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How can I beat my smartphone addiction?
Thanks for asking.
The word nomophobia means a fear of being without our smartphone, and it's affecting more and more people with each passing year.
After all, we're rarely separated from our phone over the course of a day, and even use them at night time.
Back in 2021, a phone addiction study by researchers from King's College London was published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal.
It was based on a five-question survey and found that 389 of young people qualified as smartphone addicts.
Many admitted being unable to control their usage and said that it regularly got in the way of other activities like work or studies.
Furthermore, not having access to their smartphone brought on feelings of distress.
It's as if our smartphones are an extension of our bodies and as if we've been amputated when they're taken away from us, isn't it?
So what can people do about it?
The first tip is to ban your phone from the bedroom.
So that means no bedside charging and no using it as your alarm to wake up in the morning.
Gradually transitioning to sleep in the evening is important.
You shouldn't really be using your phone right up to the moment you lay down to go to sleep.
That's due to the blue light the screen emits, which stimulates the brain and eyes.
It disturbs our brain's nighttime recovery processes and thereby reduces our mental sharpness.
What about notifications?
That's a good question.
Smartphone notifications have turned us into Pavlov's dogs, in that we've been conditioned to respond any time a visual or audio prompt goes off.
The brain activates its reward circuit and releases hormones like dopamine in particular.
Simply turning those pesky notifications off is the best way to break that vicious cycle.
You can create a setting for each app if you need to leave notifications on for some of them.
Another tip along the same lines is to activate grayscale mode, which means removing all color from your smartphone screen.
Smartphone apps are intentionally designed with colorful logos and icons to catch our attention.
Seeing row after row of them on your phone screen can make you feel like you're in a candy shop, what with all the enticing colors and shapes.
The grayscale option can generally be found under display settings, but the exact pathway will vary depending on your device.
If you're struggling to find it, try searching for your device name, followed by grayscale setting on Google.
It's important to be conscious of your consumption habits and of how you cope being without your phone at certain times.
Smartphones have a number of built-in tools which let you see how much screen time you're getting each day, week or month and which specific apps you're using the most.
If you've never checked before, you may be surprised when you realise just how long you're spending staring at your smartphone each day.
Course, you could also take the survey used by King's College London researchers that I mentioned earlier.
It's been published in a number of online news articles.
The higher your score, the more likely it is that you're a smartphone addict.
We hope that by putting some of our tips into practice, you can curb your screen time and avoid the negative symptoms of phone addiction.
There you have it.
Now you know how you can beat your smartphone addiction.
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