Is Smart Phone Addiction a real thing ?

Smart Phones Eating into Our Quality Time

Today is 6th of May 2020 in the middle of COVID-19 pandemic and most of us are in quarantine. We are all going through a tough period. I've been having Identity Crisis, Possessive over close friends and started thinking more about life its purpose whether we have a role in the present world and what difference does it make in this world without me (Existential Crisis) ; these thoughts are pretty scary to think of given we are at quarantine now. 

People always say keep your mind occupied, but what if all the thoughts in your mind are about such things. I began questioning myself why I'm thinking in such a way. And turns out that I've always been thinking like that an d I never stopped to notice that. I was always focused on college, home, my High Score in a Particular Game, taking photographs, listening to music, downloading notes and watching YouTube videos, scrolling through social media feeds etc. By now you might have realized that most of the day I spend with smartphone averaging to 6 Hours daily. But now as I'm stuck at home I've time with me to do more stuff which were the same activities mentioned above but now consuming more time for each. I was falling into a spiral with only smartphone in my mind. Now the average use time was about 13 Hours daily which constitutes most of the day and sometimes even replacing sleep with YouTube videos. My Circadian Rhythm disrupted with constant sleeplessness at night and sleeping from 5 am to 11 am missing my mornings daily. I'll write about the importance of waking up every morning in another post. Well my mental state got altered, I got short tempered, distanced away from people including my close friends. It was exhausting. I always felt down and wanting to sleep but couldn't as I thought I would miss something which would show up in my feeds. And that's when I saw a video by Andrew Kirby on Dopamine Detox which is a 3 Video series which I highly recommend even if you are not familiar with the above mentioned problems. It would help us to reevaluate life choices and to find joy even in the small things in life. There was a time when people enjoyed reading a book for Hours but now most uses a book to fall asleep if we are having difficulties fall asleep. It might be due to the increase in Smart Phone users. You might get the a piece of information from a Smart Phone instantly but there is a certain joy if we find that from a book we refer.

 

I'm an active user of Smart Phone and even have gone a step further by rooting it and installing the Software of my choice. Smart Phone is actually a boon to humanity and we cannot think of a moment without Smart Phone in this day and age. Even my Internal Exam are conducted online. But I think its time to reevaluated certain things and make boundaries for Smart Phone usage. We need to reinvent ourselves. Smart Phones took away most of my spare time. But as soon as I ditched my smartphone even for like a day I felt like an independent person again. I started to appreciate the smaller things in life like a Flower, a Lady Bug or even a common thing like algae in wall LOL!. I was more fresh than before and was not feeling obliged to stare into a smart phone even though I had the urge I controlled myself and took the Smart Phone only to attend calls. It felt like a new beginning until the next day when things went back the way it was before without me realizing to the middle of the day. I was shocked that I just went on with the day like that. This explains why Smart Phones have become a part of our lives and its peak time to reduce the usage. 

I'm not trying to establish that Smart Phones are the root cause to the discussed problems but they certainly have a huge impact on the cause of these problems. We tend to do things for Instant Gratification. The problem with this is it distracts us from our goals in life. It causes us to procrastinate things. 

I'm not stressing out that we need to achieve success by achieving certain degree or getting placed at a firm as each individual has their own version of goals and success. Its Subjective. But Instant Gratification and Procrastination will certainly slow us from achieving our goals. Smart Phones tend to bring instant gratification.

And for all the young adults and teenagers out there; It is okay to leave your Smart Phone idle for a couple of hours instead of playing PUBG or sliding into DM's. It can wait, nothing's gonna happen. I mentioned young adults and teenagers because they are at a stage in life where you start to think about your life ahead and mold your character. If you fail to control your mind now what would you do in the distant future where you need to take an Important decision which might affect a group of people. 

We could discuss about certain steps or principles which we could copy to our lives to cope with this " Smart Phone Addiction"   

Digital Wellbeing is a well known solution to Smart Phone Addiction

    

A fascinating Quote about Smart Phone addiction I saw while scrolling through  :     

“Smartphone is definitely smarter than us to be able to keep us addicted to it.”

To be Continued......