Phubbing • Our Phones and Our Lives: Part 2 (Episode 44)

The Life & Love Nuggets podcast will help you learn valuable insights into relationships, life, and love. Brent and Janis have been empowering couples through pre-marriage and marriage therapy in their private practice, Life Connection Counseling, since 1982. They recently retired after forty years of pastoral ministry and are continuing to help individuals, marriages, and families in their private practice.

The podcast is produced by ⁠Clayton Creative⁠ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content should not be considered or used for counseling but for educational purposes only.

This podcast should not be considered or used for counseling but for educational purposes only.

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Transcript:

Welcome to Life and Love Nuggets, where licensed therapists Brent and Janice Sharpe share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hello friends, welcome to Life and Love Nuggets. We're glad that you're back with us. Here we are again.

It's been a week, huh? Yeah, it has been a week.

A lot of things going on. You know, we thought when we retired from church work a couple of years ago, we'd have a lot of margin in our life. And, you know, there's a weird thing that you can just fill up all that margin with all kinds of other goodies. Good things, a lot of good things, but it can still fill it all up. We have to pay attention to this. Yes, we may. It's not what we're talking about today, actually.

We should maybe do one on balance. I don't know. Maybe so, on boundaries and balance. Yeah, rest. There's a lot we can do. Oh boy. Yeah. Okay. So, last time we talked about phone etiquette. These smartphones that we have, they're just amazing things in our life, but they can really be used in very strange ways. And so, we talked about kind of the new rules.

This week we want to talk about how the use of technology to communicate is affecting our relationships. And during the lockdown, obviously technology was huge. It was a great tool. I mean, being able to FaceTime families and friends when you were stuck at home, huge benefit that we got from this. Being able to have a church service where you still feel this sense of connection with the community. Schools were meeting online for part of the time. Support groups, recovery groups and stuff were able to still meet and meet online. It was really a godsend to most of us. We continue to see therapy clients online for a season. In fact, we didn't have the lockdown as much because we were working all the way through.

We didn't slow down at all. Even Christmas, one Christmas, one of our families was not able to come that lives out of town. And so, we just turned it on. We had the computer sitting there. And let it run the whole time and let them watch everybody.

Open presence and stuff. And so, really amazing opportunity that that gave us. So, Zoom, FaceTime and other video calls offered us these coping mechanisms to at least mitigate the impact of being so isolated. But they were far from ideal. So, as we're going to talk about today, getting into this habit of continually being on our phones or video calls has really impacted our lives and relationships in really a very negative way. Yeah. And you know, I often tell my clients when they're talking about some kind of addiction or habit they don't like anymore that's a coping mechanism, I will say, don't hate your life raft. Because that coping mechanism got them to that place.

We just need to find some healthier alternatives now. It's not working well for us now. It's not working at this point. And so, our phone technology, they really were lifelines at that particular point. We really needed them. But now that things are a little bit back to normal, well, pretty much back to normal, we have to really work on, is this beneficial for me at this time? You know, in the pandemic, a lot of people talked about how they put on weight and that their coping mechanism at that point was eating. Well, it's kind of like that now. Just like we don't want to continue to overeat now that we're not isolated, we also want to be careful to not use our technology or to not overuse our technology so that we get it in the appropriate place. And just like food, you know, if we go, oh, I ate too much during the pandemic, we don't say, well, then stop eating.

You just learn how to manage it. And that's what we're doing with our phones. We just have to learn how to manage them in a way that's healthy and that is productive for us. So, a new thing has come up recently regarding cell phones in particular, and it's cell phone addiction. And we talked last time about, we're going to talk about, are you addicted to your cell phone? So, while cell phone addiction isn't really recognized, excuse me, in our diagnostic manual, it is getting more and more recognized as an actual addiction. And a lot of the symptoms and signs that we're seeing are very similar to being addicted to gambling.

So, it is a thing. It is something that we need to really pay attention to. So, we're going to look at some of the symptoms. This was a little bit convicting, and so we might have to have a little confessional.

Wait till we get to phubbing. Yeah, during this time. So, these are just some of the symptoms. Just to be able to kind of self diagnose, to be self-aware, is this impacting me too much? You know, one of them is you're constantly reaching for your phone. Gosh, I think all of us just have some of this now. We've talked about, even in counseling, you're going to have to have people leave their smartphones or their cell phones someplace else because it just totally distracts them. Every time there's a little buzz or their wrist vibrates, they're losing concentration. Squirrel. Gosh, if you have a couple in too. You've got two phones there.

