Smartphone and Health
Smartphones are the most common types of cell phones used and have become an integral part of our daily lives. Although smartphones and cell phones make our life so much easier no one can deny that this modern technology brings some harm to them. As our technology improves the quality of our life, it may be deteriorating our health.
Nowadays, adults are not the only ones to use smartphones but many parents give their children their cell phones to offer a handy entertainment option. A study suggests that the bone marrow of a child absorbs almost 10 times more radiation than that of an adult. We all are unknowingly destroying our health by getting addicted to our phones.
Smartphones are also one of the few sources that emit a high level of radiation. Due to this harmful microwave radiation, holding a smartphone, or any cell phone, in your pocket or bra is extremely risky to reproductive organs and breasts.
How Smartphone Negatively Impact Your Health and Life
Should we be concerned about the health risks with all those mobile devices? Here in this article HEALTHY and FITNESS discuss are some health risks of mobile phones that affects your physical and psychological health:
Your Psychological Health
As estimated 63% of adults in the age group 18-29 and 30% of people in the age group 30-64 fall asleep with a smartphone in their hand. Along with your physical health, a smartphone can adversely affect your mental health by hampering your biorhythm, memory, attentiveness, and concentration.
6-EFFECTS OF SMARTPHONES ON MENTAL HEALTH
1. Smartphone Use Demotes Our Social Interactions
Smartphone and Mental Health
According to research conducted on the way smartphone affects the way we think, found that smartphones or cell phones truly interfere with normal socialization. Using a smartphone disables your cognitive ability in connecting and socializing with other people.
This may make you further withdrawing from society and increasing the chance of being a “shut-in.” Smartphones keep you indoors and you no longer visit people.
The use of smartphones negatively affects your mood and pace to do work, especially if you have to work in a group setting. It decreases your attention from the people around you and your surroundings as a whole.
2. Smartphone Responsible for Change in Mood
Even our mood can hamper due to our habitat of using the phone before sleep. People become
irritable and it can even cause depression. A study conducted by Northwestern University says that the more time people spend on their phones especially at night time, the higher the risk of them getting depressed.
3. Smartphone Use Decreases Your Memory
We use smartphones to capture the best and most memorable moments in our lives by photos and videos. Sometimes smartphones may the cause behind our memory loss because we are exclusively reliant on technology to remember things for us and we stop bothering to remember things by ourselves.
Therefore, “special” moments of our life become a part of digital photos rather than internal memories. It becomes harder and harder to remember old, and already existing information in your brain. As a result, it requires more effort to remember things.
4. Smartphone Use Weakens Your Inductive Reasoning
Now a day to know something unknown has become just a click away. Google made it extremely convenient to gather knowledge. However, it may backfire on us. Our over-reliance on Google and on the internet to solve the problems and questions has weakened our mental intelligence and abilities to logically solve the problem and determine the right answers on our own. This trend is noticed due to our utter dependence on what the Internet is serving us. We assume that the answers we garner from the internet are simply correct rather than reading about things and making conclusions analytically.
5. Smartphones Raise Your Stress Level
The use of Smartphones raises your stress level. With the increasing use of smartphones, the boundaries between work and home are being erased and raising the level of stress at both places. According to a recent study shows the use of mobile phones can cause work worries to spill over into home time for both men and women and exponentially increasing stress levels.
6. Smartphone Use Addiction
The overuse of smartphones is leading to dependency syndrome or smartphone addiction. Constant use of smartphones creates learned compulsive behaviors (like self-importance). In an average young adult checks their phone over 60 times per day and sending about 109 text messages, this type of behavior could lead to potentially dangerous addictions.
What can you do to avoid these dreadful Psychological consequences?
Stop work with smartphones at least two hours before sleep. This time is typically enough for our brain to understand that it is already night and it is high time we have prepared for high-quality healthy rest. Read a paper book instead of surfing the internet or watching movies online.
Use special applications if you have some urgent work to do or an important message to receive and it is not possible to switch off your mobile phone. Modern technologies come to the rescue; there are special filters you can add to your screen.
These filters are not physical, these are special applications, that filter blue light the light scheme of your gadget changes according to the time of the day or night when you use the device the screen gets a warmer redder glow when it becomes dark outside.
