The Psychologist Who Described 'Phone Addiction' in 2012, Before the Term Existed

“I don’t talk to people, they talk to me and I ignore them, I laugh to myself, I never look up. I’m worried, what do you think I have?” a patient asks his doctor. The doctor thinks it over and says: “A BlackBerry!”

Psychologist Walter Riso tells that joke in his book Desapegarse sin anestesia (2012).

He tells it to illustrate something very specific: long before “phone addiction” became a common phrase, clinical psychology already had a name and a set of criteria for the exact same pattern.

Riso calls it now-ism.

Attachment to “now”

Now-ism, as Riso defines it, is attachment to time and speed: the need to have information, answers, or stimulation immediately, with no room for waiting.

• It isn’t exclusive to phones. Riso also describes it in the obsession with “staying current,” with not falling behind on any tech novelty.
• As an example, he recalls his own observations at technology fairs: people with this attachment “will feel like something is missing” and “will feel compelled to buy even a USB port just to feel a little less incomplete.”
• The underlying issue, he says, is that waiting stopped being experienced as something neutral and started to feel like a threat in itself.

Riso illustrates the contrast with a personal memory: during a long-distance relationship, before the internet, he received a weekly letter in a scented envelope. Waiting for it, he writes, didn’t cause him anguish but “cheerful anticipation”: “not much longer now,” the way you look forward to something pleasant.

That contrast is the core of his argument: waiting itself isn’t the problem. What changed was our tolerance for it.

Five warning signs Riso was already using in 2012

In the chapter on “internet attachment,” Riso lists a set of signs for telling whether internet use has become a problem instead of a tool. Summarized, they are:

1. Sleeping less because you don’t want to spend less time connected.
2. Neglecting other everyday activities.
3. People close to you complaining about the excessive use.
4. Constantly thinking about the need to connect.
5. Being unable to stop when you genuinely want to.

Riso also cites a piece of clinical research from that era: a study by Yen et al. (2008), published in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, which found that psychiatric symptoms in adolescents with internet addiction were comparable to those in adolescents with substance abuse.

That comparison, in 2012, was still an idea that needed explicit backing. Today it’s almost a truism in any article about teen phone use.

Riso adds a nuance that’s still relevant: not everyone with communication difficulties falls into this attachment the same way. He notes that people with shyness or social phobia are especially prone to it, because the internet lets them connect without facing anyone directly. But he warns of a paradox: the more they retreat into that channel, the less they expose themselves to the situations they fear, and the more the underlying fear stays active. In those cases, the screen doesn’t solve the original problem, it shelves it, and over time, reinforces it.

Why the phone isn’t actually the problem

Riso’s underlying argument, and perhaps the hardest to accept, is that the specific object (the phone, the computer, the tablet) is almost irrelevant.

• What defines the attachment, in his framework, isn’t the object but the inability to let go of it at the right moment.
• Switching devices, or even going “without signal” for a weekend, doesn’t fix the pattern if the need for immediacy stays intact underneath.
• Riso describes what he calls “unplugged” syndrome: uncertainty, loss of control, and a feeling he compares to withdrawal, when the connection fails or is suddenly taken away.

This doesn’t mean the phone is neutral. It means treating it as the root cause, rather than as the most available channel for an older psychological pattern (attachment to immediacy, to approval, to not missing out), tends to lead to superficial fixes: switching devices without changing your relationship with waiting.

What to do with this idea, according to the book itself

Riso doesn’t propose total abstinence or radical disconnection. He proposes, mainly, two concrete things:

• Distinguish between “needing” and “preferring” the connection: honestly asking yourself whether being connected right now solves something real or just soothes an underlying anxiety.
• Practice waiting deliberately, in small doses, like someone rebuilding a tolerance they’ve lost: leaving a message unanswered a few minutes longer than automatic, noticing what you feel and what, in reality, doesn’t happen while you wait.

It isn’t a dramatic technique. It’s, by his own account, the same kind of wisdom he cites from ancient sources elsewhere in the book: nothing that gets solved by reading it once, but something that holds up through repetition.

What’s striking, more than a decade later, isn’t that the idea still holds up. It’s that it was already fully formed before the public debate needed it.

Sources

• Riso, W. (2012). Desapegarse sin anestesia: Cómo soltarse de todo aquello que nos quita energía y bienestar. Editorial Planeta Colombiana.
• Yen, J., Ko, C., Yen, C., Chen, S., Chung, W., & Chen, C. (2008). Psychiatric symptoms in adolescents with Internet addiction: Comparison with substance use. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 62, 9-16.