And so, it's like we're distracted, and then we're distracted, and then we're distracted. Yeah. So, are we reaching for our phones just that natural, consistent impulse when we're bored or just not doing something proactively, then we reach for that.

You spend much of your time on your phone. If you're not working or certain by yourself that most of the time we end up spending on our phone, that you wake in the night to check if your phone has any notifications. You feel negative emotions such as anger, sadness, or anxiety when you don't have your phone or can't check your phone. Because we leave the house and we forget it. My phone.

Oh, no, I forgot my phone. There's a kind of sense of anxiety, a little bit of panic. Using your phone has led to an injury or accident such as a car crash from texting while driving. Now, most of us might not exactly had that happen, but- Probably because they had their wife in the car. Stop it.

What are you doing? Car, honey. I mean, I don't know if that personally, but- No, that would never happen- No. In any personal situation. The amount of time you spend on your phone affects your professional and personal life. So, it's causing conflicts or issues at work, causing conflicts or issues with your kids or with your spouse. When you try to limit your phone use, you end up relapsing in a really short period of time. So, these are some of the first signs. And there's symptoms that can come as a part of phone addiction. There's some like muscle pain and stiffness. They're talking about cell phone neck now, that people actually their necks are changing because they're bending over so much.

Fatigue, issues with your eyes, dry eyes, red eyes, that kind of thing have come about. Auditory illusions, which I thought was very interesting. And it's thinking you hear your phone ring when it actually isn't. That can be a part of addiction.

Or maybe just buzzing. You think there's a buzzing. I've had people, they carry it in their pocket. And even when it's not in their pocket, they feel almost this little vibration in their leg that's not from anything. That's right. You probably shouldn't just say, you're addicted to your phone in session.

That probably wouldn't be right. But a few other things are thumb and wrist pain. And as you mentioned, relationship and work issues, inability, and an increased risk. I'm sorry, irritability and an increased risk of depression and anxiety. So, this all leads us to.

One more thing I forgot. If you or you think someone else has an addiction to their phone an actual addiction, it would be really important to go to verywellhealth.com because they actually go into more depth about what a cell phone addiction is. And so, it would be good to take a look at that. Verywellhealth.com. Verywellhealth.com and go to phone addiction, what you need to know. Interesting. Yes. So, these are just some of the things for us to all pay attention to. We certainly aren't pointing the finger here other than at ourselves.

Wait, wait, you just pointed at me. What? What are you talking about? Which leads us to this concept called phubbing. P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G. It's a thing, okay?

It is a thing. The Cambridge Dictionary defines phubbing as this, the act of ignoring someone you are with and giving your attention to your mobile phone instead. It comes from combining the words phone and snubbing. So again, we're thinking, okay, wait a second, is this really a thing? It's a thing. It's a thing.

Phubbing was first coined as a term in May of 2012. An Australian advertising agency created the word to describe the growing phenomenon, this was 11 years ago now, of people ignoring their friends and family who are right in front of them and instead scrolling through their phones. Shocking. I'm sure this has never happened to anybody. Never happened. Well, we may not use the word phubbing very often, though I have a feeling in this podcast we're going to say phubbing more than we'll say the rest of our lives.

So just get ready for it. There's going to be a lot of phubbing. So though we don't usually use that, we all do it.

And we all do it a lot. One study found that 17% of people phub others at least four times a day. And almost 32% of people report being phubbed two to three times a day. Phubbing interrupts your ability to be present and to really engage with the people around you. And since almost all Americans have cell phones now, this is happening all the time and is probably increasing in the quantity of time that people are spending phubbing. So one study found that texting during a face-to-face conversation made the experience less satisfying, certainly for the person that's receiving, you know, that's on the other end. But interestingly enough, even for the phubber, even for the one that's actually doing it, the whole conversation was considered less significant and less valuable. There was a study done, this couple, or two individuals, my life has become a major distraction from my cell phone.

I love that title. Mary O'Driscoll That's how I always say, you know, work really gets in the way of my life. So it's very similar to that.

