We all have heard about habit formation loop in different stages of our lives, you may have researched it, you may have come across articles about 'effective habits of successful people'. I can remember one of our teachers said to us, that learning is a habit. If you want to learn, you better start it as a habit so we can carry on doing it easier by the day. Nowadays, there are genius habit coaches who teach us about the cue routine reward cycle of habit, also teach us about, how we can use different techniques to improve each step of habit formation to enhance our ability to stick with new ones. From atomic habits to tiny habits, we are taught how to harness the power of habit, by various methods.
Although habits are powerful tools, as the psychology of habit formation is more and more researched, by individuals and by academics, it is understood that habits, also have created epidemics among us today. From epidemics of obesity, depression violence to phone addiction, may have been caused and contributed by these habits we have acquired over time.
The phone addiction is one such epidemic, especially among teens and younger generation. If you board a bus in your town, you will find everyone is listening in Bluetooth devices and headphones. From morning till night our lives are controlled by screens.
By definition, if you use your phone most of the time of your day and feel depressed and anxious when you do not have it, use it to get away from boredom, those may be signs that you may having a problematic usage. How did we end up in such a deep dark black hole? How did these apps and games start to control our lives, when we should have been masters of the technology?
Did we know from Facebook, twitter,YouTube to this website, is going to hack your willpower by making you addicted more and more in search of content, to satisfy your inner craving, until you get Hooked?
Companies use our inherent habit-forming abilities for their advantage and create habit forming products by using four step process, as summarized below.
cue - eg: vibration of your phone.
routine - eg: check notification - reminds you to walk 5000 steps today.
reward - eg: once you walked- display a nice message congratulating your success.
Invesment- eg: it saves your data for today.
It saves your progress, it saves your messages, it saves the level of your game, and next time when you open the app and get a notification, there you will be hooked again to complete next task and be drowned in it some more. Think about it. What will happen if you forget your phone to work, or to your trip?. Why do we feel that there is part of us is missing when something like that happen? Because the phone is saved with valuable data of ours, in pictures, Facebook pages, twitter messages, and even we save these things in clouds and carry across devices. We are blackmailed, by these apps, and no wonder why we are so much hooked, as the basic idea of these products are to get us hooked anyway. Billions of human hours are wasted.
Provided the insights, best advice so far to break the phone addiction is trying to replace it, with new creative habits of your own. Otherwise soon we will find ourselves in another epidemic of short-sighted, angry birds.
The first step would be to be aware of your phone usage and that it is an addiction, rather than entertainment. Next, we can follow same principles of 'app developers' to make ourselves better habits to replace with phone addiction.
Awareness is the key, knowledge is the sword, and it's a battle of your own.
Thank you for reading: Phone addiction, habit formation how do we get hooked?
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