Not only mental and psychological health is languishing due to our usage of smartphones, our physical health also deteriorating. We are eliminating some of the physical activities we do every day due to the convenience the smartphone providing us and converting the free time into destructive “lazy” or “procrastinating” moments.
13-HEALTH RISKS OF SMARTPHONES
Smartphone and Heath Risk
1. Smartphone Use Can Cause Disruptive Sleeping Patterns
Night-time is your favorite time to chat and gossip with your friends on your smartphone after a busy day. However, this nighttime engagement with a smartphone is the main reason why you are sleep deprived.As estimated 63% of adults in the age group 18-29 and 30% of people in the age group 30-64 fall asleep with a smartphone in their hands.
High mobile phone use was associated with disruptive sleeping patterns. The blue light emitted from electronic devices disrupts the production of melatonin hormones. These melatonin hormones promoting sleep, and secreted when we are in darkness. Mobile rings and vibration are also major contributing factors to interrupted sleep patterns are getting awakened in the middle of the night.
2. Smartphone Causes Neck And Back Pain
Smartphone users spend an average of two to four hours per day checking their phones. The use of a smartphone makes you physically less active and weakens your bones. Constant tilting down to check your phone screen can lead to neck and back pain as well as migraines.
Spine surgeons notice that poor posture during prolonged smartphone use; leads to an increase in patients with neck and upper back pain. Spinal stress due to misalignment of your spine can hamper your overall health and well-being.
3. Smartphone Increase Accident-Risk
Smartphones distracting you from your physical surroundings can lead to an accident and physical injury. This does not depend on which brand you an iPhone, Samsung, Nokia, flip phone, or a Blackberry.
The chances to check your phone aggressively is undoubtedly higher while traveling. A mobile phone can be a potential distraction while driving or while crossing the road. According to the World Health Organization, a lot of research showing 3-4 times increased risk of traffic accidents with mobile usage.
4. Smartphone Can Lead To Weight Gain
Smartphones improved the accessibility of your favorite games, movies, and social media apps digitally at your fingertips. You are able to do whatever you want in just a few clicks.
This leads to sedentary behavior and a lack of physical activity that are contributing factors to obesity and risks for chronic illnesses. According to a study, the risk of obesity in kids increased by 43 percent due to the use of screen devices more than 5 hours a day.
5. Smartphone Damage Your Brain
You may develop a tumor due to your cell phone usage! Research conducted for 2-year in Finland by the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found that radiation from mobile phones may cause brain tissue damage. Our brain activity gets accelerate by smartphones, even after just 50 minutes of use.
This shows how sensitive our brain is to mobile electromagnetic radiation, and the magnitude of its effect for long-term usage. A recent judgment by the Italian court states that a man’s heavy mobile phone use caused him to develop a benign brain tumor. He testified that his job required him to use his mobile phone for 15 years, 3-4 hours every day.
6. Smartphone Use Can Lead To Increased Physical Injury
The use of a smartphone makes you physically less active. Lack of physical activity begins to weaken the muscles in your body along with your endurance and immune system. Sedentary also weaken your bones and in turn, makes you prone to physical injury.
7. Smartphone Complicates Heart Problems
Chronic diseases as heart problems get more complicated by radio waves emitted by mobile phones. According to a study published in the European Journal of Oncology, microwave radiations emitted by mobile phones contribute to abnormalities in heart function.
Smartphones emit radiation, which causes red blood cells to seep hemoglobin. This leakedhemoglobin then accumulates in the body, which can lead to health complications including heart disease or kidney stones.
8. Smartphone Makes You Infertile
Beware, men! Your cell phone can even make you infertile. A study (2009) on rats found that the mobile phone radiation negatively affects semen quality, decreases sperm count and may impair male fertility.
Wdowiak A and colleagues carried out research to identify whether the same holds true in humans, which revealed that the group of men who used mobile phones had a sperm cell count in their semen decreased, leading to infertility.
