Mobile Phone Addiction

Good morning from under a very warm Spanish sun.

With the launch of the latest iPhones, I would like to highlight something that is becoming more and more obvious and worrying.  The addiction to the mobile phone/cell.  Have you gone out without your phone recently? How lost did you feel? Naked perhaps? Nervous or jittery? You are not alone…

“Mobile phone usage is so strongly integrated into young people‘s behaviour that symptoms of behavioural addiction, such as cell phone usage interrupting their day-to-day activities. The main aim of this paper is to investigate aspects of the emerging literature on the impact of mobile phones on adolescent’s lives. There are several reviews addressing the definition, Mobile phone addiction symptoms, Assessment of Mobile phone addiction, Negative effect of Mobile phone addiction on adolescents and some reviews addressing the role of Mobile phone addiction on adolescent’s mental and physical health.”

Goswami, V., and Rani Singh, D. (2016). Impact of mobile phone addiction on adolescent’s life: A literature review. International Journal of Home Science. 2(1). Pp. 69-74

The addiction goes well beyond simply talking on the device – there are obvious signs of compulsive behaviours in checking the phone for messages, playing games when a moment arises or listening to music and worrying about battery life… Here are some statistics from the internet on teen mobile use:

1. 59 percent of parents feel their teens are addicted to their mobile devices
2. 78 percent of teens check their mobile devices at least hourly
3. 72 percent of teens feel an urgent need to immediately respond to texts
4. 44 percent of teens believe they spend too much time on their cell phones
5. 77 percent of parents feel their teens get distracted by their cell phones. For example, they fail to pay attention to other people at family events
6. 30 percent of both teens and parents claim to argue about mobile devices and cell phones on a daily basis
7. 44 percent of teens use their mobile devices at the dinner table.

Does this sounds common… so what do parents do about this? Apart from argue perhaps.  “Let’s not all check our phones, or, let’s put them in one room of the house etc.” Do you find that the rule gets broken easily, but… by who?  32% parents are said to break first rushing to the phone or letting the rule slip by unnoticed. This is an epidemic affecting the whole population, all age groups and generations. I feel that this is only going to get worse.

If you are feeling genuinely addicted to the cell phone, and if you desperately desire to change, then hypnotherapy can help break the habit and addiction. Contact me today to discuss how I can help you. Stop being a mobile phone zombie.

Thanks to Gauthier Delecroix - photography from flickr creative commons.