelings such as loneliness, depression and boredom evaporate into thin air, it can actually make you feel even worse. A 2014 study found a correlation between high social media usage and depression and anxiety. Users, especially teens, tend to compare themselves unfavourably with their peers on social media, promoting feelings of loneliness and depression (Pantic, 2014).
- Fuelling Anxiety: One researcher found that the mere presence of a phone in a workplace tends to make people more anxious and perform poorly on given tasks. The heavier the phone user, the greater the anxiety experienced.
- Increasing Stress: Using a smartphone for work often means work bleeds into your home and personal life. You feel the pressure to always be on, never out of touch from work. This need to continually check and respond to email can contribute to higher stress levels and even burnout.
- Exacerbating Attention Deficit Disorders: The constant stream of messages and information from a smartphone can overwhelm the brain and make it impossible to focus attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes without feeling compelled to move on to something else.
- Diminishing Your Ability to Concentrate and Think Deeply or Creatively: The persistent buzz, ping or beep of your smartphone can distract you from important tasks, slow your work, and interrupt those quiet moments that are so crucial to creativity and problem-solving. Instead of ever being alone with your thoughts, you're now always online and connected.
- Disturbing Your Sleep: Excessive smartphone use can disrupt your sleep, which can have a serious impact on your overall mental health. It can impact your memory, affect your ability to think clearly, and reduce your cognitive and learning skills.
- Encouraging Self-absorption: A UK study found that people who spend a lot of time on social media are more likely to display negative personality traits such as narcissism (Pearson & Hussain, 2015). Snapping endless selfies, posting all your thoughts or details about your life can create an unhealthy self-centeredness, distancing you from real-life relationships and making it harder to cope with stress.
Reference:
Smith, M., Robinson, L. & Segal, J. (Updated 2017, April). Smartphone addiction: Tips for breaking free of compulsive smartphone use. Retrieved 23 May 2017 from HelpGuide: https://www.helpguide.org
Pantic, I. (2014, 1 October). Online social networking and mental health. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 17(10), 652–657. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2014.0070
Pearson, C. & Hussain, Z. (2015, 3 March). Smartphone use, addiction, narcissism, and personality: A mixed methods investigation. International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning, 5(1), 17. doi: 10.4018/ijcbpl.2015010102