Phone Addiction By Matt Bouma-Hannam

     I don't think I have realized how much my phone addiction has really become. My screen time daily adds up to about three hours a day. I truly feel upset by this number and see those three hours every day as three hours wasted. But what I started to realize after reading about the 24-hour phone free challenges was how many times I picked my phone up just to see if there were messages. Even if there were no messages, I would still check it, again and again, every five minutes. This annoying need to constantly check my phone bothered me, and I decided to figure out why it happens. 

     One reason for this obsession, according to Melody Wilding a Licensed Master of Social Work, is what is called operant conditioning. This is where our actions are modified based on rewards and consequences. She stated that in order to train animals to do certain things, rather than constantly rewarding them, you should reward them occasionally and randomly. This is known as intermittent reinforcement. Wilding described this with us humans and our phones. Every time we check our messages or refresh our screen to see if there is more information, we will sometimes see the new messages and sometimes we won't. The reward is the new message, and the very possibility of there being another one, no matter what it is, is what keeps us there on our phones. 

     American Journalist Sharon Begley devotes much of her time to criticizing new revelations in science, and her view on compulsions seemed to corroborate that of Wilding in her work Can't Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions. She too claimed that our compulsions are a result of a "pleasure, reward circuit." However, Begley also talked about how dopamine affects this process. She first stated that dopamine was found to be addictive in the 1950s and how now we are compelled to do certain things that will raise our hopes (or dopamine levels) to make us feel better when reality falls short of our expectations. 

     Begley's work allows us to see that it is, in fact, a balance of chemicals in our bodies that causes us to be so attached to our devices. My main takeaway from this research is that maybe I could seek other forms of pleasure other than my phone in order to keep myself happy (or my dopamine levels high). On the other hand, it could be beneficial to lower my expectations of happiness to prevent my dopamine levels from plummeting. This may be a difficult task, but it will definitely be worth it to bring myself back to the real world and away from my compulsions to look at a screen.  

https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-real-reason-youre-always-checking-your-phone/

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/why-keep-checking-phone-psychology-smartphone-notifications-social-media-a7572916.html