Nomophobia is the fear of missing out on what, to many people in a postmodern, post-digital and dangerously post-truth age, is the biggest and most vital prosthesis mankind has ever known. Nomophobia is the fear of being forced to disconnect—to miss out on a tenet of what it means to be human now. Nomophobia is the fear of not having a functioning mobile phone.
Countless students can’t seem to get off them.
“Yeah, I think it’s a problem,” senior Egehan Biskin said. “Sometimes I ask my friends what their weekly screentime is: one has five hours, another 13, another 12. Me? I’m probably not telling you.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than one in 10 adolescents showed strong signs of problematic social media usage, struggling to control their behavior and suffering the brunt of the resulting negative consequences. The excessive social media usage these adolescents demonstrated seemed highly correlated to reports of lower mental well-being, anxiety, poor academic performance and bullying among the same in-group.
“I just spend a lot of time on TikTok,” Biskin said. “Once it got so bad for me, I deleted most of my social media apps for a while. I really just gave it up suddenly; I felt like if I didn’t, the novelty and the freshness of all the videos I’d constantly get on my For You Page would never really wear off. I’ve seen way worse than myself, though. Social media has a grip on people.”
The percentage of the world population that owns a smartphone has risen exponentially: 2012 was the last year less than half of American adults had one in their pockets. With such a widespread presence in the cultural zeitgeist, awareness of phones and the grip they may have on teenagers has quickly moved from bedrooms to public high schools. In response to rising concerns about poor academic performance, well-being and overall distraction, some school districts and whole state legislatures have tried weaning kids off phones with a physical solution: holders.
Phone cubbies, baskets and lockers have been used by teachers for years, primarily as a means to enforce classroom expectations and ensure students’ continued academic development. It’s usually the same system across classrooms and schools: students deposit their phones at the beginning of class and retrieve them at the end.
A near-universal push to digitally detox kids in the classroom may seem ambitious to many people, but Biskin seems to welcome the lack of Instagram Reels during school hours with open arms.
“It’s a bit of a slog to put my phone away, I guess, but I think it’s a positive change,” Biskin said. “In the classes where we get a break, I spend more time talking to my friends now—obviously. In an odd way, I think removing phones from class makes class pass by just a tiny bit quicker. I imagine some people’s grades might be improving from this too, maybe.”
For other students, however, mandatory phone holders may feel less like a protective measure on distractions and mental health and more like a rather exclusive vote of no confidence. After all, in the decades since mobile phones first went commercial, they have become ubiquitous lifelines to parents and emergency services. To some, phones function as figurative lifelines to personal identity.
“All these phone bans remind me of a really bad relationship,” junior Yuvraj Chana said. “Specifically, how a lot of bad relationships have no trust at all. What if something really, really awful were to happen at school and I couldn’t get to my phone in time? Text my mom or stepdad one last ‘I love you?’ Because schools have no trust in students with phones, we could all be the potential victim of such a horrific scenario. All I’m saying is that if a couple kids are on their phones the whole period, the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for it. Public school education is free and if they want to waste that resource, that’s their fault. Not mine, and not others.’”
