The Mental Health Crisis: Could Our Phones Be the Root Cause?

Thanks for sharing this insightful and personal story Jillian Johnson, MPH. From our work, it’s undeniable that our connected lives can add stress, mentally and physically. You asked the question of what can we do about it? From our vantage point - it’s not about detoxes or disconnection (though they are great circuit breakers as you observed). Instead, it’s about learning and applying digital wellness frameworks that help you develop resilience to thrive alongside tech. Cheers!

Our phones are definitely an extra limb at times, useful when needed for work stuff but we’re too dependent on them now as we can pretty much do anything/everything with them - we don’t even need to bring wallets, cash, etc out with us now as long as we have our phones. Some downtime from them is something worth trying, especially in the evenings, to cut out the incessant scrolling that most of us are probably guilty of.

I attended an event last year that addressed the intentionality of electronic communications. ALL of it was amazing content, but the part I took away and added into my daily life was this: If you email me, it might be a day or two before I respond. Today email is equivalen to USPS. You want to share something with me but it's not imperative. If you text me, you likely want my attention and I can choose when to respond but likely within 24 hours. But if you call me, I'll know you want to reach me and if I'm available, I'll pick up. If not, please leave a message. Whatsup is a whole different ballgame and while it hasn't hit my radar of a means of communication, I'll likely treat it as email. I frequent LinkedIn but not as my main form of communication, although it is important to me. It's like my rolodex with the ability to reach out electronically on a professional level, share professional relevant content and to contribute to intellectual conversations. And like this post, share what is working for me. Maintaining a philosophy on electronic communications has helped me manage information overload which ultimately helps lower the stress level. I hope my insight helps others! ??

Yes, I personally believe our "connectivity" is causing a lot of negative mental health effects. We have to remember we didn't even have a 24 hour TV news cycle until the first Iraq war in 1990. Think about that, you would get a paper thrown onto your porch at 5am with yesterday's news and then at 5pm you could get another bit of the day's news from the evening TV broadcast. The rest of our time was just in-person, face to face interactions concerning things that directly affected us either with job or family. Now you can't go 5 seconds without 15 notifications, most of them regarding things that will never directly affect you, but all of them designed to elicit an emotional response from you all the same.

Jillian, the quick answer is yes we are way to connected to our phones. When I take walks during my day to get away all I ever see are people walking with heads in phones. The stress we all feel when we misplace our phones is insane. This is why I don't even pick up my phone after a days work. It does not go into restaurants or any public place except for maybe a concert.