How Mobile Phones are Controlling our Mind?

Story 30 Years Back...

Looking back at how things were some thirty years ago. Life looked slow, functional yet seldom did we think about our ease of access over things in contrast to our health or time being a factor in our life. Concern was centered to our daily routine being full of physical activities, greeting our family members or just a cup of coffee on the front porch. Speaking in comparison to how we do it today, first things first we check our cellphones after waking up.

Same story follows up in the night while trying and I mean really trying to go to sleep while scrolling our fingers through the deep waters of social media. It may not look like procrastination because you might think that I am getting a load of all the information present on the internet but you never consider the vitality of established human routine including sleep time, physical activities, retention of information and how it might affect our brain functions.

What Mobile companies are doing...

Phone companies are always coming up with new ways of engaging you to things that have no use in your daily life. Keeping up with new tech is one thing and using it for something blasphemous is another. There is always a race to get your hands on the newest phone but at the cost of what. Financial factors get thrown out the window.

Let us lead by example, a mother held back on using phone all the time because one day she realized that she wasn’t paying much attention to her daughter as her daughter almost touched the hot pan and she was in the state of total ignorance.

Thoughts like these might arise in everyone’s minds to cut back on the time spent on phones but it seems like the hardest thing to do. It seems like all our life has been centered to those five inches. We are forgetting how successful our life can be if we just talk to people in the real world. Your network is your net worth, it has been done in the past many a times not by using smart-phones but by establishing human connections.

Smart-phone is also a way of achieving that but we must not consider it as the only way, it can prove to be more of a contributing factor rather than the whole truth itself. Our time should be utilized unlike those of people who are successful because they use technology to connect rather than to waste time on useless things. And we all know the portion of internet that is useful and how much of it is useless and destructive. Advice here is to monitor your time on the cellphones and record how much are we actually using to grow as a person rather than forming opinions. There are apps like mute, moment, space, hold and forest helping you to do so. Correct utilization of newest technology must be considered a virtue.

Are we using smartphone smartly...

We went through our phase with development of smart-phone OS like android or iOS. Never did we in our wildest imaginations thought that we would feel the strongest urge to pick up and use our phones at expense of doing something meaningful. The benefactor to this problem of a habit is Push notifications. Every part of the world, every major city and every person has access to technology that is intentionally controlling how his brain works. There is something about this technology or smart-phones in general that keeps us glued to them, being ready to get suckered into them any minute.

Shakespeare : "This world is a stage and we are its mere puppets"

Threat to human brain has changed rapidly from destructive thoughts to thoughts being planted in our mind. Shakespeare says that this world is a stage and we are its mere puppets. Seems like a viable thought. It never used to be like this, we as humans were focused on a single task or doing things in our leisure time which contributed to our growth as a person. Little did we do to give our attention to smartphone usage but more importantly we focused on interacting with our colleagues, exchanging ideas, reading a book, developing a hobby or doing anything but lowering our self esteem to even lower standards.

Notification: A good news!

Push notifications play with our brain, there are dopamine receptors in our brains activating when we feel something good. These notifications get displayed on our screens with an ear-piercing dinging sound paving its way into our brain through our ears which immediately attracts attention towards them, no matter how much important task you might be doing. You start to crave the next enchanting notification. Your time gets wasted beating around the bush when you could be doing something useful.

Social Media : How people are shaping up their lives? Good or Bad??

Leading by an example, two people were discussing something important but one of them had notifications coming up in his phone. He checked it and the conversation never resumed the same. Social media is the best example of how people are shaping up their lives around things they see on it. Nobody would post something on social media that is bad or his life would be portrayed in such a manner that it is always lively, adventurous and full of excitement. Attention grabbing pictures and photos of people acting to enjoy their life are what lowers our self esteem and we start to value ourselves lower than them just because we don’t live our life the way they do.

Whos is in profit then?

All the tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Instagram and YouTube earn their money off your attention. They show you what they want you to see so that your attention towards them could be increased. Your time is the most precious possession of yours and it is wasted on making these tech giants richer while you are left with nothing but a desire and sudden urge to do something with a hope associated to it that dies slowly. Most of your time and attention is spent on these sites procrastinating, time is money as we all know it. So, your money is being earned by these tech giants, seems a bit odd to hear but if you invest that wasted time on yourself making you more skillful, wouldn’t it make a whole lot of difference.

Need of the hour is to suppress that sudden urge to check your phone but most importantly to know your capabilities by investing in your betterment rather than feeling low about it. A pro tip about social media is all that glitters is not gold and grass is not always greener on the other side of the screen.