Take a smart phone-break: don't become an addict to your smart phone!
The widespread use of smart phones has led to the problem of smart phone addiction. It really shouldn't surprise anybody that the problem has come up; a smart phone has lots of different things that you can become addicted to. The problem is that dealing with smart phone addiction is not easy.
Smart phone addiction is a serious problem, much more serious than most people realize. A lot of people treat addiction to smart phones as a joke but it is something that has to be taken seriously. Using your phone too much can interfere with many aspects of your life and it can cost you a great deal of money. The wireless providers and smart phone makers are pretty clever and are more than willing to take advantage of your addiction to make money. If you are not careful you could find yourself with a very large bill for using your smart phone.
There is no clear definition of what constitutes a smart phone addict but it will be pretty obvious when you see one. If you have to check for messages every five minutes there is a pretty good chance that you are an addict. The same is true if you find it necessary to get up in the middle of the night check for messages. Other warning signs would be using your phone in places where it is inappropriate, like church. If you can't control your usage then you are an addict and you need to address the problem.
The first step in addressing your smart phone addiction is admitting that you have a problem. The next step is devising a plan to deal with it. This is where things get difficult since you likely won't be able to quit cold turkey like you do with most other addictions. There is a pretty good chance that you will need use your smart phone for work. That means that you are going to have to come up with a way to control your usage. The best way to do this is to set specific times that you are going to check for messages and then to stick to that schedule.
There are a lot of other things that you can do to break your smart phone addiction; most of them involve limiting your use to situations when it is actually necessary. For example if a work colleague sends you a message instead of responding on your smart phone walk down to his office and respond in person. As a general rule if it requires more than four messages to resolve something you should doing it by phone or in person rather than email anyway so that is another way to reduce the amount that you are using your smart phone.