Letters From Listeners

Dear Dr. Laura,

I recently had a visit from my old high school best friend. She lives many states away and I have not seen her in 18 years! I am an army wife. We move quite a bit, so visits like this don't come around very often. Needless to say, I was very excited to have her visit and a catch up on our lives.

I have a smart phone that I use maybe a couple times a day. I can definitely live without it, just fine. If fact, my husband even got rid of our house phone, so we only use our cell phones. I nipped that in bud real quick! Bottom line is that I like to have real conversations. I don't believe that texting and using social media is a replacement.

While my friend was visiting, if her phone went off in the middle of a conversation, instead of ignoring the sound, she begin to interact with her phone. She just kept talking to me while doing whatever she wanted, on her phone. At one point, she thought she had lost her phone and completely. She went into a state of panic.

I told her: "We will find it, it can't be too far."

Her response was: "I can't function if I don't know where my phone is and I won't be able to sleep if I don't find it before we go to bed."

I didn't know how to respond because I was in a state of shock. I have gone several days without my phone and couldn't comprehend someone of our age, would be in such an anxiety ridden state over a cell phone. I do use my phone to listen to your podcast, on a daily basis, but if my family is here I put it away and only listen while I'm doing housework or maybe grocery shopping. I wish there was more I could do to stop the madness but, I think it's out of my hands. I think if she were able to put her phone down, while she was here, we would have had a much better time.

After she had gone, I checked my Facebook and noticed that she had been posting different comments and pictures the whole time we were together. I wasn't mad about the whole thing; I was more surprised and sad for her. I live my life in the real world.

I'm just glad you're on the air to remind people that this is a very real problem! When you see it happening in front of you, it's actually very scary. So, keep putting the word out there that overusing your phone isn't good.

Thank you for being who you are and for all that you do. The world needs more people like you!

Di