James That's right. Mary O'Driscoll Yeah. James Meredith, David, and James Roberts suggested phubbing can really impact the most significant relationship in our life, our life partner, and in our marriage. According to their study, phubbing decreases marital satisfaction, in part, of course, because it leads to conflict over phone use. But the scientists found that phubbing, by lowering marital satisfaction, actually affected a partner's depression and satisfaction with life.

Mary O'Driscoll Wow. James And there's a follow-up study that showed some similar results. Partner phubbing, because it was associated with lower marital satisfaction, contributed to greater feelings of depression. And one study, now this is a huge number here, one study showed that 70% of women in this study felt cell phones interfered with their romantic relationship. This is huge. Mary O'Driscoll It's huge. And I don't know about you, Brent, but I kind of wonder if it's more than 70%, at least in the people that we see, because we see it all the time. It's always interesting that a lot of couples believe that their partner uses their cell phone more than they do.

So a lot of times she'll say, oh, he's always on his phone. And he'll go, I'm not either. You're on your phone more than you are. And so in our own relationship, when a comment that comes up is, well, I wouldn't be on my phone, but you were on your phone, so I got on my phone because I didn't have anything to do. Right? Brent I wonder how many times that is said in America.

Mary O'Driscoll Oh, isn't that the truth? Well, I now have a factual basis for that evidence to prove that you do get on your cell phone when your partner is on their cell phone. So according to a study, people who feel fubbed turn to social media. They may turn to their cell phone to distract them from the very painful feelings of being socially neglected. And it's interesting because brain research is now showing us that that impact is the same as physical pain. So feeling rejected or socially isolated is the same. It registers in your brain the same as physical pain. So we are harming one another day in and day out. But most people to cope for that feeling of pain, what do they do?

They attach themselves to their phones. And then it just repeats the cycle and it increases anxiety and depression in our lives and in our partner's life or friends. Brent Well, what an impact that this is having. What a spiral cycle that becomes then. Age and gender do play a role in this we found in people's reactions. Studies suggest that older participants, so people like us and women, advocate for more restricted phone use.

Men tend to differ from women about this. They don't view it as inappropriate as much in environments. And so, which is, we could go into all kind of maybe reasons for that. But they even found in classrooms that male students find fubbing far less disturbing than females do. But I would just say to us guys, the most significant person that we want to feel heard and listen to and important and not fubbed is our spouse.

It's a woman. And so we got to pay attention to this. And so we have to realize that if we are, even if we don't think it's that big a deal, we might not experience it. Maybe the male brain, I don't know, can slip in and out of stuff. I still like you. You know, the whole multitasking idea is really, it suggests it's not a thing, that you actually just lose concentration.

You focus from this thing. You can only focus on one thing at a time. You don't do it well. Yeah. And so, and maybe the male brain can back and forth easier and faster and they don't feel distressed from it. But realize that we're causing distress in others. And so causing them to feel discounted, invalidated, causing them to feel unimportant. So we've got to pay attention to this and realize that this is something that we can, we could just turn around, not by arguing over it and trying to prove why it's not that big a deal, but recognizing and validating another person's experience. Yeah. This is something that could be coming in between us that we need to deal with. One of the interesting things that I found as I was doing some research is that phone use doesn't only equate to less face-to-face time, but the face-to-face time is less positive, or we enjoy it less, which is interesting because you think when you put your phone down, we would really enjoy the time together, but it's causing people to really not enjoy the time together.

Researcher Ryan Dwyer was asked why participants enjoyed speaking with people in person less the more they use their phones. And he replied, the culprit is distraction. Using your phone, as you said, during an interaction makes it hard to engage with your conversation, which makes it a more stunted conversation and can be a boring interaction. Which again, the stunted communication is what we see in our counseling office when people have to stop in the process because they're looking at their phone. I found a quote that I can really, really relate to from a man who was talking about a reunion dinner that he went to. He said, many of the people had already been so involved in my digital. you know what I'm saying, online, my online life, that we didn't have much connection. Most of the people at the table were focused on their devices, not knowing what kind of isolation they were projecting.

