Fear of signal loss is common anxiety

Rating: If nomophobia exists then why not gomophobia?

Mobile phones have radicallychanged social behaviour. Meetings your mates on Friday night is now a doddle, for example. But what happens when the crutch that is your mobile phone suddenly disappears? Apparently, the fear of having no mobile phone signal is now recognised as nomophobia.

GoMo News is indebted to the UK’s Sun newspaper for publicising this phobia here . It is now commonplace to worry whether you’re in an area of cellular coverage so that your calls, texts and emails will get through.

If that wasn’t bad enough a poll carried out by Rightmobilephone found that an amazing 77 per cent of people that own an iPhone, Blackberry or other email enabled smartphone will keep checking them for new emails over the Xmas period.

Commenting on the findings, Neil McHugh, co-founder of Rightmobilephone, said, “I wasn’t surprised by the number of people who said they will be checking their smartphones this Christmas. Checking emails is a hard habit to break, especially in the case of the BlackBerry when that flashing red light catches your eye.”

Furthermore, 45 per cent of the1,000 plus smartphone owners questioned revealed that they would keep their BlackBerry with them at all times just in case something important cropped up.

Sounds like a bad case of nomophobia to GoMo News. But how to you escape nomophobia?
Catherine O’Neill, of Anxiety UK, says, “The main technique to overcome phobia is called cognitive behaviour therapy. This is based on exposing you to your phobia.”

The real trick is to expose yourself gradually to the phobia. In the case of nomophobia, therefore, you should place yourself in a situation when you know that coverage will be lost only intermittently.

GoMo News would therefore suggest an ideal therapy session would be to get on a train from Epsom to London Waterloo where you know that the phone will lose coverage at Raynes Park but recover again as soon as you leave Wimbledon station.

From there you can work you way towards situations where you know there will be absolutely no mobile phone coverage at all. GoMo News has found that mobile phone Press conferences are excellent for this.

Knowing full well that a phone signal is vital for demonstrating the product, PR companies inevitably chose a location – such as a basement – where no signal is guaranteed. Sir Alan Sugar’s Amstrad famously did this when demonstrating that its fixed line videophone could receive calls from 3G phones.

Of course, the next phobia to be identified will be gomophobia. This involves the fear of being cut off from a decent mobile phone news feed.

Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran comms journalist. Tony also writes on the UK market… contact him here tony@mobileinsight.co.uk.