Anxiety, Your Phone, and You
Did you know your phone can trigger a stress response in your body?
Maybe you did know because you’ve experienced it.
The dings and beeps keep you vigilant, perhaps – just as you’re sitting down with your tea, another comes through and your laert stays high.
Or it’s the anticipation of the dings that keeps you vigilant – continually checking to make sure you’re not missing something.
Or maybe it’s actually the content you’re encountering when you’re on your phone – the crises coming through the 24/7 news coverage.
The common denominator in all of these? Anxiety.
Consider this research finding:
“Both the content on your phone and the act of checking it frequently can trigger a stress response, which releases cortisol into the body,” says Dennis Buttimer, a life and wellness coach. “Too much cortisol can lead to anxiety and eventually, chronic disease.”
Or this one:
Dr. Nancy Cheever’s research suggests this:
“Phone-induced anxiety operates on a positive feedback loop, saying that phones keep us in a persistent state of anxiety and the only relief from this anxiety is to look at our phones.”
Anxiety’s no fun, as anyone who’s wrestled with it can tell you. (And that’s pretty much all of us, to one degree or another.)
So why would we want to increase the amount of it in our lives? We wouldn’t.
But many of us do anyway, inadvertently. The impulse you constantly feel to check your phone is thanks to its addictive nature – your brain releases dopamine whenever you pick up a screen, which makes you feel good and want to do it more.
But the problem, according the Buttimer, is that “a dopamine boost is temporary and leads to a letdown,” hence the creation of the feedback loop. Think of it as something like a caffeine crash – the high’s only temporary and eventually gives way to anxiety.
If this is something you struggle with, then you are not alone! Here are some easy things you can do with your phone to decrease your anxiety:
1. Use your phone less. This is the obvious one – take advantage of features like iPhone’s ‘Screen Time’ and set time limits that will help you spend less time staring at social media.
2. Turn off notifications. If you can, turn off all of your notifications except for texts and calls.
3. Set aside phone-free time. Pre-determine some time, once a week perhaps, to go entirely phone free – it could be a whole day or just a few hours. Allow your mind and your soul to exist without being consumed by your phone!
In our digital, Covid-themed world, anxiety levels are higher than they have ever been. But we don’t have to fall prey to it. Even simple changes can decrease our worry and increase our peace.
Spend time away from your phone. You won’t believe the difference.
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