Addiction of Smartphones, and how you can outsmart it

Good old days...

It’s a digital world today, where technology has become a very integral part of how we communicate. You may not notice this today, but think about those times when your far-away grandparents wrote snail mails to your mother which would arrive via post and were some few pages long. The pages had a long handwritten letter on it, which would carry practically a news update of not only their own family members but the entire locality at large. You may remember your mother smiling or dripping a few tears while reading those.

Think about those times when one had to wait in the post office to just make a 15 minutes STD call and the operator could literally listen to the entire ordeal discussed over the call.

Even pictures were printed and kept in albums which would have pictures which would often have some papaya-shaped shadow covering a substantial amount of the photograph; only to discover later that our Einstein cousin, was way too careless while holding the camera and didn’t realize that his finger was covering the lens.

Things are quite different today, you rely on the blue tick of the Whatsapp message you sent to know whether your friend is actually busy or just too lazy to take you to that long pending treat. You can make not just free national and international roaming calls, but can also make free video-calls over the internet. Today, you take pictures on your cellphones, on which you can apply literally a million filters before deciding to take another selfie as your face’s angel in the picture is giving away the fact that you have a visible double-chin; which may result in lesser “likes” when you post it on Instagram or Facebook. In fact you are reading this article on a screen which scrolls up on you touch, instead of wetting the corners of a magazine’s pages to help flipping it.

Sci-Fi movies have shown us many a times how robots would one day control humans and it can be an ultimate war of survival between the Electronic and the Organic. But that’s a movie, right? It will never be true, will it? Well, guess what, something similar has already begun! Its right here in our houses; in our own families.

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Is your Smartphone in your pocket, or the tables have turned?

Our lives are so overly effected by a small device that comes in our pant pockets that we feel incomplete and panicky the entire day, if we forget our phones at home while leaving for work.

Kids today play games on their parents’ phones; teenagers are apparently tickling their phone’s screens with their thumbs every time you look at them. Even as adults we can find ourselves chatting on some social media, getting deeply affected if our Facebook post doesn’t get enough likes, or taking countless selfies in oddest of the places as if we have no better things to do. You may not find it hard to recall someone close to your busy fiddling on his or her phone while you are talking to them.

The saddest part of this is that our phones have become more important than the people we talk to, on them; or the jobs that have made us being able to buy those devices. Today Smartphone Addiction is an actual psychological disease; and most of the world population is a victim.

A very common instance that you may have seen is; how babies get addicted to phones at a very small age, as parents find it easy to run a video on the phone to distract the baby while they can feed the little one with ease. Slowly, the baby’s brain gets trained so much that he/she will not eat until he/she has a phone in hand on which perhaps a Youtube video is playing.

And since we are talking so much about the social aspect of it, you might as well want to look at a little on the health aspect. We all have heard about how cell phone radiation can cause heart risks or decreased fertility, but since most of us believe too less of it and/or have a mammoth of a confidence on our own vitality; let’s talk about the more practical ones, shall we?

We have all seen the superheroes on the road with supernatural powers of driving and texting at the same time. For your information, approximately 660,000 drivers are attempting to use their phones while behind the wheel of an automobile. The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year. Fun fact: Answering a text takes away your attention for about five seconds. Traveling at 60 kmph, that's enough time to travel the length of a football field. You do the math.

Keeping your phones nearby while you sleep contribute greatly on damaging brain cells, more so to children and the elderly. So, may be you would want to just send a nice Good Night emoji to your buddy and actually sleep without your phone literally an inch away from you.

Also, your angle of your head while you type a text is one of the worst position you can have according to the physiotherapists. The position is a sure-shot expressway to a cervical pinch nerve. So next time you have a bad neck pain which shoots down from the neck to your upper back; you can comfortably blame your best friends who takes it as his duty to text you every five minutes and you, being the good friend that you are, reply with complete vigour.

How to Outsmart your Smartphone?

There are some very simple ways of getting rid of this addiction and it requires no medication. So below are five super organic, non-cosmetic ‘Habit Pills’ you might want to take:

• Keep your phone away in a drawer, cupboard or (even better) a locker, before you go to bed at night. It will help you sleep on time as you won’t waste hours chatting before you finally realize it 2:00 am on a weekday and lay down to sleep as you need to go for work in the morning. This way you will also be saving your brain cells from getting damaged.

• It’s a good idea to hide your spouse’s phone and ask him/her to do the same to yours – calling it a “See my Face and not Facebook” game. Set a time until which both of you would not start looking for the phone. This will help you to grow closer as you will be spending quality time with your special one, and you will also gradually develop a habit of not having your phone with you all the while.

• Take only one phone in a group when going out to a nearby place like grocery shopping, or morning walks. This ensures that you separate yourself from your phone for a while but still ensuring a communication media, if there is an emergency. Ensure that the person with the most low-end phone carries it.

• Switch off the internet in your phone while you are working on something important, or more so, while driving. You will have a substantially low rate of app-notifications which usually urge you to check your phone. You’ll be surprised to discover, that the people you spend so much time with on social media, don’t actually remember you that much once you are off the Internet. (note how many calls you get then – like, actual phone calls. Hint: there won’t be many). Also you will be saving a few lives as you won’t be bumping your car into them while you look at your cell phone screen.

• Play a game with your spouse/ friend/ colleague/ room-mate, where you have to drop one rupee in a designated “Gotcha! Jar” for every time the other person catches you looking at your phone while he/she is talking to you (and vice-versa, of course). The money collected in the jar at the end of the month/week can be used to order a pizza. We are pretty sure, after 2 or 3 rounds your partner would not love the idea of paying more for a pizza you both will have equally.

Follow these and we guarantee you will discover some very interesting things about people around you, develop a new hobby or probably improve relationships with your family members. So go ahead, take charge, and show your Smartphone - who's the boss!

- Arindam Mitra