Fear of Being Without a Phone

That accident is worth flagging because the resemblance is what gives the word its authority. A term that looks like it was formed in the classical way and was in fact contracted from a marketing survey belongs in a different category from arachnophobia, and this catalogue puts it there.

Where the word nomophobia came from

The 2008 study was run for the United Kingdom's Post Office by YouGov, surveying more than two thousand mobile phone users. About fifty-three per cent reported anxiety when they lost their phone, ran out of battery or had no service.

That is the origin of the term and the source of the figure that still circulates with it. It measures self-reported anxiety in a commercial survey, not a diagnosis, and the gap between those two things is the whole difficulty with this entry.

Whether nomophobia is a condition of its own

Nomophobia appears in neither DSM-5 nor ICD-11. It has been proposed as a specific phobia on the basis of the DSM-IV definitions, and it is usually treated instead as a behavioural addiction sharing characteristics with drug addiction.

The material also raises the possibility that undermines the category: nomophobic symptoms may be produced by other underlying conditions, with social anxiety disorder and panic disorder named as likely candidates. On that reading nomophobia is a presentation rather than a condition, and the phone is where an existing anxiety has found its object.

What the nomophobia figures actually measure

SecurEnvoy's survey ranked the reported anxiety by age group:

1. teenagers, seventy-seven per cent of whom reported anxiety and worry when without their phones
2. the twenty-five to thirty-four group
3. people over fifty-five

Shambare, Rugimbana and Zhowa claimed in 2012 that mobile phones are possibly the biggest non-drug addiction of the twenty-first century, and that college students may spend up to nine hours a day on them. They described the result as a paradox of technology, both freeing and enslaving.

Among students, frequent phone use correlates with lower grade point averages and higher anxiety, with reduced self-reported life satisfaction compared with lighter users. The proposed mechanisms are ordinary: time and focus consumed during study and class, and pressure to remain continuously connected to social networks, which removes the perceived solitude that relieves daily stress.

What the Australian nomophobia study found

Nine hundred and forty-six Australians aged fifteen to twenty-four completed the Mobile Phone Involvement Questionnaire alongside measures of use frequency, self-identity and validation from others. The questionnaire items are the recognisable ones, including thinking about the phone when not using it and feeling connected to others through it.

The results found moderate differences between frequency of use and psychological relationship with the device, and, importantly, no pathological conditions. What they found instead was excessive use showing signs of attachment, and one specific relationship: participants showing excessive use were more likely to increase it when receiving validation from others.

That is a finding about a feedback loop rather than about a fear. The device is not frightening; it is the channel through which validation arrives, and the use rises when the validation does.

How phone dependency differs in panic disorder

A Brazilian study compared fifty participants with panic disorder and Agoraphobia, average age forty-three, against seventy healthy controls, average age thirty-five. Sixty-eight per cent of all participants reported mobile phone dependency, which is a striking figure for a control group.

The difference lay in intensity: participants with panic disorder and agoraphobia reported significantly more emotional symptoms and more dependency when access to the phone was prohibited. About forty-four per cent of the clinical group described feeling secure when they had their phones.

For somebody with agoraphobia, a phone is the safety behaviour made portable: help is available and escape can be arranged from anywhere. The dependency in that group is not a separate condition but the existing one using a new tool.

What the vocabulary around nomophobia names

Over-connection syndrome names the reduction in face-to-face interaction that follows heavy phone use and its interference with social and family life. Techno-stress names the avoidance of face-to-face interaction through isolation, associated with depressive mood.

The observed behaviours are specific:

• carrying more than one internet-capable device
• always carrying a charger
• keeping the phone within reach during sleep
• experiencing phantom notifications
• avoiding situations where phone use is restricted, flights and examinations named

Sleep is reduced, and reduced sleep is linked back to the low mood that increases use, which closes another loop.