Learning to look up again – controlling your smartphone addiction | Ross Sleight | TEDxLeamingtonSpa

I would like to introduce you to a new word that explains what we are doing. It's called phubbing, which is phone snubbing by using my device in public and ignoring the people around me or I could have said it was techno. Ference the interference. of technology in our daily lives and the interruptions and intrusions it has or he could have said he was an honorary member of the details ow which in China means the bowed head tribe or perhaps as he walked towards the stage shuffling his feet, with the eyes glued to my device that you could have called me ass momma bee that is a zombie

smartphone

now all these new words have come into our language in the last 10 years and that is directly related to the launch and phenomenal growth and adoption of the phone smart today there are more than two and a half billion people in the world with a

smartphone

and that number is expected to increase to five billion in 2020 and what we have done is that we have effectively created two and a half billion new homes Because we live and laugh and love and cry and work in the reflected glow of this five-inch screen, it's our virtual home, but all these words, mombi notes and phubbing, I mean, they're not very positive about our virtual homes, so In fact, they are quite negative, at best. talking about them being antisocial, at worst they are realistically saying that you dehumanized

your

zombie now.

I'm not the person to stand here today and curse the smartphone. In fact, I am one of its biggest supporters. I think it's an incredibly empowering and enriching device. For the last 20 years of my life I have worked in digital media and the last 10 years I have worked with smartphones creating products and services for them. I have always tried to use technology to improve people's lives. make them simpler to make them easier, but it worries me, it worries me because when I

look

at the prisoners of war, people are using their smartphones and it's not just the people on the train or the strangers on the street, but From my colleagues, my friends, my family and my teenagers, we seem to spend more and more time

look

ing down, glued and obsessed with this virtual home, let's see how you feel, raise

your

hands if you think you spend too much time on your smartphone , look around you, lemming, no, keep him awake. tick it off that's amazing it's much higher than the national average on average in the UK 39% of people say they spend too much time on their smartphone and that rises to 55% of people aged 16 to 35 years old, so the youngest You are most likely to think that you spend too much time on your smartphone and if you are one of those people, you are actually trying to change that because 74% of people who think they spend too much time on your smartphone.

We are trying to reduce that time and time is a really finite commodity, we cannot take advantage of it anymore. You may be surprised that on average you spend 2 hours 25 minutes a day on your smartphone and if you are considered a heavy user this will double to 3 hours 45 minutes and the time we spend in our virtual homes is at the expense from the interaction in our real homes in the real world, give me some examples, a third of us, a third of us use our smartphones with our friends and our family while eating 50% of us wander the streets looking at our smartphone 11% of us say we actually c

ross

the street with our smartphone looking at it a third of us will wake up and in five minutes reach for our smartphone and in a study surprisingly one in 10 of us said we answer our smartphone while we had sexual relations.

It's amazing, isn't it at the best of times? At worst, it's alienating. This is antisocial behavior. Now I don't want to blame the device. It's not the smartphone problem, the problem comes down to our behavior with the smartphone and that's good because we can choose to change our behavior, we can choose to act differently, we can choose to stop looking down and start looking up. , in preparation for I read a lot, talked to a lot of experts, psychologists, anthropologists, scientists to try to figure out what are the things we can do to start actively changing our behavior with our virtual homes and five ideas emerged ac

ross

the board.

A consensus opinion and I want to share it with you today so we can assess how we could start looking

again

, so the first thought is about usage, do you know how you use your smartphone and what you use it for. You can start to understand if you are using it for the right type of things, there are apps that you can download, like moment or quality time, from the app stores and they will actually track your smartphone usage and play it back. I tell you it's a sobering wake up call and I decided to go on a major smartphone diet when using one of these apps and the reason was I found out I was spending five hours a week playing Candy Crush which I thought was just a couple of minutes here on the commute or a couple of minutes and I was bored, that's half a day of work spent playing a game, so if you can understand the amount of time you're spending then you can start to evaluate whether that time is valuable. spend it in our virtual homes versus our real homes, the second area is about living in the present and making a conscious decision that when we are with people with our friends, with our colleagues, we live in the present and ask, we don't know.

We put our smartphones away, we turn them off, we put them in our pocket or our bag and that's really important because the mere presence of a smartphone can actually reduce our cognitive mental capacity, just being there on a table, regardless of whether we interact with the. can make us dumber, so with your smartphone put away when it is off you have the ability to pay attention to people you have the ability to talk to them you can live in the present with that person who is really important to you The third idea is that you can ask them to other people doing the exact same thing when you meet someone who's had their smartphone taken, just say "that looks great." I can't wait to have this conversation, but would you mind putting away your smartphone because I don't want there to be distractions when I'm talking to you and your behavior can become contagious and you can help change how other people feel about their smartphones.

The fourth idea that came up was to not sleep with your smartphone now. I'm not talking about the one in ten of you who might answer your smartphone during sex, although I really think please stop doing that and what I mean is that when our virtual home is next to our bed, it comes first that we look at in the morning and it's the last thing we look at at night and surprisingly, one in three of us wake up during the night and check if our smartphone is in our room, which will deprive us of sleep and sleep.

It affects our physical and mental well-being, so take your smartphone out of the room, buy yourself an alarm clock if you need a wake-up call, better yet, give yourself a curfew with your smartphone and stop using it a certain number of hours before to go to bed give yourself some free screen time, some decompression time, some real world time and the fifth idea is about this kind of Pavlov's dog reaction that we have when we see a notification in our fake notifications. They have been scientifically proven to increase our inattention and hyperactivity, in fact it all has to do with FOMO, our fear of missing out, we must have things right now, know something right now, when in reality it's probably just a "me like" or a retweet or something pretty insignificant that shows up as a notification, so the best thing you can do is what you can do here is turn off your notifications, yeah, put your phone on airplane mode.

Now I say I'm not going to check my smartphone for an hour. I'm going to leave it there. I'm not going to look at it and doing it. I will feel better because of this because I am not constantly distracted or interrupted in my life, so it is these five things that help us learn to look up

again

and if you can change your behavior to do these things, I promise you. You will be more focused, more social, more enriched and more harmonious with your virtual world, your virtual home and your real home, so if you think you spend too much time on your smartphone, here is the guide to change it, you can make a choice positive of not looking down and you can choose to look up today thank you very much