Psychiatry Advisor thinks nomophobia is a modern day pathology or psycho sickness. It says the term comes from no–mobile-phone-phobia. We have some doubts because the naming of other phobias is more logical. For example arachnophobia comes from the root for spider. However, it makes for a good post and we’ll go with it.
Is Nomophobia Irrational or the New Normal?
The root prefix “nomo”, traditionally refers to something customary, or a law. Hence we derive words like normal and normative from it. If we have a friend who gets stressful when their battery starts beeping they may be displaying signs of nomophobia.
Systemic symptoms may include typical signs of separation anxiety, according to Psychiatry Advisor. The afflicted person may have anxiety, depression, discomfort, increased heart rate and blood pressure, shortness of breath, nausea, or trembling. One school of thought says this is not a phobia at all. It is a sign of an addiction, or another lifestyle disorder.
Go Where Few Phone Owners Have Gone Before
Wired.Com tipped us off about the ‘Die With Me’ chat app. This enables an owner of a ‘terminally-ill phone battery’ to find and chat with a soulmate. “Die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace” or so says their website.
We rather like that idea, whether or not nomophobia really exists. We could “go where no person has gone before” because facing up to our ‘demons’ is after all one way to defeat them.
Wired.Com offers this additional comfort: “Die With Me is a remarkably wholesome chat,” it says. “With many users seeming to revel in their phone’s imminent battery death” as they explore a strange new world. Letting your phone die in this context is a cheeky kind of anarchic bad behaviour like dancing on the edge.
Related
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Batteries Stressing Smartphones & Me Too
Preview Image: Separation Anxiety
