People Who Are Easily Distracted By Their Phones Usually Have These 2 Psychological Traits
If you're always in your head, you're probably a cellphone addict too.
Ivanko80 | Shutterstock We talk all the time about how our phones are making us less present and more anxious, but it seems like there might be a "chicken or the egg" aspect to this issue. Is the phone making us distracted and anxious? Or are we glued to the phone because we're distracted and anxious? A new study from Japan sheds interesting light on the subject.
The study found that people easily distracted by their phones tend to share two specific psychological traits.
Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan sought to dig into the issues other studies have brought up in recent years about the potential psychological implications of constantly being on our smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
By now, we've probably all heard about the myriad negative outcomes linked to smartphones, from more anxiety and depression to lower attention spans and even cognitive impairments. And, of course, the mental health, literacy, and behavior crises among kids and young people seem to bear out the idea that all these screens are doing us harm.
But science has yet to fully establish how exactly our phones might be doing so. The Japanese study landed on two strong correlations among those who display "attention bias" towards their phone, a scientific term for, basically, being highly distracted by an object or thought.
1. Those easily distracted by their phones lack 'interoceptive awareness,' or bodily awareness.
The researchers found that those of us who spend all of our time staring at our phones tend to be disconnected from our bodies. We lack what's called "interoceptive awareness," which is the ability to notice and understand the body's internal signals, from things like hunger and thirst to physical pain and emotions.
If you've ever spent hours endlessly scrolling only to realize it's 9:30 p.m. and you forgot to eat dinner, you might have experienced this. It's not that you never got hungry but that you just sort of didn't notice the hunger pangs, or at least not as strongly as you noticed your desire for the next TikTok video.
To test this, researchers gave subjects a simple visual test to identify letters on a screen. In the background of the screen were either images from a cellphone, such as a call notification, or random images as a control. Those who had cellphone-related images in the background consistently struggled to pay attention to the letter-identification task at hand, even when the smartphone background images were irrelevant. They were disconnected from their interoceptive awareness, too.
"They were less attuned to internal bodily signals such as their heartbeat," Yusuke Haruki, one of the lead researchers and author of the resulting paper, told research outlet Medical Xpress. Even more bracing, Haruki noted that this pattern "[mirrors] behavioral addictions like gambling or substance use."
2. Those easily distracted by smartphones are also more physiologically reactive.
In an interesting dichotomy, the easily distracted folks were not only disconnected from their bodily signals but were also far more physiologically reactive, meaning their bodies reacted to the stimuli they received from the tests much more intensely than others.
For instance, "participants who were more distracted by smartphone cues not only performed worse on the attention task but also showed accelerated heart rates" when exposed to the images in the tests, Haruki said.
It seems it's a sort of "double whammy" for those who struggle with paying attention because of their phones, then. They're not only less attuned to their bodies, which means they miss key signals of their bodies' physical and emotional needs, which stresses out their systems; but they also have reactions like a racing heartbeat in response to the phones' stimulation, which amps up the stress responses even more.
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It's easy to see a feedback loop forming an endless cycle between these two states, and as someone who has struggled with what feels like an addiction to the ol' smartphone, it certainly feels like this is how it goes. I've lost count of how many times I've looked up from my phone, realized three hours have gone by, I'm desperate to pee, absolutely ravenous, and irritated and agitated.
Haruki said he and his colleagues want to continue doing more research to dig deeper into this relationship, in the hopes that they can come up with ways to help people form healthier habits with their smartphones, especially among young people. That's a noble goal we could probably all benefit from.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