This behavior has led me to become totally awkward and increasingly lonely. You know, I find oftentimes when I run into people that we've known from years ago and they're like, how are you doing? I want to update them on my kids and all the things that are going on. And so I'll say something like, oh, this one just started kindergarten. They'll go, I know, I saw those pictures. Oh yeah, this one is doing this. And it really leads to, well, what do I talk about? If I don't have something to share about my life because they've already seen it online, I'm not sure what I should be talking about. This next one is really a bit staggering to me. A set of studies actually showed that just having a phone out in front of you, not on it, not looking at it, just having it out in front of us on a table during a conversation interferes with our sense of connection to the other person, a sense of closeness and the quality of conversation. So this is hitting us on a subconscious level that just by seeing a phone, it feels like a distraction.

It feels like, okay, that's something that is coming between us somehow. Well, it's that feeling of, okay, well, they're talking to me, but they're going to be ready to pick that up the minute it rings. That's why it's out. So especially true during meaningful conversations, that just having a phone out, we lose this opportunity for real, authentic connection to another person, which is obviously what we're looking for in important relationships is this deeper sense of connection. And so these same studies went on to show that conversations with no smartphone even close, that we couldn't actually see it, that they're rated significantly higher quality than those when they're around.

Again, this is regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, or mood. So it's same actually with men in this study, that we feel more empathy when smartphones are put away. So, I mean, this makes sense. When we are on our phones, we're not looking at other people.

We're not looking for nonverbals. If we see that most communication is nonverbal, then we're not even looking for that. We can't see the nuance in their tone of voice, or are they discouraged, or are they feeling anxious? We don't notice their body language. Is there sadness or excited, or they feel overwhelmed by something? All that stuff you pick up not in words, but in those nonverbals. And so if we're not looking at them, certainly that's going to limit that. So we miss so much because we're slumped over our phones. Oftentimes communicating with somebody else, which creates a distraction, or, and this is really interesting, or we're catching up on social media or news, and both of those are found to cause depression and loneliness. So I'm actually over here looking at social media, or catching up on the news, which is going to decrease my mood. It has nothing to do with the relationship that I have with the person I'm talking to.

Anyway, all this stuff is really, we need to really pay attention to this. This is catching us and impacting us, and we're not even aware of it. Well, it's got to be contributing to more depression and anxiety in our society. You feel fubbed, but then when you're fubbing, you're looking at negative content online that makes you feel bad. The authors of the book, Fubbed and Alone, have had a quote that said, it's ironic that cell phones, originally designed as a communication tool, may actually hinder rather than foster interpersonal connectedness. So interesting.

So it is, it's a vicious cycle. You know, a fubbed person turns to social media, their partner feels bad, that causes them to go to social media, they end up fubbing each other in the process, and it ends up with a negative result that we aren't even aware of. But it's a decrease in mood that we're not even aware of. But we don't just do this to our partners. We do it to friends, we do it to kids, we do it to a number of people that we really do care about, but we get caught up in this. It's not surprising to anybody who's been fubbed that phone users generally are seen as less polite and attentive. If you're on your phone a lot, people perceive you as someone who doesn't care.

They're just involved in something else. All of us want connection and validation. So just like you talked about earlier, if I'm sitting here and you're on your phone, I'm not going to, if you're on your phone, if I'm on my phone, anyway, we don't get to see people's social cues. One way or another, if you're on my phone, does anybody want our phones? Because I would just like to give them out. If one of you is on your phone, the other person feels disrespected. And we get our connection by not only the verbal things that we say, but our nonverbal cues that we get from the other person. So it's harming all of our relationships. And then we're alluding to this already, but certainly our mental health is affected by this. And so there's some pretty staggering statistics out there about sadness and loneliness. And these that we're going to talk about here, it's important to know this was before the pandemic.

So this was just the effects of some of this before the pandemic, before the Ukrainian war, before a lot of the natural disasters that have happened around the world. And so in the U.S., there was a Cigna survey of 20,000 Americans released in May of 2018 that found that nearly half of Americans are lonely based on the UCLA revised loneliness scale, calling it a national loneliness epidemic. So one out of two people are feeling lonely. A year later, Cigna also conducted another study, and the national trend was even more staggering.

It was three out of five. So 60% of Americans are lonely. But this isn't just in the U.S. This seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. The U.K. is considered a kind of an epidemic in there. The prime minister at the time in 2018 appointed a minister for loneliness. Wow. Bizarre. Made this decision after two studies found that 9 million British citizens are often or always lonely. Another study of Irish adults found that most of what induces loneliness is not the quantity of the relationship, which speaks to the phone issue, but it's the quality, that low-quality relationships, which abound when we're distracted by all these devices where somebody's not paying attention, significant attention to you, incredibly increases loneliness.

