According to a recent survey of people in 65 countries, 73.4% of people own a smartphone. Those with smartphones check them an average of 110 times per day, which amounts to every five or six minutes spread out over a twelve hour period. Another study found a slightly higher frequency - 150 times per day. That’s a lot of people with instant, constant access to email, social networking, and text messaging. Not all of them will suffer all or most of these negative effects, but the draw of checking your phone “just one more time real quick†is obviously difficult to resist. Heck, most people don’t even try to resist it, because staying connected and apprised of everything everywhere can only be a good thing, right?
Text NeckWhen most people text or use a smartphone, they jut their heads forward and bend their necks. It seems harmless and natural, but it places a huge amount of stress on your vertebrae (human heads are really, really big and heavy!) that compounds over time.
Gameboy BackPardon the incredibly dated reference to an obsolete gaming device (Gameboys were around, what, fifteen years ago?) and focus on the issue at hand: kids (and adults) who frequently game on smartphones and other handheld devices are placing their thoracic spines in flexion for extended periods of time. It’s similar to text neck, only instead of firing off a quick text, you’re playing a game for minutes or even hours at a time. This can cause the thoracic spine to follow the head and round, perhaps even leading to kyphosis. Growing kids whose skeletal systems are still developing are most vulnerable.
Text ClawHuman hands are incredible. They allow us to manipulate and create thousands of complex tools, tell stories through sign language or the written word, play instruments, lift 500 pounds off the ground, caress loved ones, and cradle a delicate egg or rip a phone book in half. They do a lot of different things, in other words, so when we send texts a hundred times a day and write entire emails using our thumbs, we put our hands through the same contortions over and over again and run the risk of overuse injuries to the tendons in our hands. Unfortunately, text claw isn’t the useful, fearsome bird-of-prey kind of claw. It’s the kind of claw that curtails our everyday abilities and causes immense physical pain. Text claw. Weird, I know. But apparently some people are suffering from it.
Sleep TextingNo, not drunk dialing; sleep texting. It’s a real thing. People are rousing themselves, still half-asleep, in the middle of the night to answer incoming text messages with garbled responses that they don’t remember sending upon waking. In and of itself, sleep texting is bad because it’s disrupting our sleep (even if we don’t remember waking up, we’re still waking up and we can’t just resume where we left off in the sleep cycle). It also suggests a deep and disturbing attachment to our phones.
Phantom Phone VibrationThis is the sensation of feeling your phone vibrating in your pocket even though it is not. Dangerous? No, but it’s a bit alarming to have your mind playing tricks on you like that, isn’t it? One researcher even thinks these phantom vibrations might be “increasing the flow of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine, dopamine, epinephrine and cortoctropin-releasing hormone and decreasing the flow of serotonin, and gamma-aminobutyric acid.†To me, it sounds like the phantom limb phenomenon, only more sinister: in our minds, our smartphones have become as appendages.
Internet AddictionOnce derided by researchers, Internet Addiction Disorder is now mentioned in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and the subject of reams of new research. Plus, even if “Internet Addiction†never receives official validation, people are displaying the classic symptoms of addiction, receiving Facebook “Likes†gives a hit of dopamine to your reward system, and people with IAD show similar neurobiological abnormalities with other established addictive disorders. Teens with IAD, for example, have elevated sympathetic nervous system activation with lower heart rate variability. The first IAD inpatient program has even popped up at a Pennsylvania hospital (it won’t be the last, I’d wager).
DepressionOn the surface, one would think that checking our Facebook, sending texts, reading emails, and sharing Instagram photos should us feel like we’re establishing and maintaining meaningful connections with other humans, but the reality is that these pursuits taken to an extreme only make us feel more isolated from and less connected with real people. In fact, the more frequently you use social media or check your phone the more likely you are to report feeling sad, depressed, and lonely. A recent study in young adults showed that Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being, while “direct†contact with people does not. Some clinicians even have a name for it: Facebook depression.
Read more:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-physiological-consequences-of-being-hyperconnected/#ixzz2heHQw6PXAno ano na mga na experience nyo dito mga sir?
