Why we became addicted to our phone?

We Filipinos are known as the "Texting capital of the world" with the help of our phones. It is used primarily in communicating with people with long or short distance. It is more convenient for us because the availability and the cheap registration fee is relatively low here in the Philippines. I guess that fuel our record for being the top texting capital of the world.

So the addiction came from the phone?

The reality is that the phone itself is not the problem but it made people hard to find anything that is more interesting than a smartphone. We already know the side effects of too much addiction of the smartphone, but still, we don’t want to give them up. The addiction of phone is not just a term for using it for excessively, but it is a distraction to keep ourselves busy.

Because of phones, we find ourselves incapable of sitting alone in the corner without using our phones. We love our phones not because we are addicted to them but rather we love them because we rely on it for the sake of being happy.

How to know if you’re addicted to phone and what can you do about it?

We humans aren’t born to be inherently addicted to technology or the information that we get from four corners of the screen of our smartphone. Rather, it is social expectations that we want to be accepted or part of something.

Even if we don’t admit it, we are narcissistic in a way that we feel rewarded when we being ‘liked’ and connected to other people through social media. These little words ‘like’ and ‘friend’ set off such deep and tender longings in our souls and a heartfelt understanding. We feel joy, happiness, and satisfaction when we get likes from our new profile picture and genuinely moved when we get message from love one.

Today’s technology is so advance that we can get the information just by looking in our phones. And sometimes we forget that there are more important things. As we are glued to our phones, we don’t realize we are forgetting:

The simple sound of jeepneys during traffic.
The red bracelet that your friend bought in Manila.
The cold air that brushed your face after a long productive day.
The feeling of being satisfied for no reason.
How nice is it to eat in a fancy restaurant.
The color of the sunset when you are on the beach.
How awkward someone become in from of their crush
The smile of a boy eating his Jollibee meal.
These little things are all waiting for a little attention.

If you examine everything, you will come up with two main two ideas:

1. Inability to focus on something without looking at the phone.
2. Always anticipating something. If you look closely, you always think about what people say about you.

A recent study called Hyper-natural Monitoring Hypothesis said that

"This natural urge points to just how much others matter to us, and how we want to matter to them. These are not cravings we should condemn of fear, but ones that we should embrace and learn to love well.”

The only way we can stop the addiction of smartphone is to know how and when to use them. The first step of freeing this social addiction is self-acceptance. Accept the things you don’t have and give importance to the things you have and surely you will be satisfied.

Rather than spending more time on a smartphone, we should spend it with our family. Our phones will come and go but our family will stay the same. After all, no amount of material can equal with our family.

References:
1, 2

Photo Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5