And so it's not just affecting communication and personal relationships, but it's actually affecting our own mental health. You know, we all do it.

Some more than others. We all excuse it, but focusing on our phones rather than the people around us really does have a negative effect on our relationships, on our mental health. Just it's an unhealthy habit that everybody does. So we talked about are you addicted to your phone?

Let's talk about are you a fubber? Here are some signs that you're a fubber. I'll read them out loud for you, Brent, so you can hear them. You have your phone out and close to you when you're with your partner at all times. You keep your conversations with your partner short because your attention is more focused on what's on your phone. You break your attention from the conversation you're having with your partner to look at or to respond to your phone. You check your phone when there's a lull in the conversation. If you're watching TV together, you look at your phone when there's a commercial break. You take a call that's not urgent when you're having quality time with your partner. Ouch. That really hits close to home.

I think that's something that we can both say we're very guilty of. So remember, no condemnation. That's right. No shaming here. But we all should have some conviction, have some self-awareness here. So, boy, there's a lot of things we could talk about on what to do about this. We're just going to kind of wrap this time up with just three simple things. We find that if people can just eliminate just a very few things or begin to do a few things differently, then it forms a new habit and a new way of being. And there's just three things that we think of that could really make a difference here.

The first one is making our meals a no-phone zone. What we encourage is whether you're out to eat, whether you're sitting around the dining room table with just your partner or with all your children, a whole family, just make it a thing. We do not ever have our phones with us. We encourage families to have a little basket over somewhere in the living room or whatever that everybody puts their phones in just as a practice for these kind of times or at least make sure everybody turns it to do not disturb. I have to make one disclaimer for this particular one because I just had a couple that ran into us that said they see us at lunch frequently. Yes. So if you see us at lunch, we probably, if it's a work day, we're on our phone because we're with clients all day. And so our phone is the only time we have to look for urgent messages. So for those of you that see us at lunch, just please know we're not breaking our rules. We just have to get work done during that time. Yeah. But just know this is going to feel kind of forced initially.

It's going to feel awkward. But eventually you're going to begin to see the benefit of these face-to-face conversations without this distraction. And so give yourself each meal to engage in this more active communication, more listening, and just see what happens. Yeah, yeah. So the other one is leave your phone when you're going to be interacting with someone you care about. It can, as you said, it can be in a basket, a box, a bag, at your desk, another room of the house. Now some of you may be freaking out because that's a lot of time to be without your phone. But it really is worth it and you can do it. Those news alerts, the text you got from somebody, that email, there's really nothing that can't wait 30 to 60 minutes.

There's no crisis that generally requires you to respond to that quickly. So talk back to your anxiety and put it down and go back to it when you've finished having your conversation. We talked about couch time in marriages. That's the time there should be no phones. No phones, no emails, no computers, no TVs, anything that could distract need to be put away during that time.

And remember, smartphones have been out for 16 years. So the world operated for literally thousands of years where you couldn't get back to people immediately. And the world lived and everybody did fine. And so we can do this. And so the final thing is we just encourage you to make this a challenge. Start keeping track of the hours and meals where you have no phone. And so whatever your goal is, if we want to do it for 30 days, if we want to do it for start out a week or whatever, do it for a month. And then you meet that, you check all this off, make that as a family goal even with your kids. And then we check it off and then we treat ourselves. So do whatever you need to do to reinforce in a positive way, making a real change in this. And I would say really work on yourself.

It's so easy for couples. Of course we see conflictual couples, but it's so easy for them to go, well, I'll work on my phone usage if you work on yours. You know, if your partner doesn't do it, you can still work on yours and then you can express later on in a positive way that you would appreciate it if they would work on theirs. So boy, we could talk about this for a long time, but let's all take a step. We can make a difference in those significant relationships and our own mental health. Bring our own levels of joy and feeling encouraged and vibrant in our days.

We can affect that and connected. We can affect that by making this change.

So for today, go in peace. Blessings as you go. The Life and Love Nuggets podcast is a 501c3 nonprofit and is supported by gifts from people like you. To donate, go to lifeandlovenuggets.com/donate. This podcast is produced by Clayton Creative in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content should not be considered or used for counseling, but for educational purposes only.