Documentary About Screen Time Issues
Discussions around this topic have been here for a while but much about the digital dimension remains unknown to quite a lot of us. In many cases parents know much less than their kids do. At the same time both this issue and parenting in general are often somewhat sensitive, private matters for parents , so were not really open to discussing it publically. Screenagers tries to bring more light to the problem of parenting in the age of the smartphone.
How Can I Help My Kids Balance Real Life With Cell Phone Use
Do not despair! It is possible to enjoy an active and healthy life and still let your kids enjoy time on mobile devices. And for that time to be educational. Win win win!
- Get Active. Make sure your kids do something active frequently. Even if its just 10 star jumps every half an hour, bodies need to move and habits form young. So get them in the habit of being active. I aim for 10 minutes of running around in every hour. Its good to break up screen time rather than allow your kids to sit there for hours and hours.
- Work First. If your kids have homework, reading, house work to do, make sure they do it before they get on the mobile device.
Recognizing The Symptoms Of Cell Phone And Internet Addiction
A 2016 report published in Frontiers in Psychiatry suggests using the DSM-5 criteria for compulsive gambling and substance abuse to measure problematic smartphone use. While problematic smartphone use is not defined as an addiction, it can be evaluated as a behavioral disorder.
Using this model, potential symptoms might include the following:
- Conscious use in prohibited contexts or potentially dangerous situations
- Excessive use that causes conflicts with family withdrawing from family or shared events in favor of smartphone use
- Negative effects on school, family, social, or emotional functioning
- Continued excessive use despite negative effects
- Impulsive, frequent, constant checking of phone, even in short bursts
- Insomnia or sleep disturbances related to frequent checking
- Excessive urgency or need to be connected
- Increase in use to achieve satisfaction or counteract dysphoric mood
- Need to respond immediately to messages and alerts
- Increased anxiety and/or irritability if phone is not accessible
- Feelings of unease when unable to use the phone
It can be difficult to distinguish between normal daily use and problematic use. It helps to ask yourself the following questions:
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Are We Really Phone Junkies
Phones arent drugs. So why do we get addicted? Because addiction is not about pleasure.
If it was, you would literally be addicted to chocolate. Think about it: thousands of people have surgery every day and are given very strong painkillers. But exceedingly few become addicted. Why?
Because addiction is about soothing psychological distress. Its using something to cope with a problem in life. Heres Adam:
You only develop an addiction when there is some psychological motive that hasnt been fulfilled for you: loneliness, that youve been bullied, or you cant make good things happen in your life. It doesnt actually matter what you use to soothe that addiction, whether its playing a particular game that lulls you into a distracted state or whether its taking a drug. In terms of soothing those psychological ills, behavior and substance addictions are very, very similar.
We live in an age of anxiety. And phones can soothe that anxiety. But they can also add to that anxiety. Some researchers refer to smartphones as adult pacifiers. We get cranky, bored, or distressed and the pacifier soothes us.
Okay, so what do we do about it? Well, Adam has a few tips from psychology we can use to get a handle on things
Signs And Symptoms Of Smartphone Addiction
There is no specific amount of time spent on your phone, or the frequency you check for updates, or the number of messages you send or receive that indicates an addiction or overuse problem.
Spending a lot of time connected to your phone only becomes a problem when it absorbs so much of your time it causes you to neglect your face-to-face relationships, your work, school, hobbies, or other important things in your life. If you find yourself ignoring friends over lunch to read Facebook updates or compulsively checking your phone in while driving or during school lectures, then its time to reassess your smartphone use and strike a healthier balance in your life.
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Figure Out What Youre Feeling
The emotional component is something we dont give enough attention to, Price says. Reaching for our phones is an efficient way to not feel unpleasant emotions. But they also muffle the happy moments in life if youre too busy scrolling to notice the world around you.
So, get mindful about your phone use. Take a breath and ask yourself why youre picking it up in the first place. Are you bored, anxious, curious, happy? When youre done using it, do you feel better or worse? Thirty minutes dinking around on Instagram instead of going to sleep at night is probably going to feel disorienting and vaguely depressing.
How To Stop Your Phone Addiction In 5 Steps
In one way or another, many people are addicted to their phones. While the internet and smartphones are great for many things, they can also be exhausting.
With the average person checking their phone47 times per day, this results in over 3 hours per day spent on mobile and picking up their phones 2,617 times per day!
Besides, the time you spend on your phone is costing you. For example, overusing your phone can harm future career moves or family relationships.
Recently Ive decreased my smartphone use dramatically. I use all my apps for a maximum of one hour per day. While that wasnt easy in the beginning, the persistence is worth it.
Here are the things that helped me stop my phone addiction and resist the distraction.
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Is A Problem A Problem If You Dont Think Its A Problem
This behavioural loop is subtle, and identifying it as a problem is a problem. If your addiction is deeply intrusive injecting yourself with heroin or blowing your lifes savings on a 10-match final score accumulator in the Romanian second-division alarm bells will ring.
These types of addiction pacify deep-rooted, intense emotional states such as clinical depression. But what about feelings on the slightly below average part of the emotional spectrum? Boredom? Restlessness? Frustration? Agitation? These states induce behaviour matching their tenacity.
There are those of us where addiction has completely taken control of our lives, Valerie Mason-John, author of Eight Step Recovery, told MindThatEgo. Then there are those of us where addictions are hidden. We dont even acknowledge them as addictions, she added. Obsessive phone checking is in this category, subtle, easy to dismiss.
Put The Phone Physically Out Of Reach
What we know is our phones will distract us even if theyre in sight but were not using them, says James Roberts, a consumer behavior expert and author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Are You Addicted to Your Smartphone?
