Have you ever been separated from your phone? Perhaps you left home in a hurry, and in your rush forgot to pick up your phone. If you can’t go back to home to pick up your phone, you will suffer from phone separation anxiety the entire day, until you get reunited with your device again. Things will get worse if you get back home and don’t find your phone; perhaps you didn’t leave it behind, you lost it, or it got stolen from you.
Phone separation anxiety is a new condition that only the millennials know too well, as it is within our time that phones have become an essential part of our lives. While the term phone separation anxiety might seem a bit over the top when you think about it, but make no mistake, it is as real a condition as any out there.
It was suggested comScore when the industry analyst research concluded that the millennials are becoming increasingly addicted to their smartphones and applications. A more recent poll by LendEDU conducted between June 5th – August 26th backs up comScore theory; Millennials do suffer from separation anxiety when they are away from their smartphones.
LendEDU research has 7,076 correspondents in the survey. The correspondents were asked if they ever get anxious when they don’t have their phones around them, 31% said they don’t get an anxiety attack, while 69% stated that they did get anxious.
How do Men and Women compare in Anxiety attacks when they don’t have their phones?
LendEDU further broke down their survey into sex categories and unraveled a bizarre finding. In their survey, they found out women were more anxious when away from their phones than men. The survey found only 63% of men said ‘yes’ to being anxious when they don’t have their phones on them, while 37% said it really doesn’t bother them that much.
That is a sharp contrast to 74% of women who said they did get anxious when away from their phones while only 24% of women said they were not that bothered by it.
Smartphones enforce long-term use like slot machines by giving your awards in the form of notifications. It has been established that smartphones make the brain release the cortisol hormone, which triggers the flight-or-fight response and makes you feel the urge to check your device.
However, unlike the slot machines, your smartphone is a jack-of-all-trade. You use it to make calls, entertain yourself, do some calculations, and check up facts online, among other plethora of things. So the level of separation anxiety that hits you when it is away from you is greater than when you are away from the slot machine.
