How To Keep Your Phone From Ruining Your Relationships | Video Inside

Your phone isn’t keeping you as connected as you think, for real…

Are you more intimate with your phone than your partner?

Think about it … which one do you touch and pay more attention to?

Our phones do a great job of connecting us to the world, but at the same time, they’re also pretty darn distracting and often keep us disconnected from the relationships we value most.

Emails from the office. Facebook updates from “friends.” Texts from your BFF. Candy Crush. Our phone knows how to get (and keep) our attention, and our partners and children suffer as a result.

Senior VP of YourTango Melanie Gorman took this all-too-common problem to our panel of experts: psychotherapist and loving relationship expert Tamara J. Green; therapist and hypnotherapist Leslie Rouder; life coach Lora Lucinda Andersen; and renowned relationship expert and author John Gray, PhD.

They all said the same thing — technology is a handy tool, but should never replace in-person connections.

“You miss all of the subtleties of communication,” says Leslie Rouder. “Eye-to-eye contact and being able to see someone’s body expression … over 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal, we’re actually not being in close contact with each other [when on our phones] in a way that’s most beneficial in terms of really good communication.”

In addition to just distracting us from our loved ones (we’re looking at you person playing on your phone while out to dinner with your spouse!), John Gray PhD says over stimulation from our phones is actually changing our brains!

“When our brain is over stimulated, it adapts,” says Gray. “It suddenly depends upon over stimulation and it can’t relax. We have to train our brain to come back to a more centered, relaxed place and this is very challenging.”

So how do you do it? How do you keep your phone addiction from ruining your relationships?

Check out the video above to hear the spot-on, super smart advice our experts share for making your phone work FOR your relationships instead of against them.  

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