now every time you get a notification on your phone or you watch a funny video on Tik Tok you receive a message or you get a follower on social media it triggers that release of dopamine that you would normally get from doing other things like finding food or talking to people what's up everyone today we are going to talk about phone addiction so first I'm going to tell you some interesting facts about phone addiction then we'll talk about what causes phone addiction then we'll talk about the negative effects of it and finally we will talk
about how we can reduce phone addiction what are some useful ways that we can stop being so addicted to our phones because most of you probably already know what phone addiction is right most of you have probably felt it you might have it right now or you might be trying to reduce the amount of time that you're on your phone phone addiction is something that is super common now in modern society and it's not just young people but older people as well so phone addiction is something that affects almost everyone myself included I have a
constant Battle of trying to reduce my phone time and trying to not be addicted trying to not scroll through uh shorts like on Instagram or YouTube I don't use Tik Tok but Instagram reals and YouTube is pretty much the same thing so often when I'm trying to work like prepare a podcast or edit a video just do something productive I'm constantly fighting the urge to pick up my phone which is definitely a sign of phone addiction and when I do pick up my phone and spend some time scrolling once I realize what I'm doing I
actually get kind of angry I get like annoyed with myself but also with the fact that we have this piece of technology that has been designed to take our attention right like literally scientifically engineered to make you you addicted to it like these companies have spent so much effort and money to research what makes humans addicted to things and how they can make their products addictive so this topic of phone addiction is pretty close to my heart to be honest because I think it's a big deal in society and and in the world in general
okay so before I tell you about some interesting facts about phone addiction I just want to let you guys know that I just opened the whats up English store at whatsup english. VN and in that store I'm going to be selling products like PDFs and audio files that are designed to be super convenient and useful they're designed for you to be able to have it on your phone and if you have you know three or four minutes to study then you can just open it up and listen to it to practice really useful things like
vocabulary uh pronunciation communication and my first product is the 1,000 most common English words in that product you get a a list of the Thousand most common words but also you get the IPA pronunciation an example sentence in English a natural one that is useful for Vietnamese people the Vietnamese translation of that sentence but also you get audio files for every single word and sentence and the audio file I say the word and then there's a pause so you can repeat the word to practice your pronunciation and then I say the sentence and then there
is another pause after the sentence where you can repeat it it's got a study schedule so you can study 10 words a day so after a little over 3 months you will have practiced a thousand of the most common words in English which is all you need to understand around 7 to 80% of daily English so I just wanted to let everyone know about that if you want to buy that and support the channel I would appreciate it so much thank you all right so let's get started with the interesting facts phone addiction is also
called nomophobia which means no mobile phone phobia now some of you may maybe have heard mobile or mobile both pronunciations are correct mobile is American English and mobile is British English next fact the average person touches their phone 2,617 times a day that's a lot 67% of mobile phone owners check their phone even when it doesn't ring or vibrate I do that too I will just see my phone it didn't ring it didn't vibrate and then I'll just pick it up and and just look at it because you get that feeling of dopamine right the
average person spends 4 hours a day on their phone 50% of people feel uneasy when they leave their phone at home so when they leave their house without their phone 50% feel uneasy I'll admit me too if I leave without my phone I don't want to leave for a long time and over 60% of people aged 18 to 34 admit to being addicted to their phones so those were some interesting facts so now let's talk about what causes phone addiction well the addiction starts with a chemical in your brain that you probably already know called
dopamine and most of the apps in your phone are designed to trigger that feeling of dopamine you probably already know what dopamine is it's that neurotransmitter chemical in your brain that makes you feel good for your reward system but it also has a big role in your feelings of motivation one study even showed that when mice didn't have dopamine in their brains um they wouldn't go and try to find food and they would actually starve to death even when food was put in front of them so dopamine is extremely important to motivate us to go
and do things that are important for our survival like going out socializing finding food and doing other things that keeps the human race alive right but the thing is now every time you get a notification on your phone or you watch a funny video on Tik Tok you receive a message or you get a follower on social media it triggers that release of dopamine that you would normally get from doing other other things like finding food or talking to people and every time that dopamine gets released those Pathways in your brain become stronger and it
feels good so we want to keep doing it before we had phones in order to get this nice feeling of dopamine we had to go outside talk to people get food maybe go hunting or go and and pick plants or vegetables but now all we need to do is pull out our phones so the question is how does this negatively affect our lives well one of the negative effects is it could make you start feeling less excited and happy about life because those normal things that are supposed to make you feel good like going out
talking to people getting food don't have that same effect anymore now one study with rats showed that when they put the rat in a new exciting environment it triggered the dopamine in its brain and it felt really excited it felt happy but if they gave that same rat dopamine treatment before putting it in this new exciting environment then it didn't have the same dopamine release they would give it dopamine it would be like oo nice and then they put it in the new environment and it didn't feel excited as it normally should that dopamine treatment
is what our phones are doing to us so when we go outside in an environment or do something exciting that should give us dopamine it doesn't so that's one negative part of phone addiction but another negative part is that it decreases our attention spans this decrease in our attention spans makes it harder to focus on tasks right especially tasks that take long time to do and it also makes it harder to delay gratification now to delay gratification means to wait in order to get the enjoyment from something for example if you have to write a
script for a video and then edit it and do and do a whole bunch of things before you can post it and get the views then it might be harder after using your phone all the time because with your phone it gives you instant gratification but if you have to do something that takes time in order to get the enjoyment from it later then being addicted to your phone will make that a lot harder and this is especially hard with things that take a few months in order to see the results like studying English for
example you need to study English for months if not years before you start seeing really good results and the instant gratification from our phones could make that more difficult to do all right so we know phone usage is bad I think everyone knows that but of course it's really hard to stop using your phone because our brain wants it it's just how we are designed so how can we reduce the usage of our phones well it turns out a lot of people are starting to buy dumb phones and dumb phones are those phones that can't
really do much you can make calls you can text but browsing the internet is not convenient you can't watch videos so people have found it so hard to control their behavior that they just made it so they cannot do those things even if they wanted to cuz maybe you have tried deleting apps right I've I've tried that too but when it's possible to download it again in 30 seconds it's just a constant battle that you have to fight with yourself and it can be difficult so some people just get a dumb phone where it's not
possible to download and apparently it has been effective so another thing you can do is turn your phone on grayscale which means you won't see any colors everything is black and white so the colorful icons won't attract your attention or you can use a minimalist launcher which is what I use you could see here and what this is is like here is the homepage there's nothing on it except for a calendar so when I open my phone I don't see you know Instagram or you YouTube and Just it makes it a little bit more difficult
for me to go in and it doesn't look exciting so it really helps and if you want to use an app then I would have to go to the next screen search for that app specifically and then I can access it if you can make it just harder for yourself and less exciting then that can help another thing you can do is put your phone away when you're working if it's out of sight and out of your reach it can make it a lot easier to not be addicted to your phone all right guys so
that is going to be pretty much it for this podcast um I think this topic is really important I think being less addicted to our phones will help humankind as a whole we can be more productive we can feel feel happier with you know talking to each other and again I'm not saying that I'm not addicted because I am too and that's why I care about it because I know it can happen to anyone but um yeah so that is going to be it for this podcast uh make sure to check out my website whatsup
english. VN and there will be a free PDF for this podcast below 1,000 most common words is available for 79k so uh yeah we'll see you guys in the next video goodbye
