When You Are Running Out Of Battery You Run For Your Charger
Do you find yourself running after your charger instantly as soon as you get that low battery notification every time?
If so, then you might be addicted to your phone.
Some people are so obsessed with their phones that they will use it constantly until their battery is running out and then immediately run for the charger to charge it before their phone dies on them.
In some of the cases, they will sit right next to where their phone is charging so that they can use it as it charges.
If You Really Can’t Help Yourself Buy A Minimalist Phone
There are hardware options out there for people who simply can’t help themselves, designed to give users the cell phone bare bones, without all the distracting accoutrements like Facebook and Snapchat. One solid option is the Punkt MP01, an ideal way to hold onto the convenience and safety of cell phones without the unnecessary extras. It’s one step up from a brick phone, and one streamlined step down from a regular smartphone .
Dont Use Your Phone Before Going To Bed
Constantly checking your phone throughout the day ruins your productivity, while staring at the screen before bedtime can affect the quality of sleep.
I try to ditch my phone at least a couple of hours before going to bed. It hurts when I break this rule. After my last spontaneous googling session at 12 AM, I was just lying in my bed for a couple of hours staying alert and unable to fall asleep. In the morning, I felt exhausted and unable to concentrate on anything.
Use Screen Time or Digital Wellbeing to schedule the time away from the screen. For example, between 9 PM and 7 AM, your phone can ban you from most apps and allow only phone calls. You can also automatically turn on the Do Not Disturb mode every night to make sure nothing interrupts your sleep.
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There’s A Good Reason Tech Innovators Don’t Let Their Kids Have Devices
When you’re a parent, reckoning with your own negative cell-phone behaviors feels badbut watching the same habits infect your kids is even worse. That’s probably why, as Price points out, when it comes to their personal lives, many of the leading innovators in digital technology have chosen to shield their own families from the devices for as long as possible. Consider this: Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use the iPad. And Bill and Melinda Gates did not let their children have phones until they were 14.
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Reconnect With Your Smartphone Gradually
To consistently be able to stop looking at your phone, your phone will have to become a tool again instead of a temptation.
Of course, why we use is they do a lot of things wonderfully, James Roberts of Baylor University says. But we over-adopted.
After people break up with their phones, they often slowly reintroduce some apps as long as they are able to use them responsibly. The process can involve some trial and error.
Habits do take a while to form and to break, Roberts says. Dont beat yourself up if you slip. If you spend too much time on a website, thats okay. Go back, reorganize and start again.
Rachel Saslow is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post and Portland Monthly.
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Causes And Effects Of Smartphone And Internet Addiction
While you can experience impulse-control problems with a laptop or desktop computer, the size and convenience of smartphones and tablets means that we can take them just about anywhere and gratify our compulsions at any time. In fact, most of us are rarely ever more than five feet from our smartphones. Like the use of drugs and alcohol, they can trigger the release of the brain chemical dopamine and alter your mood. You can also rapidly build up tolerance so that it takes more and more time in front of these screens to derive the same pleasurable reward.
Heavy smartphone use can often be symptomatic of other underlying problems, such as stress, anxiety, depression, or loneliness. At the same time, 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, youll succeed only in cutting yourself off further from 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 youre choosing for your anxiety , is actually making your anxiety worse.
Our Phones Are Altering Our Brains
Do you feel like you can’t concentrate anymore? Has your ability to remember things you’ve read gotten dramatically worse since you started doing the lion’s share of your reading online? It’s not your imagination. According to Price, when we read digital media, the cluttered landscape of links and ads and the short bursts of attention that are required by scrolling and swiping and tweeting result in a contradiction in terms: “an intensely focused state of distraction.” And while that distraction seems like it should be temporary, its effects are actually chillingly long-term. “This type of frequent, focused distraction,” she explains, “isn’t just capable of creating long-lasting changes in our brains it is particularly good at doing so.”
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You Turn To Your Phone Whenever Things Get Awkward
Do you find yourself relying on your phone a little too often whenever things get awkward?
If your answer is yes, then you are probably addicted to your phone.
Sure, the phone can be your savior every once in a while, but if you find yourself relying on it a little too often, then you might just have a problem.
