Smartphone Addiction, Is it a “Real Thing”?
By: Muhammad Ahmad
Tags: Time, Smartphone, Internet, Mobilephone, Addiction

Introduction: Ever thought about how much time do you spend on your smartphone while crawling through the internet or other SNS (Social Network Services)? It seems like a fraction of the time you do spend on your phone.

Smartphone Addiction renders to something that we often neglect, that is, using your smartphone in excess, while to some that seems like a break from reality and an escape to the virtual world they couldn’t be more right in this regard, but several real-life responsibilities have to be full-filled.

We all have heard the phrase “You’re so absorbed in your phone.” or “Whenever I see you are always glued to your smartphone.” It is often our family at first, then the surrounding people in our social circle who says this, and frankly it’s not far from the truth.

A Global study showed that smartphone owners in Brazil spend by far the most amount of time online. The average user in 2016 spent close to 5 hours per day surfing — more than twice as long as in 2012.

Effects of Phone Addiction

Smartphone addiction has adverse effects on one’s mental and to some extent on one’s physical health, let’s see how that affects one’s daily life.

· Tolerance: It can cause people to spend a lot of money on the upcoming models of mobile phones due to the desire of staying up to date.

· Eye Strain: Excessive usage has been known to cause eye-strain, which causes blurred vision among other conditions due to the Blue light emitted from the screen on smartphones.

· Neck Stiffness: can be caused due to an unnatural posture while looking down at a smartphone screen.

· Interpersonal Relations: suffers from the over-usage of the smartphone as one remains glued to their phone and doesn’t want to engage with anyone and often neglect important persons in their life.

· Preoccupation: People seemed to be preoccupied with their phones.

· Sleep deprivation: was also recorded in a study as a negative physiological effect of phone addiction in almost one-third of the youth.

People with excessive smartphone addiction were positively associated with female gender, Internet addiction, anxiety, and alcohol use, while the male gender was not so common but a study shows that with the increase in the gaming capabilities of the upcoming smartphone there has been an increase in the male gender which may replace the female gender.

while negative associations were found with depression and with character strength–temperance.

Causes of Phone Addiction

There may be many causes related to the overuse of smartphone, Parents, nowadays, have given Smartphones to their children to distract them, a study conducted in U.S.A. 2018 showed that 89 percent of parents or the primary care-giver were responsible for their children’s time wasted on a smartphone or other mobile devices.

While in Adults there may be various risk factors that lead them to the over-use of their smartphones, some of the major risk factors being:

· Depression

· Anxiety

· Loneliness

· Social awkwardness

Another study showed that 63 percent of Millennial respondents declared that they felt attached to their phones or tablets, while the same was true for 26 percent of the Boomers.

Connection to Behavioral Addiction

There has been much debate as to decide whether smartphone addiction is Itself considered an addiction or not because behavioral addiction is different from substance abuse which is normally called “Addiction”.

However, some factors are similar to Substance abuse such as the release of Dopamine- A hormone that brings about the feeling of pleasure is released by the brain also whenever we get a like on social media or when the notification rings on our phone.

Preventive Measures

Specific preventive measures should be taken by parents in case of their children or by adults to limit their time spent on a smartphone.

That includes:

· Do not take the phone to a bedroom or dining table.

· Limiting their usage of the phone by monitoring their usage in-app as certain social apps have this feature.

· Whenever going out with friends play a game of “Phone Stack” as whoever picks his phone up has to pay the check.

· Turn off your phone, if you can’t resist the urge to check it once in a while you should set a time limit and then extend that limit to when you can check it once an hour.