Our Reliance on our Cell Phones

Every morning at 9:00 AM on the dot, my cell phone starts vibrating and the song “By The Seaside” spills from its tiny speakers. I pick it up, the camera projects invisible infrared dots onto my face, and the screen unlocks. As my brain is transitioning from sleep into its first moments of wakefulness that day, my thumb is absentmindedly going to the middle right of my screen where the Instagram app is located. Within seconds, I see a picture of a former classmate at a bar, a political post about a genocide, a video of someone tripping down stairs, and then an advertisement for the new best app to track your period. 

Throughout the day, I will pick up my phone an average of 215 times and spend over five hours staring at its OLED display. I will use it to text multiple people, order food, keep track of future events, Snapchat my friends, listen to music, pay for laundry, GPS to the nearest coffee shop, check my Canvas, check my email, and look at old photos. Once in a while, I will feel a wave of dystopian dread as I realize I walked for two blocks without looking up from my phone. That I missed something my friend said to me because I was too busy looking at a meme I’ve seen three times before. That I’m texting my suitemate who is in the other room when I could’ve just gotten up to talk to her face-to-face. 

I wonder what the world was like before cell phones. For example, I ask my parents about how they met up with someone in the world before cell phones. "What if one of you were late? What if you accidentally went to different spots? What if you showed up, and then the other person realized they couldn’t go anymore? How were all of these problems communicated?"

I also wonder about what our current world would look like without cell phones. I have trouble picturing living one day without my phone. I think it should also be noted that even if I did want to disconnect, I can’t. For example, if I wanted to leave my phone in my dorm, I wouldn’t be able to eat any coffee or food because our school relies on the Grubhub ordering app. Once, I tried to go rock climbing at the gym without my phone, and as soon as I got there, I realized I needed to sign in to the wall using a QR code. 

This all begs the question: Do we rely too much on our smartphones? The answer is yes. Our growing dependence on phones is not just changing how we communicate—it's quietly fostering addictive behaviors, eroding our social skills, and rewiring our brains in ways that make sustained attention and real-world presence increasingly rare.

Harvard Health defines addiction as “a relationship between a person and an object or activity. With addiction, the object or activity becomes increasingly more important while previously important activities become less important. Ultimately, addiction is about the complex struggle between acting on impulse and resisting that impulse. When this struggle is causing suffering related to health, family, work, and other activities of everyday life, addiction might be involved.”

I can guarantee that if I asked you to give up your phone and all its functions for a week—or maybe even a day or two—you would gawk at me and roll your eyes. It’s impossible for us to imagine our lives without daily smartphone use. Is this not what constitutes an addiction?

Harvard Business Review instructs people who are struggling with a possible phone addiction to consider a few factors. First is loss of control. Check in with yourself and be conscious of when and why you are picking up your phone. Are you picking it up because you received a notification, or for no reason because you feel you need to check it compulsively? The second factor is how dependent you are to your phone. Does being without it cause serious distress and anxiety? Something else to consider is emotional coping. Do you use your phone to distract yourself from negative emotions?

The article also nudges people to consider how a cell phone is impacting performance and focus. “Does your phone interfere with getting important things done? Constantly distract you? Limit your ability to think clearly?” Many teens complain about a shortened length of focus and “ADHD” because their cell phones have deteriorated their attention spans. A study found that excessive smartphone and social media use can fuel symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in adults.

But potentially the biggest drawback of cell phone addiction, in my opinion, is how it harms our social relationships. While it’s true that phones have made communication more readily available, any person in virtually any place is instantly reachable, it has also caused our real-life, face-to-face communication to suffer. Never before in history have humans been so connected to each other on a global scale. Is that really such a good thing?

Since countless people carry out their daily routines with their smartphones close at hand, it’s often assumed that if you send a text to a friend or coworker, you’ll get an answer right away. The expectation of near-instant results can fuel a lack of patience in other areas of life.

Communication through text can also result in misunderstandings. Without the auditory and visual cues present in spoken conversations, it's easy to misinterpret gentle sarcasm as a rude comment. This can increase the likelihood of misunderstandings and cause hurt feelings.

Constant distractions from phones also pull our attention away from the people in front of us, making it harder to focus and have real conversations. You go into a room to hang out with your friends, and everyone is on their phones. You try to talk to someone, and they’re scrolling. You're on your phone when your loved ones are speaking to you. We’re present physically, but absent mentally. That disconnect is weakening the quality of our relationships.

All of this adds up to a loss of strong communication skills altogether. We're not practicing the art of conversation—things like listening, reading body language, or expressing nuance in tone—and so we’re gradually forgetting how to do them. All of these visual cues can add a deeper layer of meaning to spoken words that simply cannot exist through words on a screen. We aren’t getting our social needs met in person, and we’re losing the ability to communicate deeply and effectively. Without consistent real-life interaction, the subtle skills that make conversations meaningful—like empathy, timing, or emotional awareness—begin to depreciate.

A user on Reddit asked, “Has anyone else realized 99% of their life problems stems from phone addiction?” They went on to list a 17-item list that included things like anxiety, lack of attention to detail, and no zest for life. Many of the over-100 comments agreed with at least part of this post. Do smartphones rewire our brains? 

It has been less than 20 years since the first iPhone came out. This is the first time in human history that humans have spent this much time looking at a small screen. According to BBC, “The more useful our phones become, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more we lay neural pathways in our brains that lead to pick up our phones for whatever task is at hand – and the more we feel an urge to check our phone even when we don't have to.” 

Although the facts can feel daunting and despairing, cell phone reliance is something that can be fixed. Mudita suggests, “If you’re a smartphone owner, the first thing to do is to set aside some time without your device.” If you find it challenging to be without your phone at home or work, try not taking it along when you're going out with friends or family. As a test, leave your phone in a different room (or even in another building) for about an hour and notice how quickly you begin to feel anxious about not having it with you. 

Furthermore, BBC states that “each time a person resists the temptation to check their phone, they are laying down new neural pathways that will make it easier and easier to resist that temptation — and perhaps others — in the future." The key, like with many skills, is that practice makes perfect (or at least improved).