The Psychologist Who in 2012 Described 'Phone Addiction' as an Attachment to 'Now'

“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 uses it to introduce a concept of his own, now-ism (yaísmo in Spanish, from ya, “now”), which looks at compulsive phone use from an unusual angle.

One clarification first: Riso didn’t get ahead of the term. When he wrote the book, “internet addiction” had been in the psychological literature for more than fifteen years. What makes his proposal interesting lies elsewhere.

An idea that already had a history in 2012

The timeline helps place the book:

• 1995. Psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg posts a set of criteria for a supposed “internet addiction disorder” on a professional forum, as a parody. The joke gets taken seriously faster than he expected.
• 1996-1998. Psychologist Kimberly Young presents her cases at the American Psychological Association convention (1996) and in 1998 publishes “Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder,” with an eight-question questionnaire adapted from the criteria for pathological gambling.
• 2005. Adriana Bianchi and James Phillips, of Monash University, publish one of the first scales of problematic mobile phone use (the Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale).
• 2008. A survey commissioned by the UK Post Office coins “nomophobia” (no-mobile-phone phobia) for the anxiety of being without a phone.
• 2013. A year after Riso’s book, Min Kwon’s team in Korea publishes the Smartphone Addiction Scale.

The debate about phones, then, was already under way. What Riso contributes isn’t the label but a reading of the phenomenon through his theory of attachment as clinging.

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.

He doesn’t limit it to phones. He also describes it in the obsession with “staying up to date” and in a scene from technology fairs: people with this attachment “will feel something is missing” and “will feel compelled to buy something, even just a USB port, to feel less incomplete.”

To show the contrast, he turns to a personal memory. At a time when he was in a long-distance relationship, before the internet, he received a weekly letter in a perfumed envelope. Waiting for it, he writes, didn’t cause him anguish but “joyful anticipation.”

That’s the core of the argument: waiting in itself isn’t the problem. What changed was our tolerance for it. The phone would be the most available channel for an older need for immediate response, for approval, or for not missing anything.

That discomfort when no reply comes recalls, with due distance, what attachment psychology calls anxious attachment: the need for a frequent signal that everything is still fine. They’re different frameworks (Riso’s attachment means clinging to something; Bowlby’s is a bond with people), but they share an intolerance of uncertainty.

The five signs the book lists

In the chapter on “attachment to the internet,” Riso lists signs for telling a use that has become a problem from one that is still a tool:

1. Sleeping less so as not to take time away from being connected.
2. Neglecting other activities of daily life.
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 really want to.

They’re very similar to the questions in Young’s questionnaire: constant preoccupation, failed attempts to cut back, relationships or tasks put at risk. Riso doesn’t present them as a diagnosis, and they aren’t one.

The book also cites a study by Yen and colleagues (2008) with 3,662 Taiwanese students. It found that both internet addiction and substance use were associated with more intense psychiatric symptoms, especially hostility and depression. That’s an association, not proof that one causes the other.

Riso adds a nuance about shyness and social phobia: the internet makes it possible to relate to others without showing your face, and the more that route is used, the less people expose themselves to the situations they fear. In those cases the screen doesn’t resolve the original fear; it sets it aside and, over time, can keep it going.

What research says today: addiction or problematic use?

Since 2012 the field has moved on, and not in the direction of confirming a “phone addiction” in the strict sense.

• It isn’t an official diagnosis. Neither the DSM-5 (2013) nor the ICD-11 (2019) includes smartphone addiction. The ICD-11 does recognize gaming disorder, which is something narrower.
• The addiction label is under debate. Tayana Panova and Xavier Carbonell, of Ramon Llull University, reviewed the studies on the topic in 2018 and concluded there wasn’t enough support for calling it an addiction: the observed behaviors fit better as problematic or maladaptive use, and their consequences don’t reach the severity of an addiction.
• The risk of pathologizing everyday life. An international group led by Daniel Kardefelt-Winther proposed in 2017 that a behavior should only count as a behavioral addiction if it causes significant and persistent functional impairment, not just because someone does it a lot or enjoys it a lot.

Curiously, this debate lends some support to Riso’s approach. If the problem isn’t the device but our relationship with immediacy, switching devices or going “off the grid” for a weekend leaves the underlying issue untouched. The book even describes an “unplugged” syndrome: uncertainty and a sense of losing control when the connection suddenly fails.

Riso’s proposal: rebuilding tolerance for waiting

Riso doesn’t propose abstinence or a radical disconnection. His proposal has two parts:

• Telling “needing” from “preferring” connection: whether being connected at that moment solves something real or only calms an underlying restlessness. It’s the same distinction that runs through his whole book, and we develop it in why swapping “I need you” for “I prefer you” changes a relationship.
• Practicing waiting in small doses, like someone rebuilding a lost tolerance: letting a few more minutes pass than the automatic reflex allows before checking a message, and noticing what happens in the meantime.

It isn’t a spectacular technique, nor has it been tested in trials. It’s a popular-psychology idea that fits what current research suggests: look less at the device and more at the role it plays.

If this need for constant connection also feels familiar with people, our emotional dependency test explores that pattern in more detail. And if what weighs on you is the pressure of technology at work, we cover it in technostress and AI anxiety.

Sources

• Riso, W. (2012). Desapegarse sin anestesia: Cómo soltarse de todo aquello que nos quita energía y bienestar. Editorial Planeta Colombiana.
• Young, K. S. (1998). Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 1(3), 237-244.
• Bianchi, A., and Phillips, J. G. (2005). Psychological predictors of problem mobile phone use. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 8(1), 39-51. doi:10.1089/cpb.2005.8.39
• Yen, J.-Y., Ko, C.-H., Yen, C.-F., Chen, S.-H., Chung, W.-L., and Chen, C.-C. (2008). Psychiatric symptoms in adolescents with Internet addiction: Comparison with substance use. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 62(1), 9-16. doi:10.1111/j.1440-1819.2007.01770.x
• Kwon, M., Lee, J.-Y., Won, W.-Y., Park, J.-W., Min, J.-A., Hahn, C., Gu, X., Choi, J.-H., and Kim, D.-J. (2013). Development and validation of a smartphone addiction scale (SAS). PLoS ONE, 8(2), e56936. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0056936
• Kardefelt-Winther, D., Heeren, A., Schimmenti, A., van Rooij, A., Maurage, P., Carras, M., Edman, J., Blaszczynski, A., Khazaal, Y., and Billieux, J. (2017). How can we conceptualize behavioural addiction without pathologizing common behaviours? Addiction, 112(10), 1709-1715. doi:10.1111/add.13763
• Panova, T., and Carbonell, X. (2018). Is smartphone addiction really an addiction? Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 7(2), 252-259. doi:10.1556/2006.7.2018.49