9. Smartphone Increases Cancer Risk
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), radiofrequency (RF) emitted mobile phones are 1000 times greater than what emitted from base stations. This increased emission obviously has some harmful effects on the health of mobile users. Radiofrequency is identified as a possible carcinogen in humans by International Agency for Research on Cancer.
10. Smartphone Causes Hearing Impairment
Prolong mobile phone use may result in inner ear damage that may lead to hearing impairment. Individuals who attended phone calls for 2 hours on an average every day are at a higher risk of impaired hearing compared to those who moderate (10-20 mins.) users.
Mobile phone users more likely to have high-frequency hearing loss, if they have symptoms such as a warm sensation, fullness in the ears, or ringing. Mobile phone radiation is another factor that causes hearing disability. Overexposure to mobile phones, the electromagnetic field contributes to decreasing hearing function.
11. Smartphone Causes of Eye Problems
You might get vision disorders for the overuse of smartphones. Interviewing 2000 people for the reasons for their vision problems, 55% admitted that their eye discomfort might be due to the overuse of smartphones. Most of us use our mobiles to do web surfing, read e-books, and text messages.
When you do so, the small font size and glaring smartphone screen strain your eyes, especially if you are reading in the dark. You tend to squint or open up your eyes wide open to read the smaller screen of your mobile devices.
You also blink a lesser number of times while watching your smartphone. This causes your eyes to dry up, irritate, and redden. The bluest light from the smartphone screen negatively affects the retina of our eyes and damages it, especially in darkness. The optic nerve along with eye structure gets irritated and our eyes get tired. In extreme cases, it may lead to almost blindness.
12. Smartphone Causes Skin Allergies
Most mobile phones and phone accessories are coated with a metallic polish to make them look more attractive. Such phones reported to contain potential skin allergens like nickel, chromium, and cobalt that cause mobile phone dermatitis.
Metal allergens show symptoms like dry-itchy patches and redness on the face or ears, blistering, lesions, and rarely oozing. Researchers from the US and Denmark found at least 37 incidents since 2000 where contact dermatitis caused by mobile phones.
Marcella Aquino and colleagues conducted tests on 72 cell phones for the presence of nickel and cobalt. About 90.5 percent of flip phones were tested positive for nickel, about 29.4 percent of Blackberry models tested positive for nickel, and about 52 percent of flip phones had cobalt.
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13. Smartphone Carries Infections
Mobile phones not only serve as a home for your valuable data but also carry millions of infectious organisms. Mobile phones carried bacterial pathogens that can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and even skin infections. A recent study found that mobile phones highly contaminated with organisms of fecal origin and could be as dirty as public toilet seats.
The heat generated by the phones makes a perfect breeding ground for bacteria. They are a home for several pathogens like Staphyloccocus aureus (known to cause skin infections) and E.coli (known to cause vomiting and diarrhea). Cleaning your mobile phone with a disinfectant is always a good idea to stay safe from these germs.
What You Can Do to Protect Yourself?
So, be careful the next time you use your mobile phone incessantly. You are exposed to a great deal of radiation through the use of smartphones. The best way for protecting yourself is to reduce the number of verbal conversations you are having on the phone.
Try to use speakerphone when you are at home, and utilize text messaging if you can. Let us know how to use your cell phone safely.
Productive Ways To Take A Break From Your Smartphone
1. Enjoy Outdoor Activity
Get out of the house, go for a walk or a run, and re-establish your connection with nature. Invite your friends to play your favorite sport. Try all the outdoor activities that you love like mountain biking or camping. Make time to encourage your social interactions with your colleagues and friends.
2. Read A Book
Reading your favorite novel in the library or bookstore and get a physical copy, instead of reading it on your smartphone. Reading a physical book beside a window with a hot beverage is the best way to feel relaxed.
3. Get A Pen And Write
The old-fashioned way of writing on paper is still the best way to express your feelings. Take your time out writing a letter to someone special using a pen and paper. Make habit of writing regular dairy expressing all your thoughts and sentiments.
4. Spend Some Time On Your Hobbies
Spend Some Time On your hobbies like cooking, gardening, fishing, or paint and spend some time on yourself.
5. Bond With Your Pets
Dogs are considered “man’s best friend.” Spending time with your pets are a great way to relieve stress and feel happier.
