DUBAI So how long in this day and age can you live without a mobile phone? A few minutes or a few hours at best or worst (depending on how you look at it)?
Here’s a man who’s lived without a mobile phone for an incredible 90 days at a stretch after accidentally breaking his phone in August and realising - while waiting to buy the latest arrival - that it had actually done him a world of good. He is now suggesting others take his cue in order to reduce stress.
Stress buster
Briton Chris Banner, 44 (name changed on request), who accidentally broke his Samsung Note3 in August, initially planned to hold out his next buy until the launch of Note4. That delay however, turned out to be much longer than planned after he suddenly realised he was beginning to enjoy a life without a mobile phone. “After I broke my phone, the intention was to wait for a few days till the launch of the latest version of the phone I wanted. I thought it was going to be hard initially, but after the first week of ‘destabilisation’ I suddenly began feeling the stress levels, rather than going up, actually went down,” says Banner, who heads the digital team of a multi-media company in Dubai.
“The problem is we are constantly checking our phones even when we don’t need to and it’s all a massive stress. Sometimes you receive an email and just thinking about it till you have replied or done something about it adds to it. Ninety-nine per cent of the time that we spend on our phones we don’t really need to and not having a mobile for a while was like going on a holiday,” says Banner who was vacationing back home in London when he accidentally dropped his phone and damaged it.
“The fact that I was away from work helped me immensely. Obviously if it (breaking the phone) happened at work, I would have been stressed to buy a new phone immediately,” he says.
“In today’s times, you can’t obviously afford to not have a phone long term, especially in the kind of job I am, but for a short while it is definitely worth an experiment that I certainly enjoyed. I love technology, gadgets and internet, but for the time that I was away from all this, in terms of the peace of mind it was like going on a holiday. It helped me de-clutter my mind, something like trying to quit smoking and regaining a healthy lifestyle,” explains the father of two from Surrey, England.
YOUSPEAK: Does your mobile cause you stress and rob you of family time? What are you doing about it?
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