Are You Addicted to Your Smartphone?

Do you have recurring compulsion to use your smart phone, despite harmful consequences to your mental state, social life or social etiquette? Are you strongly attached to your smart phone and dedicate your time to use throughout the day and night? If your answers are yes to above questions, then you should read this article and take control back with cautious approach to use your smart phone what it really is necessary.

Let us not give wrong picture here; smart phones are great to connect with people, to access information and to organize your lives. Smart phone obviously has added value in our lives saves us time and money. See it here on how it is handy when you need it.

However it is important to make conscious effort so that we manage the smart phone not the smart phone manages us.

Mental State Damage

Smart phones in some cases create false sense of urgency to people to check their emails every 10 minutes. Being so much overloaded and easily accessible by others overwhelm us. It takes away our sustained focus and interpretive thinking ability. We are losing the opportunity to be alone with our thoughts and peace in our mind.

Average person receives 10 to 20 emails every day. Only 1 or 2 are important. If someone reach to you urgently via email, that is his mistake to use wrong communication channel. He should call you or text you. Therefore, there is no need really to follow up your personal email to overstretch yourself to filter out all junk email. Nobody can accomplish such tasks. We need to prioritize works in our life.

Social Etiquette Degeneration

Smart phone changes our social etiquette. When you are in restaurant eating with friends, family or someone new, it is important to have eye contact and show that you listen to them. People with smart phone usually try to text under table at the meeting or their head down to look their smart phone. People try to get something done with their smart phone during the congregation, funeral or even driving a car. People take the phone call while eating in dinner table with friends or even worse texting during driving. Even people are texting from funeral and try to update friends who could not make it there.

Social Life Disruption

Smart phone disrupts our social life. Many people carry their work blackberries when they are on their vacations. They are capturing their photo with their mobile phone where ever they and uploaded to Facebook or YouTube right away without considering privacy of their children and their lives. They are answering phone call when they are in bathroom. Level of communication has increased by smart phone but does it have better value?

The more we use smart phone, the less time lefts for our children and family. What is even worse, we often give another smart phone so that children should not bother us.

Physical Damage

There is already debate out there in healthcare community regarding cell phone cause brain cancer and infertility in men. Also studies shows that phones are germ magnet. Hospitals are alert and not letting visitor to get in to certain area of hospital with cell phone.

Diagnosing and recognizing the problem help to solve the issue. Here are some of the symptoms of this problem.

• You keep your phone with you all the time.
• You cannot spend your 24 hours without your smartphone
• You have downloaded more than 10 applications.
• You have 5 different personal emails.
• You wake up in the middle of the night to go bathroom, you take your blackberry and smartphone to check your work and private emails.
• You are looking at your inbox says no new messages. You are keep refreshing and thinking it is not true.
• You are telling others best way to contact him through email and you tell them that you check your email at least 2 times a day.
• You have more than 500 people in your Facebook or Google+ accounts and you do not meet 99% personally during the whole month.

Smart phone ownership is on the rise. There are people who likes to keep their old phone and happy about it. They claim their old phone battery last a week and has better reception with low cost of ownership. Nevertheless, smartphone is enabling us to do so much good things with tools such internet, maps, search, email, camera, camcorder, music player, video player and e-reader. It is really not an option to solve the problem. We should pick the right phone based on our need. If that choice rightfully the smartphone, we should find different approach and way to handle the problem. Smart phone> offer tools, (internet, maps, search, email, camera, music player, video player, reader etc...).

Once you know that you have smartphone addiction, you can take measure to solve your problem. With conscious effort and proper communication, you can slowly take the control of your lives.

• Tell people around you that you will not instantly response your email or take their call all the time. If it is urgent, they should follow up with text message.
• Take quick break to outside of the office and do not carry your phone with you.
• Unsubscribe all newsletter and yahoo groups etc.
• Completely separate your private and work email. If you have multiple emails address consolidate to only one. Emails are so reliable these days do not worry about; you will be impacted from any outage.
• Use phone conversation to communicate things does not require going over documents. If email goes back and forth 3 times. Do not respond and give a call to person
• Take your time and write professional email with correct spelling and grammar.

As a conclusion, we need to embrace the technology and create the balance between technology and life. If we do not take control, Smartphone addiction may cause serious consequences ranging from a traffic accident to strained relationship.