A complete guide for students!
The youth today: ‘I can’t live without my phone.’
“Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Games!”
These apps occupy the majority time of teenagers today. While they are helpful in some way or the other, people forget that they are using it too much and wasting their time recklessly. Phone addiction is just a little more less severe and harmful than that of drugs or alcohol!
But why?
When we spend more time on social media or playing games, we are minimizing interactions with real people: family and friends. What people don’t realize is that they get lost in the ‘Virtual world’. ‘Mobile phones have connected us with people sitting miles away, but in course, we are getting far from people close to us.’ You may have noticed how strange you feel sitting with real people after being lost in the ‘internet world’ for a long period of time! Frustration and peevishness are symptoms of phone addiction. Also, if you’re not wise enough to know the apps where you’re wasting your time, you are destroying your academics, your career and your future by wasting seconds , in which you could have learnt something beneficial!
Why are we so addicted to phone?
For many people, social interaction stimulates the level of dopamine. Phones, today are a tool of social interaction, thus we become so addicted to constantly check messages and texts for a hit of dopamine, which makes us feel pleasure.
How can we get over it?
If you are a student, you may have realized that you use your phone just too much and you want to minimize it, but the addiction, by now, has become so strong that you are finding it difficult, isn’t it? You have noticed it’s severe impact on your studies too. You may not be feeling like studying because of the current ‘online schooling system’, and to pass time, you don’t have something interesting to do other than scrolling your fingers over the screen, right?
You’re at the right place, let’s discuss some points by which you can get over this addiction. We don’t have to stop using it , as of course, studies and jobs are totally virtual in such times, but we should use it in a more sensible way.
1. Turn notifications off: In the world of pinging notifications which creates the urge to see ‘who texted me’, ‘what’s this new offer’ and food delivery apps making mouths water’, by all types of sensory marketing, it is difficult to concentrate on the work you were doing. So, it’s better that you turn these provoking notifications off. Trust me, your messages will not be deleted if you don’t enable the notification ping to lead you to the respective app and check it later on after completing your work or studies!
2. Analyse where’s your time going: Sometimes you doesn’t even notice and time just flies away. Don’t let that happen. Keep a track of the time you spend on your phone, using digital wellbeing apps. Then, by appropriate behaviours, try minimizing their use. For example: If you feel you’re using Instagram too much, try putting a fixed timer on it and train your mind for it.
3. Try replacing: The best thing to stop a bad habit is replacing it with a good one! If you can’t put your phone down after snoozing the alarm and end up wasting your energetic morning time, try using an alarm clock instead. If you are caught with the bad habit of taking the phone in the washroom or not being able to sleep without using it at night, try switching to reading good books or novels! Their addiction is far more better than this.
4. Focusing on studies and motivation: This method is something related to self-motivation. No one can stop you from achieving targets if you have trained your subconscious mind and you’re motivated to study. It’s understandable that this is a little difficult in such times, but you have to! You have to make yourself understand that whatever the conditions are, you have to study, you have to get away from distractions and you have to stop wasting your precious time.
5. Using your phone in the most effective way: We talked about the negative impacts phone have in our lives. But it’s true that if you have a phone with a normal data connection, you have the entire world in your hands! You can learn and explore beyond limits! Even if you’re zero in any field and you want to learn it, like- design, marketing, freelancing, there are no hurdles if you put your efforts in the right direction. Instead of watching useless videos on YouTube, let’s look at the thousands of knowledgeable videos it contains! And wait, you have Google, you can read and learn any topic, may it be study related or just be your area of interest! So, every coin has two sides and you are to choose between the two!
I hope these points helped you in some way or the other. And remember, “You can’t do big things if you are distracted by small ones.”
~Deepti Jain