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The Anxiety Disorder Lurking In Your Pocket (Update)

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This article is more than 9 years old.

Our gadgets are so interwoven with our lives, it’s fair to argue that they’ve become an extension of who we are. Phones are no longer just phones, they are Life Interface Devices (let’s just go ahead and coin it – they’re LIDs), and losing your LID is no small matter. Back in the day if someone stole your cellphone or you left it in a public bathroom, the loss stung for sure, but was remedied easily enough. Not so with LIDs, which carry as much of you in them as anything else you own.

It stands to reason, then, that losing your LID is likely to bring on anxiety. Researchers Those promoting the research are calling this “Smartphone-Loss Anxiety Disorder” – the “disorder” part conveying not a clinical diagnosis, but just how grave a blow losing or having stolen our LID is, and just how difficult it is to get over. [Note the update at the end of this article about the term "Smartphone-loss anxiety disorder".]

A recently published paper by researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario discusses the core of this anxiety, and a few coping mechanisms to overcome it. The problem they describe comes down to the depth of data “assets” we entrust to these little boxes in our pockets.

“These assets may include personal and business contacts, private pictures and videos, meeting and lecture notes and the like, banking details, utility statements, company spreadsheets and much more. All such assets are potentially sensitive to abuse by third parties,” they write.

On top of that, many companies now have a BYOD policy (bring your own device) for employees to use their own smartphones as work phones, rather than issuing company phones. So along with the ocean of personal data on your phone, you may also be safeguarding proprietary company data. Losing your phone in that case catalyzes anxiety about the security of your job along with the personal loss you’re already feeling.

Coping with this anxiety, the researchers say, starts well before we lose our LID. We need to punch up our awareness of our options. The research team says they found few people in their study who were aware of “countermeasures” like remote device locks or “time bomb” data deletion settings that effectively nuke everything on the phone before someone manages to break into it. People generally don’t investigate these countermeasures, according to the researchers, because they’re simply “in denial of the risk of losing their phone.”

Even with those coping mechanisms, there’s still a sharp uneasiness that comes with feeling like you’re cut off from the world. Losing a LID even for just a few days feels like drifting into a black hole where every voice, text and social media need is sucked into oblivion. And since so many of us have jettisoned our land lines and gone fully mobile, the anxiety of disconnection is all the more intense.

So what can we do? First we can take the researchers’ advice and get acquainted with the security measures available to us in case our LID goes MIA.  Then we can take our phone in hand, give it a good long look, and make peace with the possibility that this beloved device can quite easily go missing, either by mistake or by the misdeeds of others. It happens. Life will go on. And who knows, you might even enjoy the break.

The study was published in the International Journal of Mobile Communications.

Update: It turns out that the term “Smartphone-loss anxiety disorder” was not coined by the author of this research paper, but was ginned up by the author of the press release about the paper. Mea culpa for not checking directly with the paper’s author, Zhiling Tu from McMaster University, to verify that the term was accurate.  In any case, the study does address how people cope with loss of a smartphone (and other digital devices) so this is an error in description, not substance. Hat tip to Gawker for the heads up.

You can find David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website The Daily Brain. His latest book is Brain Changer: How Harnessing Your Brain’s Power To Adapt Can Change Your Life.

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