If Subway Surfers or Satisfying Slime Videos need to play in the background of all your activities, or you instinctively turn on Instagram whenever you unlock your phone, you might have an addiction to your phone. A student from the University of Waterloo gathered researchers’ 5 categories of addiction:
- Virtual Relationships – obsession over online relationships through social media, which can often be false (think “catfishing”)
- Informational Overload – a sense of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) due to an overload of easily accessible information. This often leads to doomscrolling (more on this later).
- Gaming Addiction – the addiction to the cycle of unpredictable reinforcement and rewards that is provided by different virtual games.
- Network Compulsions – winning and acquiring new items, especially money, through activities including online shopping, trading, and gambling.
- Cybersex Addiction – the overuse and addiction to online pornography.
Phone addiction and overuse has many negative consequences. These include:
- poorer academic performance
- sleep deprivation
- depression and anxiety
- persistent underlying feelings of guilt
- ridiculously short attention span
The Slot Machine Theory
Psychologists have found that social media apps and games create a sense of variable reinforcement, a sense of eagerness of not knowing whether the next cycle brings a reward or dissatisfaction. This is often modelled after gambling concepts, which are known to alter brain chemistry and make users more susceptible to anxiety and depression.
In the context of social media, this variable reinforcement looks like pulling down your feed to reload new posts, or scrolling down to the next TikTok or Instagram Reel. Similar to a slot machine, you don’t know whether or not you’ll strike something dissatisfying and useless (which is most of the time) or if you’ll find a reward. Dissatisfying information looks different to everyone, and satisfying information often looks like validation from others in the forms of likes, comments, and shares.
Anger in Social Media
Because of the constant search for rewards in social media, creators and programmers often make controversial posts to receive views and interactions. This is more commonly known as “rage bait.”
Provocative posting has majorly influenced aggression, perception of racism and social issues, as well as politics. Because the algorithm of social media and gaming is primed to show you more of what you like, it can provide extreme information or only provide the singular perspective on an issue that you interacted with. This leads to misinformation and lack of awareness.
What We Can Do:
Now that your guilt has been further exacerbated by the beginning of this post, here is a list of some of the actions you can take to reduce your screen time.
- Set your phone to Grayscale
- Hide social media apps by removing them from your home screen, so you can only access them through the app library, or even better…
- …Delete social media apps. Nobody that doesn’t have your number will miss you that much, I promise.
- Leave your phone in a separate room
- Turn on DND (do not disturb) with exceptions for your emergency contacts, and leave it on indefinitely.
- Keep your charger outside your bedroom.
- Only use a very short charger, or use a charging station.
- Use Screen Time Limits (start at about 1 hour, and work your way down from there. Too much too fast will be too difficult to stick to.)
- Create boundaries (areas where the phone is banned)
- Schedule times and limits to check your phone
- Pick up a hobby
- Go outside
- Use an old fashioned alarm clock instead of your phone
- Log out of all social media and gaming accounts after using them, and set different passwords for each profile
- Tell someone that you’re trying to stay off your phone, and stay around them the entire day. Report back to them at the end.
- Track and log your screen time.
- Remind yourself of all the things you could be doing instead
- Use your lock screen wallpaper to remind you of what your phone causes you to miss out on
- Set a phone curfew (ex: no phone after 8pm)
- Bookmark this article so that you can come back!
TL;DR
This article was not that long. If you scrolled to the bottom to get a quick summary, your attention span is fried and you should start healing it by reading the full thing.