Phone Use: Healthy or Compulsive?

5 steps to get your phone use under control.

Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Do you feel compelled to post a picture of your food when you dine out?

Do you find yourself busy recording your child's concert instead of fully enjoying it?

Do you click on your ex when you’re disillusioned with your current partner?

Do you experience FOMO when you don't check Instagram every day?

If so, you are not alone. I am currently visiting my 91-year-old mother in Concord, Massachusetts. Today, we dined with my two favorite cousins at the Fife and Drum, a restaurant run by inmates at the Northeastern Correctional Center since the 1970s. The rules are simple: no shorts, jeans, cleavage, purses, or cell phones. Essentially, show up with your cash, picture ID, and an empty stomach, and for just $3.21, you can enjoy a three-course meal, and it's delicious!

As we sat at the table enjoying homemade Caesar salad, chicken noodle soup, eggplant parm, peanut butter cake, and garbage cookies (I know, they were a first for me, too, and amazing), the conversation went something went like this:

"I wonder what that illness cousin so and so has entails, let me look it up. Oh yeah, I don't have my phone."

“Hey, I’ll show you a picture of my daughter's boyfriend. Oh, right, I can't. My phone is in the car."

"Let me see if my son texted from his first college tailgate. Oh my God. I feel so naked without my phone!”

Then we all chimed in. We all felt naked without, as my mom so aptly refers to our iPhones, “our third hands.”

And we are three women who came of age in the 1980s. What happened to us? Back in the day, we would get in the car, turn on the radio, sing at the top of our lungs to Def Leppard, and if we got lost, pull over and ask a human being for directions. And we lived to tell it. Now if we leave home without our phones, fear sets in. Fear of what? Boredom? Being out of touch? Off the grid? Missing something? Never finding our way home?

Whether we would like to admit it, even the healthiest among us is attached. But it is important to stop and inquire...

• Does listening to the news first thing in the morning cause me to feel more informed and have a better day or frustrate me and put me in a bad mood?
• Does checking the number of followers and likes I have make me feel powerful or as if I’ve given my power away?
• Does comparing my insides to someone else's highlight reel serve me?
• Maybe the most important question is: Do I have a healthy attachment to technology or is it veering into being unhealthy and/or compulsive?

Technology so easily satisfies our needs for distraction, interaction, a change in environment, and stimulation quickly and efficiently that it releases dopamine. This causes structural changes in the brain very similar to those experienced by people with alcohol or drug addiction. And these changes may lead to impairments in our decision-making, reasoning, executive and cognitive functioning, emotional processing, and working memory.

Researchers began to investigate the concept of internet addiction disorder (not an official diagnosis in the DSM-5) in 1998, and compulsive overuse of technology has risen over the past two decades. It is associated with mental illnesses such as impulse control disorder, ADHD, anxiety, increased substance use, and depression. Physically, it is linked with a higher risk of cardiometabolic disease, sleep disturbances, and fatigue. According to the Center for Internet & Technology Addiction, 85% of Americans go online daily, 31% of American adults are online “almost constantly,” and 35% of people have an "internet addiction."

Here are five tips to help ensure that you don’t fall into compulsive technology use and remain an active participant in your life rather than a mere spectator.

Technology Gatekeeping Tips

1. Make a List of 25 Things You Love: Include hobbies, creative passions, things you want to try, places you want to go, and people you care about, and be intentional. Put one tech-free adventure or social event on the calendar every week. (More if possible!)

2. Spend the First Hour of Your Day Tech-Free: Meditate, stretch, journal, clear yourself of yesterday’s resentments, make a gratitude list, and ask questions like, What do I feel? Need? Want? What actions can I take on my behalf? When we give ourselves the gift of our own attention, we are less likely to be hijacked by outside distractions and more focused, motivated, and conscious in our own lives.

3. Make an Order of Operations (PEMDAS) in Your Daily Life: Know your first five priorities in order of importance. Things like: family, career, school, spirituality, friends, chores... and make sure you attend to them first. With technology at our fingertips and being reachable 24/7, we can be tired by the end of the day, and we haven’t attended to the people or things we hold most dear. Using a PEMDAS makes tech-use an “in addition to” rather than “in replacement of.”

4. Use Technology, Instead of Letting It Use You: Don’t fall prey to zoning out on tech when you know you could be doing something more meaningful in your life or connecting in real-time with someone you love. Use technology as a “Yes, and...” to enhance your life — affording you more information, knowledge, career advancement, connection, and entertainment.

5. Control Technology, so It Doesn’t Have Control Over You: Have boundaries around: what you use it for, how much time you spend using it, and when. For example: maybe make social media scrolling or watching your favorite show an end-of-a-day well-spent reward rather than an all-consuming, anytime-free-for-all distraction in your life.