Most people would be using their phone even when they are at a spa and trying to de-stress and melt away their worries for the day.
People get a massage for relaxation purposes, and phones are one of the primary stress causing machines.
Therefore, in order to unwind properly, it is essential that the phones are kept as far away as possible during the process.
If You’re Worried About Being Accessible At Night Put It Into Do Not Disturb Mode
Here’s how to do it on newer Android phones. And if you have an iPhone, Do Not Disturb is kind of a magical thing: You can set a time period where you allow calls to come in from everyone, no one, or just people on your favorites list . And you can also enable a “repeated calls” setting within Do Not Disturb, which guarantees that if the same person calls you twice within three minutes that the second call will go through as intended. It gives you the peace of mind of knowing that if something terrible and important happens, you’ll hear about it… but otherwise, you can enjoy your sleep, totally uninterrupted.
Access Do Not Disturb under Settings . Then select your preferences, as shown above, right.
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Change Your Phone Settings
Among the most often suggested ideas for reducing cell phone usage, you find tips and tricks by simply changing the settings on your phone.
The most common suggested ideas:
- Turn off notifications
- Remove distraction-based apps from your home screen
- Set a longer passcode
- Use airplane mode
- Turn on do not disturb
In my opinion, turning off notifications is something everyone should do regardless of how habitual their cell phone use is. Just because someone in the world wants to text you, email you, or tag you in a post on Facebook doesnt mean they deserve your attention. My cell phone screen is not currently set to grayscale, but I have found that setting helpful in the past.
Quiz: How Addicted Are You To Your Phone
Take this quiz if youve ever been curious or worried that you might be overly addicted to your phone. Its the first step towards recovery!
Have you ever sat in a train or café, looked around, and realised that almost every single person was staring at their smartphone? Did you notice this while looking up from your own phone? Yeah, thats what we thought. Take this quiz if youve ever been curious or worried that you might be overly addicted to your phone. Its the first step towards recovery!
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The Upside Of Social Media
Unlike addiction, frequent social media users sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer. Thats why a more accurate description is habit.
Habits form naturally through repeated use. Use any site or app enough, and youll form associations in memory between cues, such as site alerts and your smartphone, and responses, such as logging on. Once habits have formed, perception of cues automatically makes you think of logging on.
Creating user habits is central to the business of social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Twitter. Their revenue rises from high-frequency users. Lots of infrequent users either have no effect on revenue or are a drag on the bottom line. User habits are integral to the success and design of social media platforms.
Most of us start using social media because it is rewarding. The likes, follows and friends we accumulate are all rewards. Take Instagram: Almost 70% of user postings can be explained by a reward-learning model in which likes are analogous to the food pellets that teach rats to pull a lever in a Skinner box. Get enough likes on your posts, and you will start to post more often and create an Instagram posting habit.
Cell Phone Addiction: Signs Symptoms And Treatment
Cell phone addiction is a nonmedical term used to describe a pattern of excessive phone use that can result in significant impairment or distress. People with this issue may also struggle with other types of addictions, such as drug or alcohol addiction.
According to Pew Research Center, 97 percent of Americans own a cell phone. Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, have become for many an essential tool for daily life.
Unfortunately, for some people, cell phone use can become a compulsive habit that can lead to excessive use, negative health consequences, and interference with general way of life.
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How To Overcome An Addiction
This article was co-authored by Tiffany Douglass, MA. Tiffany Douglass is the Founder of Wellness Retreat Recovery Center, a JCAHO accredited drug and alcohol treatment program based in San Jose, California. She is also the Executive Director for Midland Tennessee at JourneyPure. She has over ten years of experience in substance abuse treatment and was appointed a Global Goodwill Ambassador in 2019 for her efforts in residential addiction treatment. Tiffany earned a BA in Psychology from Emory University in 2004 and an MA in Psychology with an emphasis on Organization Behavior and Program Evaluation from Claremont Graduate University in 2006.wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 25 testimonials and 100% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 1,122,411 times.
