In this day in age, the mobile phone is a safety net and lifeline for most people, especially for the younger generations. The dependency on phones, social media, and technology in general has sky rocketed over the past years, but this dependency is beginning to cause major issues. In my personal experience, I used to be very addicted to my phone and in some ways I still am. However, over the years I've started to realize I don't need social media and things like that because they actually make me feel worse, especially about myself. If you have seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix it explains the addiction of phones and social media and it is super eye-opening. Nomophobia is the fear of being without access to a working cellphone (Merriam Webster). This phobia has been recently looked into and it has various affects on the people that suffer from this.
In an article by Iqbal Ahmad Farooqui et al., they compiled data of 145 first year medical students in Pune city. They found that nomophobia was very prevalent in these students and the majority of males and females had moderate cases of nomophobia. In males, 56.06% had moderate and 24.24 had a severe case, whereas in females, 63.25% had moderate and 20.25% had a severe case (Farooqui, 2018). This data shows that there is a high percentage of student that have nomophobia and this is just from one school and small sample size.
Additionally, I researched the effects of nomophobia on people that have this phobia. In an article I found by Mesut Yavuz et. al., they discuss how nomophobia has a great impact on adolescents psychological well-being, and both social and academic functions (Yavuz, 2019). They also determined a correlation with nomophobia and both alexithymia (difficulty expressing emotions and showing empathy) and metacognitive problems. They also found that this correlation was significantly higher in females than in males. This shows that nomophobia and the addiction to phones is causing psychological issues in many individuals, especially adolescents. This is an continuing problem and with our world today and the growth in technology, this problem will most likely always be a factor in individuals' lives.
References:
Daei A, Ashrafi-Rizi H, Soleymani MR. Nomophobia and Health Hazards: Smartphone Use and Addiction Among University Students. Int J Prev Med. 2019 Nov 28;10:202. doi: 10.4103/ijpvm.IJPVM_184_19. PMID: 31879551; PMCID: PMC6921283.
Nomophobia. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nomophobia.
Yavuz M, Altan B, Bayrak B, Gündüz M, Bolat N. The relationships between nomophobia, alexithymia and metacognitive problems in an adolescent population. Turk J Pediatr. 2019;61(3):345-351. doi: 10.24953/turkjped.2019.03.005. PMID: 31916711.
Hi Whitney!
ReplyDeleteWow, this is an awesome post to read that really hits home. Technology is such an addicting tool and I definitely catch myself getting too wrapped up in my phone at times.
One study I found examined nomophobia in undergraduate students and discovered that 23% of the students had nomophobia and 64% of students were at risk of developing nomophobia-- that's an insanely high percentage (Bhattacharya et al., 2019). Since technology is continually becoming more prevalent in our world, this is a statistic that I predict will continue to increase.
To further complicate matters, the study found that people that frequently used their cell phones had a lower GPA and higher levels of anxiety (Bhattacharya et al., 2019).
This phobia is not only harming social connections, it's impacting performance in school and mental health as well.
I think that there needs to be more education addressing this phobia as it can become very detrimental to those that it impacts. I know that Yale used to have a college class on "how to be happy," maybe they should teach one on healthy habits for overcoming nomophobia too!
Bhattacharya, S., Bashar, M. A., Srivastava, A., & Singh, A. (2019). NOMOPHOBIA: NO MObile PHone PhoBIA. Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, 8(4), 1297. https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_71_19