How long can you go without your smartphone? How do you feel when the battery dies or you misplace it, even for just a few minutes? Most of us can remember life before our phones, but crikey! How did we ever survive?!
Enter the noPhone – this is not a phone, but it looks and feels like one to your fingers. When you need that comforting feeling of having your phone with you, but you don’t have your (real) phone with you and your fear of being disconnected becomes overwhelming, put your anxieties to rest with the noPhone.
While we’re almost certain this is a joke, it raises a crucial point – smartphones are the new security blanket. As a child, did you have a blankey, or something like that? A teddy bear, perhaps? Many children have some sort of infantile talisman without which they just can’t go to sleep / make it through the day / find their happy place. Like Linus from the Peanuts cartoon, I had a blankey. I couldn’t sleep without the feeling of it in my hands or against my face. At the age of five, my parents experimented with my tender heart by forcing me to part with it. It didn’t work – at least not the first time. After a week of emotionally breaking down, they gave it back. Eventually, I am happy to say I eventually grew out of the need to always be touching my blanket.
We live in an age where people have tossed their stuffed animals from toddlerhood and replaced them with their phones, email accounts, social media, and other torrents of streaming data of all kinds, at all times. Most of us know people who are arguably addicted to the constant influx of information.
How serious a phenomenon is smartphone addiction, though, really? Psychology Today reports that 40% of the population experiences “Nomophobia,” as in “no-mo(bile) phone”-phobia: fear of being without your smartphone. Dale Archer, MD, writes,
The phone, computer, tablet and other high tech devices have become not just an object, but for many a best friend.
For many, their smartphone is their best friend, their blankey. When we talk about addictions, we often think of the chemical kind – as with alcohol or drugs. We may also be referring to what is called a psychological addiction – as with gambling, video games, or, perhaps, checking our twitter feed. When does a habit – good or bad – become an addiction? When it impairs the normal, healthy functions of your life and your relationships.
This infographic from frontrange.com sites a study where smartphone users in the UK were asked about their separation anxieties when faced with the thought of being without their devices. The stats are a little frightening, but so common to us that we’d hardly shrug at them. Toward the end, there is a challenge to go a week without your phone.
Could you do it?
