How to know if we are smartphone’s addicted

The smartphone is now an “instrument” used for many different purposes. This little device, infact, allows us to call but even to keep us in contact with our friends through the socials, to play, to work and to do many other activities.
However, the usage of those devices, can sometimes became compulsive, with consequences not really positives.

Let’s discover together how to understand if we are smartphone’s addicted and which signs we can notice.

Usage and check

The first thing to verify to understand if we are really smartphone’s addicted is in which way we use it and how many times we check it.
All of us, for example, are used to check it over and over again, flipping through a social’s home or checking the messages. By the way, according to same recent researches one of the fastest way to check our addiction is just the one to leave our telephone somewhere and see for how long we can stay without touch it.
In some tests made for this reason, it’s been seen that mostly come out an incredible suffering that compulsivly pushed the person to check his smartphone even without doing any “concrete” action.
We need to ask ourselves, beyond that, if, for example, in the morning we can stand up before to check the telephone, or if we have the necessity to have it always next to us during the night.

Withdrawal and symptoms

Use the world withdrawal for the smartphone’s addiction is maybe an exaggeration but, for this reason, it’s essential to examine our mood while we haven’t free access to our smartphone.
If we are smartphone’s addicted, infact, the sensetions and the emotions that we feel in this cases will be absolutly negatives and they will make us irritables, tempered and nervous.
This kind of withdrawal is called from the experts “emotive withdrawal” and, basically, the person feel himself/herself far away and detached from the world even if the unusage period is short.
Of course if those symptoms happen it means that we have a clear withdrawal to the device.

The moments that make the difference

Another usefull method to understand if we are smartphone’s addicted  is to verify which are the moments where we mostly use the telephone.
Especially, the typical situation is when we are bored and we don’t have nothing to do, or when we really have a “valid” reason to check it (ex: my auntie tagged me on a facebook’s post).
Now, the situation is even more complicated than how it looks like. Everyone, infact, use the smartphone when we are bored, because the device allows us to spend some time doing something. However, this kind of mode can be one more time a withdrawal’s symptom if we do it few times per day.
To better understand: if we use the smartphone in the dentist’s hall two times per year it’s ok, but if we use it 6/7 times per day just because we are bored, surely this isn’t a good sign.

Push notifications

Finally, to understand if we are smartphone’s addicted we have to verify even our relationship with the notifications and everything about it. Unfortunatly, about this we have to say that the mechanism that is at the base of the notifications’ functioning is to show in real time the updates to the user.
However this can bring us to a real addiction that it becomes a compulsivly checking of our notifications. The best way to realise if we are addicted is to ask ourselves some questions like:

• When I wake up do I check the notifications?(Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp ecc.)
• Do I check the notifications even if I already checked them few minutes/seconds ago?
• If I wake up during the night, do I firstly check the notifications?
• Do I spend most of my free time on the socials?

If the answers to those questions are YES we are probably smartphone and socials’ addicted.

This post is also available in: Italiano