Do you feel like you’re on your cellphone too much?

In this day and age, it’s not uncommon to see someone’s eyes locked onto their cellphone.

The phones come in handy and can even save our lives in an emergency, but do you ever feel you’re on your mobile device too much?

According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, there are nearly 258 million cellphone users in the U.S.

We see them everywhere: people communicating or maybe killing time. But are you spending more time on your phone than you’d like?

“I think I’m on my phone too much every day,” Imani Adams said.

“I do feel like I’m on my phone too much at times,” Emerald Hernandez added.

And let’s talk about that feeling you get when you leave your phone behind.

“It’s just, like, an anxiety that you get,” Jazmin Jimenez said.

“Whether it’s social media, email, texting, reading the latest news feeds we always have to be connected,” Paul Carrola said.

Carrola is an assistant professor of mental health at The University of Texas at El Paso.

Carrola says there isn’t anything wrong with being connected and interacting with people on social media.

However, “The problem is when it becomes a substitute. When it becomes a substitute then we kind of lose our ability or our comfort in connecting with people in real time,” Carrola said.

Most people ABC-7 spoke with admit their phone can be a distraction.

“I’m in there for hours, and oh dang, I have to go back, like what was I doing? I just wasted so much of my time on Twitter or something,” Adams said.

“It’s a distraction all the time,” Claudia Flores told ABC-7.

Now, it’s even harder to put our phones down because there are notifications popping out at us for everything.

“Notifications are too much,” Flores said.

“They send them over and over till you have to listen to them,” Hernandez added.

Carrola says it’s up to a person to tell themselves if constantly being on their phone is too much.

“We have to be able to tolerate not having that instant connection, and what I say from a mental health perspective, ‘It’s good to be able to and disconnect at times.'”

So how can you detach yourself from your phone?

First, you can get an app that will show you how much time you’ve spent on your phone.

In 2018, Neilson researchers reported people spend nearly three hours on their phones a day.

You can put your phone away where you can’t see it, like a backpack, purse or in the glove compartment while you drive.
You can also turn off any notifications, and if you want to go extreme, you can remove all social media apps from your phone, keep them on your laptop and check them when you get home.

It’s also a good idea to charge your phone where you can’t readily reach it.

Lastly, use your free time to socialize in the real world.

“We need to make sure we don’t lose our actual connections with people,” Carrola said.

“I do think that we rely a lot on our cellphones, and I feel like sometimes we need to put them away and kind of enjoy life and live in the moment instead of trying to post everything,” Janyce Johnson said.