Do you check your mobile phone within minutes of waking? Do you want to know How To Break Up With Your Phone?
It may benefit you to know why you should not check your phone in the morning.
Our mobile phones are an ‘extra limb’ for many.
Do you wonder how you ever functioned without your phone which is now your calendar, alarm clock, music player, multiple APP provider and portable email ‘in-box’?
We rely so much on our mobile phones that we become addicted.
Finding ourselves at the beck and call of notifications we find ourselves constantly reacting to the words and images of others.
Research suggests that receiving constant notifications can trigger the stress response within the body.
The Future Work Centre in London surveyed 2000 workers and discovered that without doubt, email notifications are linked to higher feelings of anxiety.
Combine these with notifications from multiple smartphone Apps’ such as Facebook and Twitter and you are likely to be challenged.
These App’s have been shown to create a release of dopamine making them highly addictive.
We don’t want anxiety, but we feel a strong desire to pursue behaviors that create anxiety.
If you wake in the morning and reach for your phone, then it’s likely that you could be inducing a stress response within minutes of waking.
The way that you feel early on in the day can impact the rest of your day.
Checking notifications has been shown to create an increase in cortisol within the body.
Cortisol is our fight or flight hormone and can be useful in dangerous situations.
If there was a lion running towards us, we would need this to react appropriately and cortisol would help us do this.
Unfortunately constantly looking at our phones we spend more and more time experiencing this stress response which is usually meant to help us out-run a lion, not respond to a text or an email.
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk stated that “When we feel stressed, we’re either ruminating on the past or worrying about the future”.
Every e-mail or notification causes us to think about what we missed in the past, or what we need to do in the future.
Checking our phones first thing in the morning we lose our morning.
We give ourselves away to our phone and react to what we see instead of focusing on how we want to feel.
At the mercy of our phones, we operate at a level less than we deserve.
We begin to live a life that’s less than we deserve.
We suffer both physically and emotionally and the people around us suffer too. (Oh, and if you want to lose weight you may want to spend less time with your phone. Researchers have discovered that there is a likely association with cortisol and weight gain).
If you are want to prioritise your health and your happiness, then follow my top tips for starting your day in a better way:
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