Overcome Smartphone Addiction

The Problem

Have you gone through an extended period without using your smartphone or having Internet? To most people, being completely disconnected from the rest of the world sounds like a nightmare. In our digital age, online addiction and smartphone addiction is a real issue as people are checking it constantly throughout the day, relying on notifications to stay entertained, and going into shock when they don’t feel it in their pockets. While hard to break, smartphone addiction can be helped with enough self-discipline and online addiction support groups who can help bring a community to detoxifying from the dependence. With practice and time, the physical and mental strains that come from a heavy dependency can wane so a healthier lifestyle can come to the forefront.

How Does Addiction Start?

Most people fail to realize the smartphone addiction is a real problem that is affecting millions of people around the world. It’s getting into the way of our daily activities, conversations, and intimate moments with the never ending buzzing. With the rising demand for mobile phones and the necessary use of it to keep up with the news, social media, and communicating with others, battling addiction with smartphones will be faced by many. Include the rapid advances that today’s smartphones have to access information at all time high speeds, and addiction is sure to develop. Approximately 72% of people in a recent study stated that they are rarely more than five feet away from their smartphones at any given time during the day! Experts call this issue by the name nomophobia, which describes the incredible fear that being away from your phone will cut you off from your friends, family, and the rest of the world. 

Smartphone and online addiction is also a problem that often stems from other underlying emotional and psychological issues. It can be a side effect of major mental disorders like depression or OCD, also known as obsessive-compulsive disorder! Using a smartphone too much – whether you are an adult or adolescent – can create a dependency. This addiction typically leads to high levels of stress, loss of focus, and even anxiety disorders.

Online Addiction Consequences

There’s no issue with using your phone at a healthy level. However, if you are spending more time talking to your Instagram followers than your actual friends, it might be the right time to take a step back and reflect on managing what could be an addiction. Smartphone addiction, especially among children, is completely changing the dynamic that we communicate with each other throughout the day. Face to face human interaction helps a young child and even teenagers to develop emotionally in a way that phones can’t match up to. Speaking, listening, and displaying gestures with a real human helps a child to see the other person’s emotional reaction and decide the appropriate response. Yet, texting, talking or browsing Facebook threads on a smartphone does none of this. Meanwhile, grown adults are no less likely to become addicted and end up feeling excessively tired on a daily basis from staring at a screen.

How To Fight Addiction

Battling a smartphone or online addiction is not easy in any sense. To be successful, you have to acknowledge you have an issue as the first step. This type of addiction, unlike being drawn to physical drugs or alcohol, is difficult to pinpoint as we all use our smartphones so often each day. However, watch out for a few key symptoms that characterize an addiction. One that many people may have experienced is phantom cellphone vibration, describing the feeling our body has become conditioned to anticipate when we carrying our smartphone around. Even if no new texts, emails, or calls are actually coming through, our minds begin to imagine the same sensation as a heavy dependence becomes established. The most basic step that some experts suggest for weaning time spent on your phone is literally setting alarms specifying how often you can check it. Start with 15 minutes and move up to eventually an hour. When your alarm sounds, spend one minute going through all your notifications and then reset the timer. This will build restrictions in your lifestyle and help reduce your habit of checking them so often. Another trick is to seek online addiction forums, who speak about keeping addiction apps like Facebook or Instagram in hideable folders on your phone. This way, you’ll be able to prevent getting distraction from endless videos, pictures, and focus on more important tasks.

Final Takeaway

Going through any kind of addiction is tough without implementing a supportive community base, enough discipline, and temptation preventions. When it comes to battling online addiction and smartphone dependency, the process takes the willingness to plug in more into the real world and interact with the humans who are actually physically around you. While it will feel painful at first to detach from the addicting buzzes and “like” notifications, your body, mind, and relationships will thank you as you begin to function more normally as a human being. You’ll also appear much more engaged, friendly, and open when you’re around others who are talking to you or desire to strike up a conversation!

 

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