Graphic by Alex Greene and Ellie Kalatzi
He’s the last thing I think about before I go to sleep at night and the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. Without him with me, I feel incomplete. He is amazing and I can’t imagine a day without him.
I hope you’re not getting the wrong idea here. By ‘he’, I mean my iPhone 4S.
Psychologists say the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. In order to get on that road to recovery, I openly admit that I am overly attached to my phone and that this addiction is on its way to taking over my life.
Like many teenagers, I have a subconscious need to know everything that is going on with everyone at every second. As a result, the aspects of my phone to which I am most addicted are the ones that keep me socially connected (i.e. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and texting).
According to a Harris Interactive study, teenagers spend an average of 2.2 hours per day on their cell phones. In a year, that adds up to 803 hours or almost 34 days. Thinking about all that wasted time makes me sick.
But nonetheless, without knowing what everyone is doing at every second, I feel lost and excluded. If I can’t see what my friends are doing at all times, I feel even more left out.
It is absolutely necessary that while I am doing my homework, eating dinner with my family, lying in bed, or taking notes in math class, I must be in constant contact with my friends.
However, I knew my phone addiction had become a real problem when my friends took my phone away when I hung out with them.
When I’m reading for homework and have my phone next to me, I have an itch every five minutes to check for updates on all of my social networking apps. Then when I return my focus to the homework, I have to reread the last part because I’ve already forgotten what I’ve read. This distraction has caused me to take about three times as long to do my homework.
Loss of sleep because of overusing my phone while doing homework became a vicious cycle. Every night, I would take an unnecessarily long time to finish my homework because of the distraction of my phone and end up going to sleep late. Then the next day while I was doing my homework, I would not only be distracted by my phone but by my exhaustion which would only drag out the time it would take to complete my homework even more.
Just over the span of writing this article, I would estimate that I have sent 150 text messages, checked Instagram 50 times, looked at Twitter 25 times, and had my phone taken away by my parents twice.
As you can tell, I may have met with a big bump on my road to recovery.