Trapped in a mobile phone? Let us find freedom!
Trapped in a mobile phone? Let us find freedom!
Gadgets have been our faithful assistants for many years now: they will tell you the news, entertain you, tell you how best to get somewhere, give you the opportunity to shop without leaving home and make your life easier in many other ways. All this is just great - until the moment when using such an assistant turns into an addiction.
Excessive attachment to gadgets, especially to a mobile phone, is a widespread phenomenon and to a greater extent it affects us, the fair sex. Why? Because most men have things to do outside the home that do not give them the opportunity for long-term close communication with their “digital friend”. Women are more often busy with things that allow them to keep their phone in their hand. Almost ten years ago, scientists from South Korea found out that gadget mania is more developed among women. Therefore, almost every one of us is at risk and many have already fallen into this addiction, which over time begins to have a depressing effect on the psyche, increases anxiety, deprives us of vitality and has a detrimental effect on our health and, accordingly, on the quality of our existence in society.
Based on the fact that saving the drowning is primarily the work of the drowning themselves, let us discuss what we ourselves can do if we notice that our gadget is starting to turn from a faithful assistant into an obsessive centr of our existence - or, in the words of a famous character from Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings”, into “our preciousness”.
Steps to getting out of addiction
- Get rid of unnecessary notifications. Turn off push messages from online stores, news channels and irrevocably delete applications that we visit simply out of habit, which have already become a burden. We leave notifications only from people we really need – family, friends, colleagues – and a few necessary groups or applications.
- Provide yourself with an alternative. In this regard, it is difficult to think of anything better than live communication: invite girlfriends or relatives to walk together in the garden or park, go to the theatre or a cafe – this will make it easier for us to distract ourselves from the second-by-second desire to scroll through the news feed.
- Use... laziness. Yes, yes, sometimes an enemy can become, if not a friend, then at least an ally. For example, some of us complain that we cannot teach our children to read. However, children follow our example and what example can they follow from a mother buried in a smartphone? So, we do this: we put our mobile phone at the opposite end of the room and place closer an interesting novel, which we have long planned to read but could not find the time to because of the mostly meaningless flow of information from the phone. If we know how to do needlework, that is great too: we put some beautiful threads and knitting needles or colored beads at hand... Our laziness will help us choose a pastime that does not require us to get up.
- Divide and conquer. We often use our phones, so to speak, not for their intended purpose, or rather, because of their additional functions: as a camera, we check the time on it, etc. Let us get a wristwatch, a player with headphones, a camera for the time when getting rid of the addiction and use them when necessary, rather than reaching for the smartphone in all life’s situations.
Those who managed to get rid of gadget addiction thanks to various methods, including the above, admit that their lives have changed for the better. These people literally opened their eyes, their energy, confidence, and peace of mind returned and they discovered that they have enough time for live communication with their family, for admiring nature and for self-development. Enough of that precious time that was previously wasted on the mobile phone.
