What does your relationship with your phone look like?
I am not happy with mine. It is slightly obsessive much of the time. I feel weird if it isn’t with me. I am a little disappointed when it doesn’t have something new for me. It walls me off from some other, healthier things in my life.
If this was a relationship someone else was in I would encourage them to consider boundaries with the other person, possibly even breaking it all off.
I’ve tried to do this with my phone on a few occasions, and I already would have if I wasn’t trying to run a business. It is really astounding how effectively these little robots have woven themselves into our lives. It would add hours to my week if I were to get rid of the smartphone.
It is the same strategy I have employed at jobs I knew were above my head. Make yourself useful so that it is hard to let you go.
This is a good example of being in relationship to something. I am not good or bad here, and neither is my phone. The relationship I have to my phone is problematic because I allow it to overflow and be more than it should be. A river is a great thing to have in your town until it floods and ruins everything. Things being where they are not meant to be is always going to cause trouble.
I know where my phone belongs, but I get tired and anxious and burned out and it creeps in.
It’s easy to zone out on Reddit and Facebook. On top of this, studies are demonstrating that our devices trigger little dopamine spikes when we open them or when we have alerts, so we are also dealing with a hijacked reward system in our brain. This is especially noticeable when we are tired and anxious and burned out.
What kind of relationship do you have with devices?
If it were a relationship with a person, how would you characterize it? Is it a good relationship?
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