One of the problems of our time, which affects both children and adults, is the addiction to mobile phones. The truth is that almost all of us, to a lesser extent, are quite dependent on our smartphone, either for professional reasons or for others such as leisure, virtual social contact, etc. In this context, the concept of digital well-being it becomes a real need.
In this sense, Google began to integrate the Digital Wellbeing app on many of their devices in 2018. In this post we are going to see how this tool can be very useful to control the time we spend looking at the mobile screen and moderate our digital activity.
Mobile addiction: a real problem
El mobile phone It's a wonderful invention that helps us communicate and stay connected. However, when this device becomes an obsession, the effect it produces is exactly the opposite: it disconnects us from others, isolates us, subjects us to a kind of slavery.
Mobile addiction is defined as excessive and unhealthy reliance on mobile phones. The symptoms are obvious: spend many hours of the day with your mobile phone in hand, constantly checking social networks, playing games, sending messages, etc. We wake up in the morning and the first thing we do is look at the smartphone screen; at night, we go to bed with it in our hands... An excessive, unhealthy use that generates dependency.
A person suffering from this disorder will be irritable and nervous when they cannot access their phone. In some cases, you can develop anxiety and frustration to worrying degrees. These are some of his consecuencias:
- Social isolation.
- Changes in behavior.
- Changes in mood
- Difficulty getting to sleep.
- Communication problems.
- Abstinence syndrome.
Worst of all is that this problem is spreading day by day among younger users, although the real numbers of those affected by this new type of addiction vary according to the criteria applied.
How the Digital Wellbeing app can help us
This magnificent tool for Android devices is a good weapon to prevent and avoid the problem of mobile addiction. Among other things, it allows us to know how much time we spend using the mobile, as well as create timers to limit its use. This is the download link:
See the time we spend with the mobile
One of the things that we can do with the Digital Wellbeing application is to find out how we use our own mobile at the end of the day. Because the first step to avoid the problem is to be aware of it. This is how we can do it:
- To start we go to Settings menu of our smartphone.
- From there we open the application digital wellbeing
There we find a graph where the total time of use of the device appears. To know more specifically what we spend the most time on, the most used applications are highlighted in different colors. Clicking on each of them we obtain detailed information on real time. In addition, the number of notifications received and the times we have unlocked the mobile screen are shown.
Create timers to control app usage
The information that Bienestar Digital provides us about the time we spend per day or week on certain applications will help us identify possible problems and find a solution. That is to say: where we must put a stop to our activity, set limits and better manage our time.
For example: let's imagine that there is an application that we are using without control and in which we are investing too much time. Well, what we have to do is go to Control Panel, where we find an interesting option: create daily timers for each of our apps. The time that we mark will depend on many factors, although the ideal is to seek a balance between our real need for use and our degree of dependence. If we were to set a 2 hour timer, that would be the daily time to use the selected app during the day, not a minute more.
Thanks to this resource, when the established daily time is exceeded, the application It will be paused until the next day. On the other hand, the application icon will be displayed in gray, a visual warning that it has been temporarily disabled by the Digital Wellbeing timer.
Obviously, from the Digital Wellbeing Settings we will be able to extend the time period of the timer or eliminate it if we believe that we do not need any control.
Conclusion
We can only applaud this initiative by Google. The Digital Wellbeing app is a perfect tool for maintain the balance between our real life and our virtual life. To the two main functions mentioned in this post, we must add others such as the "bedtime mode" function or the "distraction-free mode". In short, the help we need to avoid becoming addicted to mobile phones and enjoy a healthy and balanced use of our smartphone.