My Smartphone, My Anxiety

I’m not an anxious person, but I do get anxious. And few things make me more anxious than my “smartphone.”

While there’s emerging research on this, plus a recent report that Apple plans to do something about it, I would like to point out by personal experience the ways that my phone is the thing in my life that’s most anxiety inducing, and how some steps I’ve taken have really reduced this tendency.

How the phone pulls you in

My phone’s biggest seductions are its colors and sounds. An endless array of them. Each Operating System update seems to enhance them.

The colors pull me in. Think of a child and its instant attraction to colors or the vast array of colors for fruits that ensures in nature (and the grocery) it gets noticed and consumed. We’re wired to connect to colors.

The sounds (the sounds!) also keep me coming back. Every ping, ding and dong, at every pitch, telling me of something important, reminding me I too must be important and my needed response therefore urgent.

And so I pick up the phone, descending into another rabbit hole of text, email or Instagram (or a game update or a traffic or weather report or a COVID warning). But whatever little dopamine (or cortisol) hit these may give me it’s a form of torture.

Really, torture.^[1]At these times I picture, however misguidedly, a prisoner of war about to fall asleep only to have some violent sound prodding him awake. Or another example. When my smoke alarm’s battery is … Continue reading  Because getting pulled out of concentration is, for me, akin to low-grade torture.

One would think I’d be repulsed by all this. Yet since owning a mobile phone for the last 10 years I noticed I had developed a compulsion. Every moment of uncertainty (which is too readily felt, if it’s consciously felt at all, as anxiety), boredom, social awkwardness, intellectual/emotional challenge or fear was dealt with by picking up the phone.

If it was there I was picking it up. It was accompanied by a nearly subconscious self-loathing: I knew I was wasting my time, staring as I was into this mindless glow and yet I’d become so sedated by it that I let it go on.

It got to the point where I could feel my time and my life slipping away and I could literally feel the muscles in my face sag in the process. This was dread.

Concentration

I remember my grandfather explaining to me in his very humble way that most of the 250+ things he invented in his life occurred on the very trail in South Central Pennsylvania that we were hiking. I’ve since come to understand that my concentration is among the most sacred things I possess. Not an object, but a state of being.

To concentrate is to achieve something profound. It’s to become exposed and vulnerable to that which is in front of me. It’s to tolerate that thing but even more important to tolerate myself and my reaction to that thing. And this in turn allows me to go places—in mind and spirit—in ways utterly new. Life in this state imitates, becomes, art.

But each ping and ding is an obliteration of that sacred act.

And it’s not just the actual sounds; I’ve found it’s the anticipation of those sounds. Before I reigned in my phone use, so accustomed to communication from my phone had I become that I found myself mentally and physically referencing it (that is, either thinking about it or picking it up) in utterly normal endeavors, such as talking with a friend or loved one or grocery shopping or waiting at a stoplight.

I felt like my brain was in a trap, a prison.

And so I ask myself, for what? Really, for what, am I trading this focus, this key part of my life, away? A text message, an email, an Instagram post. How cheap, how utterly sad. That for me, I realized, is a life not worth living.

How we got here

Stupid, useless but still desirous apps (e.g., you can fill in the blank!) aside, the phone it seems has become a device of necessity. This is done through a simple trick: pack as many necessary apps into it and consumers will have a very hard time doing without it. Maps, alarms, calculators, cameras (and a partial lifetime of photos), calendars, flashlights, music collections, wallets and bank accounts, retail stores with an unprecedented array of goods and junk.

Who could live without all this?

The phone, for untold millions, isn’t a symptom of our age, it’s the necessary hub of it.

Okay but do I want that, at least for me, to continue?

I’m no Luddite (despite my friends’ allegations!) but I do wish to discern what’s truly useful and what’s not. I view the smartphone as transitory, much like an iPad or a compact disc or a Zune. Something else will come along, has to. And I just don’t want to spend my waking hours (which, it really is worth stating, make up my life) engaged with something so unnecessary, temporary, disposable—a mere trend of my era.

I’d not say that of some other things I engage with.

My phone awaits the ever expanding trash bin of obsolete tech. How quickly it arrives there should tell me something of its inherent worth.

No matter how much tech is thrown my way I view it merely as yet another transitory thing thrown my way, which I’m expected to consume so for two primary reasons: first, to feel part of a group (the tech world plays on this to tell us that we’re “connected”^[2]Much like Starbucks calling its small coffees “tall,” tech employs any number of euphemisms for its products. FaceTime for an app that denies us the actual thing; smartphone for a device … Continue reading) and of course so that others may profit, until those others migrate to the next new thing, pulling me along with them in their ongoing experiments.

My friends point out I’m a late adopter. That may be true. But of certain actions moving forward I hope to be merely a non-adopter.