People get panicky when smartphone taken away from them…. Study decodes reason

New Delhi: Smartphone is no longer a luxury in these days. It has become a necessary and inseparable part of us. Smartphones have altered our lifestyle so drastically that it’s almost next to impossible to live without it. It stores your daily task list, sets your morning alarm, gives you quick updates about near and dear ones and also allows you to click selfie wherever you go.

We have become so attached to smartphones that we tend to get anxious and panicky if it is not around us for sometime or haven’t seen it for hours.

A recent study conducted in Portugal studied this feeling of panicking and came out certain observations. It found out that when one is not in contact with their smartphone, it triggers general feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

The study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports, found that gender has no bearing on whether people will feel apprehensive or anxious without their phones. But people who feel that way tend to be more anxious and obsessive-compulsive in their day-to-day lives than other people, the study suggests.

“It is that fear, that panicky feeling, of ‘oh, no, I left my phone at home,'” said Ana-Paula Correia, one of the authors of the study, associate professor in the department of educational studies at The Ohio State University and director of Ohio State’s Center on Education and Training for Employment.

For this study, researchers gave that questionnaire and another that evaluated psychopathological symptoms such as anxiety, obsession-compulsion, and feelings of inadequacy to 495 adults aged 18 to 24 in Portugal. Those adults reported using their phones for between four and seven hours a day, primarily for social networking applications.

The researchers found that the more participants used their smartphone each day, the more stress they reported feeling without their phone. A little more than half of the study participants were female; the study didn’t find a link between gender and feelings of nomophobia.

That kind of behaviour, Correia said, is more likely to cause anxiety when we are away from our phones. And, the study’s results suggest that people experiencing tension might see their phones as a stress-management tool.