But something has to change. Professor Alessandra Lemma, a psychoanalyst and fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, tells me that you’ll know if your phone usage is problematic if you “find it hard to control how long you are online, even if you tell yourself you must use it less” and “if you feel uncomfortable if you haven’t checked it after a while”. Tick and tick. Even though social media can be used to cope with stress, often it amplifies the problem instead, she adds. We also use our screens to dull out what’s really going on in our minds. Often when we’re alone — maybe waiting for a bus, an appointment, or a friend to arrive — we automatically reach for our phones instead of sitting with our thoughts, good and bad. “In contemporary culture, we have eroded the experience of waiting,” Lemma explains. The chain of events goes: We look at the phone, we stop thinking. Lemma says we miss out on realisations about ourselves and our lives in that uncomfortability — maybe we feel lonely, unsatisfied about something or are avoiding a task. Ultimately we don’t figure out what needs to change in order to feel happy. “Is there anything that you’re not at ease with in your life, and is that why you invest more time in your phone?” she asks.
