Nomophobia - Get Over It !

Case 1.Take a walk down any busy road. We see hordes of Ozone Layer Annihilators (Read vehicles) and then we see a sea of humanity walking with their heads bowed down. The issue here is their heads are not bowed down to check if they are treading the right path, and certainly not in humility. It’s bowed down staring away at the mean machine that is taking away all visible traces of Social Interaction.

Case 2. Take a flight to any destination. As the airplane’s wheels kisses the runway, One’s ears are treated to an imperfect symphony of beeps, tings and pings. Oh yes, its that same mean machine showing its ugly face to their owners who go about informing the world that they have just touched down. Cant it wait?

Cell phone addiction is real and scary. It is a materialistic form of substance abuse. With the smartphone industry growing at the rate of knots, the epidemic has just gotten worse. So much that Wikipedia has a separate page dedicated to Smartphone Addiction. Well Played wiki. With 6 billion active cellphone subscriptions as of October, 2012, and with thousands joining in each day, we are not far from the day when it will overtake the human population. It might already have.

So, where did this addiction come from? It starts with Cell Phones replacing almost every non-trivial thing in our daily life. We use our phones as alarm clocks, calendar, camera, entertainment hub etc. All this apart from “Connecting People” of course. The connecting people part of cell phones has also reached annoying heights, with people hooked onto messaging and calling their friends and relatives for abnormally long time periods. Actual Social interactions, and not texting or whatsapping people, has become next to non-existent.

People have become embarrassingly dependent on their mean machines. They almost feel insecure without their cell phones around them. But then if substance abuse has rehabilitation programs, this kind of addiction should be much easier to get out of isn't it? Try these few tips :

• Have a no cell phone time for yourself and stick to it. Let’s say 2 hours. Use that time to follow a hobby, learn something new or meet that friend who lives right across the street but all u do is text them.
• Use Prepaid and not postpaid connections. It might give you some sort of control.
• Smartphone users, turn off your mail notifications. No mail is that important that you have to respond to it the very next second.
• Also, switch off the facebook and twitter notifications. These apps send notifications for every damn thing, and it just increases your screen time.
• Perhaps once a week, leave your cell-phone home. The world was surviving before they entered our life and you shouldn’t face much of a problem too.
• Keep your phone in silent mode. Always. It has helped me lots personally.

 Try these small tricks. Your life will be better. Use your cell phone, and don’t let it use you. 

Oh! Just in case you are wondering, Nomophobia is the fear of being out of mobile phone contact.