From testing your eyesight and telling you whether you’re over the limit before you get behind the wheel to faking an incoming call to extricate you from a bad date, there are few things in life your smartphone can’t assist you with these days.
And with the myriad of fertility and childbirth apps now available, we are now looking at a generation conceived and born with the aid of a smartphone before they’ve even taken their first breath.
But of course the more useful technology becomes the more dependent on it we become. Smartphone addiction has become so widespread and attracted so much concern, it even has a name.
The term nomophobic (that’s ‘nomo’ as in ‘no mobile’) was coined after a YouGov survey revealed that nearly 53% of British mobile phone users feel anxious when they "lose their mobile phone, run out of battery or credit, or have no network coverage".
And as the number of smartphone users continues to increase, a growing body of evidence compounds the findings.
According to research from Versapak, 41% of Britons feel anxious and not in control when detached from their smartphone or tablet and 51% admitted to suffering from "extreme tech anxiety" at one time or another.
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But the good news is, with a little bit of smart thinking, smartphone addiction is not that difficult to break. So, if like over half of the smartphone users in Britain your mobile device has become an extension of yourself and without it you feel disconnected from the world, try rethinking what ‘connected’ really means.
Here are 13 ways in which you can become more connected – not disconnected – by ditching the virtual world of your smartphone and embracing the real world.