Life vs the Cell Phone Addiction

Not too long ago, I use to think that my cell phone was the best thing ever. Throughout the day I could easily check my email, send a quick text, tweet, update Facebook, and Google to my heart’s content. Technology had made my life sooo easy. Then my view on how wonderful it was being plugged in all the time changed. Here are a few events/experiences that made me question what the heck I was doing:

This happened a while ago, but it is still burned in my memory. I was at a restaurant enjoying breakfast. At one point, I looked at the table across from me and saw two people eating breakfast together…or should I say separately. They both had their phones out and did not say one freaking word to each other the entire time. I don’t think that they even looked away from their phones until the waitress came over and forced the interaction. Not one single word. Now, I don’t know the dynamics of their relationship, and maybe not talking works for them, but in my humble opinion, it was sad. Of course, at the time did it stop me from checking my phone? Of course not, but I wasn’t as bad as them, since I was only checking my phone periodically, right?

Ding. Get my phone out and check. Ding. Check my phone. Ding, ding, ding… It is non-stop. Well, during sxsw my cell phone connection almost became nonexistent due to the amount of  people using the lines. As a result, there were black out periods where nothing could get through…..no more dings. Imagine that, almost a week without constant notifications. The day after I got home from sxsw, I was making dinner and every few seconds I would hear a ding. As usual, I would stop what I was doing and run over to check it. However, it never stopped. I could feel myself getting more and more anxious everytime it went off. What if it was an emergency? What if it was really important? What if……  Why did my relaxed feeling while in Austin disappear into anxiety now that I was home? Then it hit me…I was a slave to checking my phone, and as a result it was causing anxiety. I immediately turned off my notifications and put my phone in my purse so I couldn’t see the little light flash either. I had decided that making dinner was more important than anything coming through on that phone.

The absolute biggest impact on me though, was the wise question from my five year old….”Mommy, why are you always on the phone?” That was it. There was NO good answer to that question.

Later, I sat there thinking how I had made that phone a priority over a lot of other things in my life. Things that really mattered were made to wait, while I checked the notorious ding. I can only apologize for my unintentional rudeness.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my phone and I still tweet, text, email, FB, Yelp, etc., but I try to do it now when I’m not in the presence of others, and when there are not more important things to do. The eye opening thing is that I realized that almost everything else that I do is more important, it’s just that those things don’t have a ding to remind you how much you should value them.

So now, I keep my phone muted, and will rarely check it on the weekends. Yes, I might be missing the latest news headline right when it happens on twitter, the text from a friend telling me that they just found a cool restaurant, the FB posting of pictures from the last concert a friend went to, and the gazillion emails from my gazillion email accounts, BUT it’s ok. All that stuff will be there waiting for me when I am ready to deal with it, letting me really focus on the people, experiences, and things that matters most.