My Strange Addiction: My Smartphone
Most people’s strange addiction includes eating toilet paper, constantly smelling gasoline, or tanning three times a day. However, if you’re like myself and many other young adults today, you are strangely addicted to your smartphone.
On an average day, I spend almost 6 hours on my phone. Totaling to about 41 hours per week. This is nearly two 24-hour days spent completely and solely either scrolling through social media, texting, or listening to music. It is hard to believe so much time could be spent on one device. Yet, myself and many other people my age face the same challenge with checking their phone throughout the day and seeing numbers quickly increase.
A majority of time spent on my phone is using social apps like Snapchat, messages, and Instagram. The highest usage is Snapchat with an average of 6 hours and 44 minutes a week. Snapchat is normally the first application I open and where a majority of my 472 weekly notifications come from. Not far behind with an average of 3 hours weekly is messages and Instagram.
These applications effectively use the “stickiness” factor where I stay on the application longer and return again and again. This factor as well as the social function of these applications is what makes them so appealing to me. I want to know what my friends are doing and feel a constant need to immediately reply to people, especially on Snapchat. If I am not reopening social applications like Snapchat or Instagram I feel that I could miss out on something exciting.
I receive an excessive average of 472 notifications a day but surprisingly only pick up my phone half the time, about 242 times per day. This proves that I have some self-control and do not need to immediately check my phone to see what application the notification is coming from.
Overall, these numbers have made me realize the excessive time I spend on my smartphone and how similar it is to a strange addiction. While I may not be eating toilet paper or tanning three times a day, I am wasting a lot of time staring at my phone. I have learned that I need to set limits on unproductive social applications that I use like Snapchat and Instagram, so I can spend more time doing productive things.
