 "Sameer Malhotra")
Geetika Malik works as a copywriter with an advertising agency. The work pressure is intense. During the day and often well into the night, she constantly finds herself checking her phone for work-related messages and e-mails. She is also active on three WhatsApp groups (office colleagues, friends and family) and repeatedly turns to her phone for latest updates on them. She knows this is consuming a lot of time and energy and is making her anxious but is unable to detach herself from the phone.
As we are getting more refined in terms of technological advancement, the pressure to perform has also increased. We are living in a time of constant checks.
Today, if someone sends you an e-mail, you feel the need to respond immediately. In a sense, we have become very answerable. And this answerability factor has gone up especially in certain job profiles, like in a doctor's profession, for those in the media and for those working with big companies. We live with this anxiety: "I hope I have fulfilled all my responsibilities and not left anything unattended to which might be important."
What is important is the context in which the person is getting anxious, the kind of responsibility he or she has, the answerability and position that the person is holding and the task at hand that the person has to fulfil. The other thing is the person's own personality profile. There are people who have obsessive compulsive tendencies, those who have impulse discontrol or others who suffer from anxiety. Such people are more prone to develop anxieties arising out of such issues.
The kind of anxiety that mobile phones are triggering can be very disturbing and lead to both disfunction and distress. It can reduce the overall performance and take away a lot of time and energy so that the other priorities of life, the really important things, get compromised.
An increasing number of people today cannot do without their mobile phones, so much so that their sleep pattern is getting disturbed. They are unable to concentrate on the task at hand. Their performance is reduced. The phone also impacts their interpersonal relationships. In such a scenario, you can say that cell phone dependence is setting in.
QUICK TIPS
No technology is bad. It depends on how you use it.
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Fix a time off from your mobile phone. This will help make you more self-reliant than reliant only on technology.
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The constant need to know about people (like what's going on in his life at this very moment) is also, in a sense, voyeurism. Be alert to how you are behaving on the phone.
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The urge to immediately respond to messages or e-mails also creates a lot of impatience and anxiety. Break this habit. If something is not urgent, then do not create that urgency on the mobile phone.
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Switch the phone off when you go to bed.
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Turn off the phone when you are doing an important job or at least put it on silent.
- After work, if possible, avoid work-related mails and messages. Deal with these the next day during work hours.
Sameer Malhotra
Director, department of mental health and behavioural sciences, Max Hospital, New Delhi
