Credit, Getty Images
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- Author, Yasmin Rufo
- Role, BBC News
We all know that frequent cell phone use harms personal relationships, but that doesn’t stop us from using the device several times a day.
This is how the phubbing (English expression for the act of involuntarily ignoring someone in favor of your cell phone) infiltrates everyday situations.
The practice can make partners feel ignored and, in the case of parents, it can affect children, from weakening bonds with younger children to a drop in self-esteem among older ones.
But instead of blaming a lack of self-control, focusing on intentional use of the device may be more effective, says psychologist Kaitlyn Regehr, associate professor at University College London, in the United Kingdom.
Each time you use the device, explain to the other person why you are doing so and, when finished, put the cell phone away and resume the conversation.
The recommendation seems basic, but Regehr tells the program Woman’s Hour (“Women’s Hour“, in free translation), from the BBC, that this small change helps to adjust behaviors, as many people check messages, swipe notifications or “just take a quick look” without realizing it.
The important thing is to be transparent. So if a message comes up that you need to check, tell the person or people you’re with, “I just need to answer this; I’ll pay attention later.”
By describing the action — “I need to check the train time” or “I’m answering my mother” — you interrupt the automatic habit and signal to the person next to you that they are still important.
“This prevents the other person from feeling ignored,” says Regehr.
“And it keeps you accountable, because it reduces the chance of getting lost in other apps or endlessly scrolling.”
Doing this can also help improve your relationships.
Credit, Getty Images
Other research reinforces the impact of these actions. Psychologist Claire Hart, associate professor at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, interviewed 196 people about relationships and cell phone use.
According to her, the more someone feels like they are being targeted phubbingthe worse your relationship tends to be.
“Not everyone reacts the same way,” he says. “It depends on the personality, but when someone feels ignored, it can trigger a reaction.”
The partner then takes out their own cell phone, and the dynamic becomes a cycle in which each person feels rejected or less valued than what appears on the screen.
Each episode of phubbing interrupts the connection. After leaving a shared moment to look at the device, it may take time to get back to what was happening before.
What happens in your brain when you use your cell phone
This is known as the brain’s reward system or circuit, and it is exactly the same mechanism by which a person becomes dependent on a substance like alcohol.
But there’s another part of the brain that fights these urges to seek pleasure and immediate reward: the prefrontal cortex.
It is the region of the brain responsible for making you make less impulsive and more balanced decisions — the one that makes you, for example, stop scrolling, get up from the couch and decide to clean the house or exercise.
What happens to many people is that “the logical part of our brain that controls our impulses is not doing its part, or at least not as well as it could, it is overwhelmed by the search for pleasure”, says Éilish Duke, professor of Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, in the United Kingdom.
Duke says the first thing we need to understand is that the impulse to pick up the phone and activate the screen, which triggers scrolling, is automatic.
We are not aware of this because we have built this habit over time — like closing the door when leaving the house, for example.
“In a survey we did a few years ago, we found that participants thought they checked their phone every 18 minutes, but when we used screen recorders, we realized they actually checked (their phone) much more frequently.”
According to professor Ariane Ling, from the department of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health (USA), the habit of scrolling can be explained by the natural behavior of human beings, but is aggravated by environmental factors.
Ling explains that human beings are programmed to want to know what is happening. This is why we read the news or, for example, stop to look when there is an accident on the road. It is something that is part of the evolutionary development that allowed us to survive.
And our cell phone was designed to continually feed us with information that interests us. It’s a perfect marriage.
According to Duke, what happens when we scroll our cell phone screen is that we enter a state of flow.
The concept of flow in psychology refers to a mental state in which the difficulty of the task a person is performing adjusts very well to the level of attention and skill they have to offer at that particular moment.
Apps like TikTok, where the algorithm is constantly changing and offering new things specifically targeted to you, directly feed this state of flow.
“They absorb all of your attention, and you go into a time warp phase where you don’t realize two hours have passed, and you’re sitting there with your hand numb, and you wasted all this time watching puppy videos,” Duke adds.
