Battling Nomophobia

Putting your personal lives on the line.

- Andrew Leci

Forget about highlining, BASE jumping, heli-skiing or cave diving. If you’re looking for adventure, try spending a week without your mobile phone. If beads of perspiration are already forming on your brow and your heart is palpitating at the prospect, you may be among an increasing number of people who are suffering from a conspicuously 21st-century malaise.

Can it even be done in this day and age? Is it a challenge any of us would accept? How much fear and anxiety have to be overcome in order to achieve the objective? And could it possibly be more dangerous than throwing yourself out of an airplane with only a length and breadth of silk to prevent gravity from taking its grisly toll on your fragile endoskeleton?

If recent studies are anything to go by, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ to the last question. So accustomed to our mobile devices have we become, and so attached to them in our hearts and minds, that their absence can lead to the kind of separation anxiety that most of us wouldn’t have experienced since infancy.

Those who indulge in dangerous sports and pastimes point to the adrenaline rush they experience at the prospect of doing something risky. Taking risks is something that has informed the human condition since the time we first stood up as a species and started to grunt, and has enabled us to progress up the food chain to the point at which we’re no longer concerned about being accosted by a sabre-toothed tiger or sat on by a woolly mammoth.