Theres a myth out there that addiction is inescapable or something thats locked in for life, but thats definitely not the case. In fact, more people succeed at overcoming their addiction than fail.XResearch source Acknowledging that youre addicted to something and wanting to change are the first steps, so youre on the right track! This article will show you how to come up with a plan for overcoming your addiction and stick with it, even when things get tough.
Dressing Up For An Important Occasion Can Wait But Your Phone Cant
Phone addicts would normally be on their phones until the last minute, even if they have to dress up for an important occasion.
Their phones are extremely important to them and they would be on it all the time.
Once they are completely satisfied with the amount of time they have spent on their phones, only then will they get off their couch or bed to get ready for their special occasion.
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Remove Those Excess Apps
Having instant ’round the clock access to Facebook is as superfluous as a nipple on my elbow. As a wise man on the Internet once said, Facebook is like the fridgeyou check it every 15 minutes, even though you know nothings there. By eliminating time-wasters and attention suckers, you can rid yourself of the urge to draw your smartphone from your pocket every three minutes out of pure impulse.
Use Apps To Bolster Self
There are apps for almost every problem in life. In fact, there are even some wonderful apps built to help us limit our time on our devices. Here are some of my favorites:
Space. Set goals and track your daily progress to manage your habits.
Forest. Stay focused, be present. Forest is a beautifully designed app that brings gamification to productivity and results in real trees being planted based on your personal phone use habits.
Moment. Through short, daily exercises, Moment helps you use your phone in a healthy way.
Flipd. Lock away distracting apps for complete focus.
Screentime. Set daily usage limits on your phone or specific apps.
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The Problem With Social Media
The behavioural impact of smartphone social media use spans from obsessive behaviour to behavioural addiction .
Read more:How parents and teens can reduce the impact of social media on youth well-being
The average user in the US spends around five hours a day on functional smartphone activities such as texting, social media use, internet searchers, phone calls half that time is spent on social media .
The specific functional use of our smartphone is what we need to look more closely at. Social media rewards users via likes, emoji use and social engagement with a large audience. The more people respond to a post, the more we gain a sense of enjoyment that people are validating our thoughts or interests.
Social media engagement, and constantly texting friends and family, may be more of a concern than the device on which it is used, because it does lead to dopamine increases, and thus, pleasure or stress relief.
People are hard-wired to seek affirmation and acceptance in social settings. Before the rise of Facebook and Instagram, humans sought out one another via many settings for social engagement and social validation. So its no surprise that when we have the technology to extend our social connections into wider communities we do so without question.
Those who have problems with prolonged use of smartphone functions such as social media, media streaming services, games and frequent texting, may fit the criteria of problematic internet use.
Break Your Cell Phone Addiction
September 16, 2021 by Eric
Recent statistics on phone addiction can be shocking to read. According to a study done by dscout, people touch their cell phones 2,617 times a day.
Research has shown people spend 3.07 hours on their phones daily. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 22% of them check their phones every few minutes. Surprisingly, most people who check their phones do it without being prompted by a notification.
With smartphone usage continuing to rise within our society, there are many harmful effects rising as well. Among them include:
After reading all of these statistics, you might think itd be the easiest to decision to stop using them so much. Unfortunately, unplugging from technology can be very difficult.
Smartphones provide us many options of things to do that it can be hard to not get addicted to them. We can access a whole world of information on them at the press of a button.
Sometimes that can be good, such as reading this self-help article. Other times it can be bad, such as spending hours on end scrolling through social media.
So, what can we do to keep our cell phone use to a minimum? Here are some ideas you can use to help curb your cell phone habit.
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What Is Smartphone Addiction
While a smartphone, tablet, or computer can be a hugely productive tool, compulsive use of these devices can interfere with work, school, and relationships. When you spend more time on social media or playing games than you do interacting with real people, or you cant stop yourself from repeatedly checking texts, emails, or appseven when it has negative consequences in your lifeit may be time to reassess your technology use.
Smartphone addiction, sometimes colloquially known as nomophobia , is often fueled by an Internet overuse problem or Internet addiction disorder. After all, its rarely the phone or tablet itself that creates the compulsion, but rather the games, apps, and online worlds it connects us to.
Smartphone addiction can encompass a variety of impulse-control problems, including:
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. 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.
