How We Mistake Our Anxiety for Phone Addiction

Over the last 15 years, the rate of anxiety diagnoses has climbed almost as fast as the rate of smart phone usage. Correlation isn’t causation, we know, but we started to wonder if there was a connection.

Here’s an example: years ago, one of our Myrth team members was a junior lawyer, fresh out of school, with a brand new, employer-issued smartphone. She was expected to check it regularly, even during nights and weekends, and respond to all emails right away. It buzzed and blinked every time a new email came in. Eventually, she started to feel phantom buzzes, and her pulse would spike every time she saw the phone light up. 

Sound familiar? Phone addiction?

Our phones have become thoroughly integrated into our lives, but that relationship isn’t always a healthy one. Sure, the phone allows us to capture special moments and stay in touch with loved ones, but it also makes it hard to draw boundaries and allows others to dictate our schedules (when people know they can always reach you, they call you according to what’s best for their schedule, not yours). 

That can lead to some troubling mental health consequences - similar to other forms of addiction.

“It turns out that using your phone a lot can cause anxiety, and anxiety can cause you to use your phone a lot. It’s a terrible feedback loop.”

We’ve talked before about how daily routines can help with anxiety, but checking your phone all day isn’t the kind of routine we meant. It turns out that using your phone a lot can cause anxiety, and anxiety can cause you to use your phone a lot. It’s a terrible feedback loop, and if you’re not on the lookout for it, it’s easy to get swept up without even realizing what’s happening.

Phone Use Triggers Anxiety

Ever notice how, after a day of particularly heavy cell phone use, you don’t feel so great? There’s a reason for that.

In 2018, the National Institutes of Health released the results of a study of college students and their cell phone use. They found a correlation between frequency and type of cell phone use and the likelihood of anxiety and depression in a student. The greatest predictor of stress? Sleeping with the phone less than 1 meter away from them. 

It’s not just college students, either. Other studies have found heavy phone-users experience anxiety symptoms and even symptoms of withdrawal when separated from their devices. Our phones are really not helping us to feel calm or present.

Anxiety Triggers Phone Use

As much as we wish things were simple, though, it isn’t just our phones causing us anxiety. A lot of us are experiencing anxiety from other parts of life, and we’re using our phones to cope (badly) with it. Do any of the following seem familiar to you?

Avoidance - A classic symptom of anxiety is avoiding unpleasant things, especially the things that are causing our anxiety. It’s called “avoidance coping,” and it can involve physically avoiding something (like not going to the store or post office, or not making a phone call you’ve been dreading) or emotionally/intellectually avoiding something (not examining your own behavior and motivations, not admitting you’ve been feeling a certain way). 

It’s a bad coping strategy because it tends to just cause the anxiety to snowball - classic addiction.

And the thing is, our phones are great tools for avoiding stuff we don’t want to deal with. See somebody you don’t want to talk to? Bury your face in your phone as you walk by and pretend you don’t see them. Got some lingering complicated feelings from conflict at work? Read nonstop on your phone so your brain doesn’t have time to focus on the unpleasant stuff.

Our phones are helping us avoid things that make us uncomfortable, but that doesn’t really help in the long run. It just makes us more anxious.

Short attention span - People with anxiety often struggle with dysregulated attention mechanisms, or, in non-clinical speak, short attention spans and trouble deciding which things to respond to and which things to ignore. That means that if you have anxiety, you’re more likely to be derailed by distractions from your phone, because you’re less able to tune out the unimportant external stimuli. It also means that if you’re having trouble focusing on one thing, you’re more likely to bop around between various stimuli, including your phone. 

Think about how often you pick up your phone during the day. If it’s several times an hour, it’s worth exploring why that is. Are you having trouble focusing? Is it hard for you to filter out which alerts are important and which ones you can ignore? Try keeping a log for a few days, tracking each time you pick up your phone, what you were doing immediately before that, and why you decided to pick up your phone.

Ultimately, quitting phone use isn’t going to fix anxiety problems, and anxiety problems aren’t the only thing driving our phone use. Even still, it’s worth thinking about how we can interrupt the feedback cycle that causes us to use our phones more while feeling more anxious. 

Have you noticed your phone habits are affected by your anxiety levels? What coping mechanisms have you developed to fight phone addiction? Let us know below!