Constantly checking phone for messages that never arrive?

Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum

Help Support Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

howtobealone

Member
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
18
Reaction score
0
Does anyone else on this forum constantly check their phone for texts/e-mails that never arrive? I shouldn't say never, because I'm fortunate enough to have a couple people in my life that I regularly text/e-mail. But I get nowhere near the amount of contact to justify my constantly checking my phone every ten minutes. It's just that I get lonely and anxious and I delusionally turn to my phone for comfort, even though hardly anyone ever contacts me. I know I'm probably not assessing this accurately, but it seems like almost everyone else I know had loads of people that they are constantly texting with.
 
Before I stopped using email I was checking my email every few minutes. The joke was that I had no personal email contacts and was just getting reply notifications from ALL and another forum, as well as some spam from websites where I'd registered accounts. Checking my email was just a reflex born of long habit; I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I'd check my email just to fill up the time.

Lately that activity has been replaced with listening to Beethoven's 5th Symphony on Spotify. When I can't think of anything to do I fill up the time with listening to Beethoven's 5th. At least the symphony is one hour long so listening to it fills up significantly more time than checking my email. That has enabled me to uninstall my email client and not have anything to do with email for several days. This is also the first time I've logged into ALL since last evening (and it's 9 pm now) and I haven't logged into the other forum today yet, whereas I used to check the new posts in both places about three or four times a day. My goal is not to go anywhere where people talk for two weeks at a time, but I'll need more solitary timewasters than just a single one-hour piece of music in order to achieve that state.
 
Would you rather be constantly bothered? For me, it's either one extreme or the other.
 
mickey said:
Before I stopped using email I was checking my email every few minutes. The joke was that I had no personal email contacts and was just getting reply notifications from ALL and another forum, as well as some spam from websites where I'd registered accounts. Checking my email was just a reflex born of long habit; I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I'd check my email just to fill up the time.

Lately that activity has been replaced with listening to Beethoven's 5th Symphony on Spotify. When I can't think of anything to do I fill up the time with listening to Beethoven's 5th. At least the symphony is one hour long so listening to it fills up significantly more time than checking my email. That has enabled me to uninstall my email client and not have anything to do with email for several days. This is also the first time I've logged into ALL since last evening (and it's 9 pm now) and I haven't logged into the other forum today yet, whereas I used to check the new posts in both places about three or four times a day. My goal is not to go anywhere where people talk for two weeks at a time, but I'll need more solitary timewasters than just a single one-hour piece of music in order to achieve that state.

Why are you trying to get rid of ALL? Don't like it? I come here of my own accord to check up on things. :)
 
Good thing for me that I hate cell phones. Mostly because of people using them while driving or walking with the phone and not paying attention to their surroundings. I have a flip phone for emergencies in the car, that's it. To me I don't want to pay the $$ for a phone and I have no one really to text or anything so why bother. It's one less thing to get me down. I have my computer and that's good enough for me.
 
A lot of people do this, myself included. My psychology teacher I had this past semester actually talked about it. We kind of compulsively keep looking at our phones even when it hasn't gone off and we know if there was a new message it would go off.
 
I do but I hate it. I get a reasonable amount of messages each day, I have a couple of people i stay in contact with every day, but still I keep checking. Actually, it's not "waiting" for new messages, usually it's just to get out of awkward social situations, like in an elevator, or a busy train. I think this is pretty much the status quo, I know it's not a good thing but I can't help to sometimes look at other people's screens and they are just scrolling through their facebook/whatsapp/instagram/twitter, not actually being in contact with someone.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top