The great thing about modern life is you can do so much, and the curse of modern life is you can do so much. Do you have a cellphone obsessive compulsive disorder, like an itch you have to scratch, like Pavlov’s dog, you hear the bell and run to your cell phone salivating? If so, congratulations! You are a cell phone addict.
As the number of people that have cell phones is rapidly growing, so is the number of people becoming addicted to their phones. When these phones were invented, they were intended to make life easier. Today there are people who do not have a life because they do not know when to turn them off.
There’s something very irresistible about an unopened message. At the same time, people will have an anxiety attack if they forgot their phones at home and cannot enjoy what they are doing until that phone is back in their hand.
This free-for-all frenzy has a real impact on relationships and families, knocking our life balance off-kilter.
Melody Yin is a student who studies nutrition at the University of Sydney. She is desperately trying to curb her cell phone addiction.
“The minute you see that flashing light, you start thinking, ‘Do I need to check it?’” she said. “I’m not a brain surgeon. I’m not involved in life and death matters. I realised I have to draw a line. If I’m doing my assignments, it’s not the end of the world if I don’t return a message from Twitter and Facebook.”
We have become both the viewer and the viewed, the audience and the actor, observing the lives of others while sharing our own in a process of mutual disclosure.
“I live and die in Twitter life,” said Yin. “I found a PDA to be a double-edged sword. It can certainly allow you to do a lot more in any given day, but there is certainly a cost associated. I tend to lose out on a lot of other experiences, like when I should be paying attention at the dinner table with my family.”
Actually, we are not really gaining genuine insights into the lives of others. We prefer to craft our own online personas to present life as we would like it to be, rather than presenting life as it is. Everyone has good days and bad days, but our online personas don’t often reflect that reality.
“Sometimes, my dining partners were staring at me with contempt and impatiently as I was stuck in my phone,” Tina Vaccaro said. Vaccaro is an ordinary office worker whose life has been run by her BlackBerry. “I’m so addicted to this device that I always stop mid-bite to rush to respond to a message during a meal.”
Vaccaro has a terrible habit, even checking messages from the bathroom and in bed. She is not alone in dealing with technology overload. Email, PDAs, iPhones, laptops, and cell phones dominate our modern world. Our uber-connected lives have made us virtually available at any time, at any place – the movies, performance venues, traffic lights, you name it.
These constant interruptions take a toll on our bodies and our mental states.
Cell phone addicts use their phones to make them feel better. These users even seem to increase their phone use over time to get the same feeling they had when they first began using them. In that way it works like most addictions – you need a bigger hit as time goes on.
Chifang Ling, a psychotherapist from Sydney, said there were also some anxiety issues when the user did not have a phone available. With regular addictions, from alcohol addiction to food addiction, there are usually some changes to the brain. There may have to be a study done on the brain of a cell phone addict for this trend to be considered an actual addiction.
Multitasking can cause the brain to overheat, like a car engine.
“The brain needs periods to recover, not just sleeping at night,” Ling said, “but during the day, it needs periods of rest and recovery. It simply can’t run straight out all day long at peak performance.”
These poor people, who feel obliged to respond to every email or message, can work themselves into what Ling dubs the F-State – frantic, frazzled, frenzied.
“They get toxic stress and burn up energy rapidly and wastefully,” he said. “In that state, they do bad work, lose friends, and lose clients. It’s bad for them in every measurable way. If they don’t prioritise they’ll go in many directions at once and they won’t do anything well.”
Xiaohan Yu, a professor of sociology from Zhejiang Gongshang University, said everyone really needed to be very clear about what mattered most to them.
“If you de-stress, if you prioritize, everything gets better– your physical health, your longevity, your enjoyment of life. If you don’t take your time, your time will be taken from you. It won’t happen automatically.”
Unfortunately, cell phone addicts spend so much time preoccupied with trying to project the perfect life they forget to enjoy life for what it is. Cell phones do make life easier, but you should not lose sight of the fact that there is life without them. Perhaps the best way to celebrate life and recover from this addiction, with all of its ups and downs, is to live it, rather than obey it. And turn off your phone when you are spending quality time with people.
