Phoneless in Orchard Road, I discover the new anxiety: 'Nomophobia'

The flip side of being untethered the discovery of things I would have ordinarily missed

- Lee Siew Hua

Recently, I surrendered my iPhone to the Apple Store to replace the battery. It would take a couple of hours, the Apple team optimistically told me.

I went back at the appointed hour, after loitering in Orchard Road. Meanwhile, the technician had diagnosed a wonky display and thought it should be fixed. He needed extra time.

A new time slot was given. I returned. Not ready. The back-and-forth was repeated one more time, prolonging the wait to six hours.

Of course, in my new phone-free state, no one on the planet could reach me, not even tech genie Apple. So I really had to find out in person and in real time if my phone was still in the trenches.

Without a connection, I was unmoored in Orchard Road on a rainy Saturday.

No navigation tool, no scrolling for listicles of new things to do in town, no news feed, no perennial WhatsApp, no Calendar, no step counter, no digital notepad, no QR code to order food. The list of Nos felt infinite, so tangled is the smartphone with our life now.

This utter dependency on the mobile phone has produced a new phobia, as I discovered online when I got my device back. "Nomophobia", a portmanteau of "no", "mobile" and "phobia", is the thoroughly modern fear of losing phone connectivity.

Medical researchers are putting nomophobia under the microscope.

In 2020, the National Institutes of Health in the United States reviewed stacks of scholarly papers on the phenomenon. One observation that will likely resonate: people even declare that the smartphone has become "an extension of their body", determining both their identity and their internal state. Also, the phobia negatively affects personality, self-esteem, academic performance and causes anxiety, stress and other physical and mental health problems.