Millions of Brits use their mobile phones to dictate their lives. Mobile phones double up as alarm clocks to help people get up in the morning on time, they help people to remember meetings, catch up with friends, arrange evening activities, play games and surf the internet. Given that there’s such a reliance on mobile phone usage, the UK’s leading mobile phone comparison site looked into the emotional side effects.
Website, Right Mobile Phone, commissioned a study to look at how mobile phone usage can affect people’s emotions, and found a surprising number of people were directly affected by their phones, even down to their ringtone.
Of the 3,138 people surveyed, 71% who use their favourite song to help them wake up every day said they felt happier when waking than when they used a standard alarm clock or no alarm at all.
Four in five of the respondents said that not receiving a reply to a text message impacted negatively on their mood, whilst 41% said a day without a text message made them feel unpopular and lonely.
Just 9% of people said they’d actually laughed out loud at anything they’d ever been sent by text despite 61% saying that the popular texting acronym ‘LOL’ was part of their regular texting vocabulary.
Not one of the 3,138 people surveyed had ‘rolled over the floor laughing’, nor ‘laughed their asses off’.
Although 82% of people said they looked forward to hearing from partners and loved ones throughout the day, the most dreaded call of the day is from parents, according to the study, with 19% saying they purposely dodged calls from their mum and dad.
Here are some quick fire facts from the survey: 78% of Brits tell somebody they love them on the phone every day; Just one in 15 people said they could go the day without using their mobile phone at some point; Brits have an average of 50 people in their Phonebook contact list they haven’t contacted since adding their details; Although people have an average of 95 people in their Phonebook, 69% of people call or text fewer than eight people every week;18% of people have pretended to receive a phone call or text.
Neil McHugh, co-founder of rightmobilephone.co.uk, said: “The survey threw up some fantastic statistics, the mobile phone now plays a huge part of how we interact. Our handsets having a direct correlation to our emotions just confirms how the technology has evolved to embed itself into our daily life. Whether its love, laughter or tears our mobile phone is often the first thing we turn too, unless of course its mum or dad calling as our results showed.”