Relying on your willpower is a losing game, so get it out of sight and reach. Roberts, a marketing professor at Baylor University, suggests starting with putting your phone in the trunk or glove box while driving, since that will have an immediate effect on your safety.
To quickly improve sleep and your relationship with your partner, dont charge your phone in the bedroom. That way, it wont be the last thing you see in the evening, the first thing in the morning, or, apparently, a temptation in the middle of the night .
Reintroduce alarm clocks and watches back into your life so that you cant rely on those excuses for using your phone. Subscribe to the newspaper or magazines to read articles music lovers can go full hipster and listen to music on vinyl instead of streaming apps.
Youre setting up your personal environment to be conducive to your goals, Roberts says. If Im going to cut back on technology, Im going to make it easy to cut back.
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Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone And Unbroke My Brain
My name is Kevin, and I have a phone problem.
And if youre anything like me and the statistics suggest you probably are, at least where smartphones are concerned you have one, too.
I dont love referring to what we have as an addiction. That seems too sterile and clinical to describe whats happening to our brains in the smartphone era. Unlike alcohol or opioids, phones arent an addictive substance so much as a species-level environmental shock. We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasnt happened yet.
Ive been a heavy phone user for my entire adult life. But sometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations. Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing werent helping. I tried various tricks to curb my usage, like deleting Twitter every weekend, turning my screen grayscale and installing app-blockers. But I always relapsed.
Eventually, in late December, I decided that enough was enough. I called Catherine Price, a science journalist and the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, a 30-day guide to eliminating bad phone habits. And I begged her for help.
Save The Bedroom For Sleep And Sex
A central component of good sleep habits, keeping your bedroom for sleep and sex, and leaving your cell phone in another room of the house will not only improve your sleep quality.
It will reduce the likelihood that texting and phoning will encroach on your personal time. And if you are depending on your cell phone for sexting, internet porn, or other cybersex activities, your sex life may be heading for trouble.
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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.
Warning Signs Of Smartphone Or Internet Overuse Include:
Trouble completing tasks at work or home. Do you find laundry piling up and little food in the house for dinner because youve been busy chatting online, texting, or playing video games? Perhaps you find yourself working late more often because you cant complete your work on time.
Isolation from family and friends. Is your social life suffering because of all the time you spend on your phone or other device? If youre in a meeting or chatting with friends, do you lose track of whats being said because youre checking your phone? Have friends and family expressed concern about the amount of time you spend on your phone? Do you feel like no one in your real lifeeven your spouseunderstands you like your online friends?
Concealing your smartphone use. Do you sneak off to a quiet place to use your phone? Do you hide your smartphone use or lie to your boss and family about the amount of time you spend online? Do you get irritated or cranky if your online time is interrupted?
Having a fear of missing out . Do you hate to feel out of the loop or think youre missing out on important news or information if you dont check you phone regularly? Do you need to compulsively check social media because youre anxious that others are having a better time, or leading a more exciting life than you? Do you get up at night to check your phone?
Withdrawal symptoms from smartphone addiction
- Restlessness
- Craving access to your smartphone or other device
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Smartphone Addiction: A Serious Problem
It is not a secret: we spend a lot of time using our mobile phone.46 percent of Smartphone owners declare their phone is something they couldnt live without. And we have a proof of that in our everyday life: even if we are out with friends of we are getting a dinner with our family or our significant other, well see smartphones popping up everywhere.Facebook, Instagram, YouTube grab our attention, and we spend a lot of time using them, instead to spend it interacting and chatting with people who are with us. And if we use the smartphone as a working tool, the situation becomes worst. Even if many of us dont mean to be so involved in the phone, it happens.The side effects of this smartphone dependency are a lot and include symptoms as disrupted sleep, stress, the isolation in the social life, anxiety, and depression.
Symptoms Of Phone Addiction
Want to establish your own reliance on tech? Try the following, she reccomends.
1. Being on your phone more often than not
Become aware of how much time you actually spend on your phone. Ask yourself: if you dont check it for a while, do you feel nervous or on edge? If so, this may be a sign that youve become dependent on your device.
2. Brushing off excessive screen time as normal
How many waking hours do you spend gazing at your phone, and when others touch on it, do you merely pass it off as a necessity?
3. Consistent unproductive days and unfulfilled daily tasks
Are you managing to fit in your workload, daily activities and spending quality time with loved ones? Or do you find that hours can easily pass when youre on your phone?
4. Comments from others
If you start receiving comments from others about how much youre on social media or on your phone in general, there may well be a problem.
5. Starting to feel low or down about things you see online
As above, excessive screen time can lead to mental health problems, so if you suspect that you may have phone addiction, now is the time to create new habits and begin to set boundaries for yourself, Spelman shares.
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Get Over Your Fear Of Missing Out
Learn to be okay with potentially missing out on things. Most of the time we check our phones, we realize there was nothing worth checking. Here are some good tips on how to overcome fear of missing out.
We all have the power to be the boss of our lives. Use that power to free yourself from your phone, and enjoy your life more again.
How Much Time Are We Actually Wasting Online
How much time do you waste on this addictive activity? An average western person spends 6 hours a day on TV, telephone and internet time.
Now were going to make such a stupid calculation. But its only stupid because no one dares to look at it like this Thats 42 hours a week . That is a working week. You waste half your life.
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Modify Your Smartphone Use Step
For most people, getting control over their smartphone and Internet use isnt a case of quitting cold turkey. Think of it more like going on a diet. Just as you still need to eat, you probably still need to use your phone for work, school, or to stay in touch with friends. Your goal should be to cut back to more healthy levels of use.
