How Smartphone Affects Your Satisfaction in Life

There’s always a “sweet spot” of smartphone use. We can either be satisfied or be overwhelmed by its tendency to instant gratification and omit to quit.

One-Touch Gratification

We haven’t yet mentioned how a very integral part of our life transformed into a self-consume-addicting machine just in one touch. Smartphones have been digitalized our satisfaction into instant likes, views, or cheering comments and make you taste heaven in seconds. Otherwise, total opposites such as sleep deprivation, anxiety, low self-esteem, and increase stress level have been overshadowing.

That “like, share, comment” has become a self-repeating, indispensable part of daily life. Next, it avowedly addictive, preventing individuals from self-realization in the non-digital world.

Smartphone addiction led to problematic behavior in its essence: positive evaluation of individuals. Since today, life satisfaction has transformed into sequences of the measurement of an individual’s expectation. Individuals tend to compare one another habits to set their happiness standard through what they had seen in social media. And suddenly, it has turned into a basis of endless and unrealistic happiness standards.

“All these functions have substantially improved and simplified life,” said Thomee Harenstam.

It appeared to be more intrusive because even when in silent mode, the habitual of instant relationships resulting from social fragmentations crave more and more desire to connect.

A Stressful Satisfaction

By contrast, there’s always a “sweet spot” of smartphone use. We can either be satisfied or be overwhelmed by its tendency to instant gratification and omit to quit. During the pandemic, we cling to smartphones as an indispensable tool to stay alive. Work affair, social networking with friends, and make ourselves entertained during lockdown catapult its dependency. And after all, we inevitably but nod this non-substantial addiction as an essential need in our lives and hardly prevent its risks.

Research Findings

Studies from Notre Dame University-Louaize in 2015 have examined the relationship variables of smartphone addiction, stress, and life satisfaction among students. The researchers deploy a random-sampling survey method involving 249 student respondents ranging between 17–26 years old, of which 54.2% were male, and other composed separate research instruments such as gender, age, education level, and academic major.

Summing-up

The smartphone has been an integral part of our social affairs. However, it has way more decorated with the polar opposite of its use. Without self-regulating capacity, overuse of smartphones could lead to an addictive cycle of gratification. Technostress, anxiety, and depression could be haunting your life satisfaction and abuse inside-out our mental health if we were unable to restrain it.

  • Maya Samaha, Nazir S. Hawi, Relationships among smartphone addiction, stress, academic performance, and satisfaction with life, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 57, 2016, pp. 321–325, DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.12.045

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