Put Down the Phone

By Alice O'Brien of Alice O'Brien Counselling, Newmarket

Does your phone give you a welcoming piece of information every Monday morning? Providing information on your screen time for the week. Showing you that you have spent four or five hours every day looking at your screen. Four or five hours scrolling Instagram, answering WhatsApp messages, checking Facebook or reading the news. Four or five hours that you could have spent talking to your family, concentrating on your work, or just looking up from the screen at the world around you.

We are all a slave to our phones; when the phone became small and portable, it also tightened its grip on us. Creating a dependency that we cannot help but fall into.

What are the mental health effects of our dependence on this device? Because, let’s face it; it has to be causing us some stress or disharmony.

• Smart phones are designed to be addictive, to keep us looking at them. This addiction leads to a loss of interest in other activities, anxiety when away from the phone and irritability and impatience in our everyday life.

• Our phones give us a lot of FOMO (fear of missing out). When we are constantly looking at what others are doing, we are disengaged from our own life, missing out on the joy of the things around us.

• Our phone is very disruptive to our concentration, therefore lessens our productivity and attention focus.

• Believe it or not, our phone can cause us to feel depressed. The news feeds we are continuously looking at can have a huge effect on our mood.

So, the key message is that although smart phones have developed the world, and opened up many communication pathways, they are not a substitute for real life. So, put down the phone and look up- there’s a lot to see.