How digital devices affect our health

Modern life is extremely difficult to imagine without various digital devices – mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, pocketbooks, readers, portable game consoles… They certainly enhance the quality of life, make it more comfortable. However, there are also downsides. Numerous scientific studies and statistics show that gadgets are not as safe as it might seem at first glance.

How do gadgets affect the human psyche and health? GoBeauty dealt with this.

Our back suffers

Smartphone owners spend a lot of time chatting on messengers and social networks, browsing the news or playing games. According to the British Association of Chiropractic (a type of manual therapy), this has led to a sharp increase in the number of young people with back problems. About half of teens complain of back and neck pain due to the constantly leaning pose over their gadgets. When in leaning pose, the pressure on the intervertebral discs is twice as high as in the normal position. Only in the last year, the number of young people aged 16 to 24 years with back disorders has increased by 60%.

Anxiety increases

Oddly enough, new communication devices give people a sense of loneliness and isolation. It has been found that young people spend 10-11 hours each day looking at their phones, waiting for messages from friends, and their absence causes concern and the feeling that everyone ignores them.

Adiposity

The spokeswoman for the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh believes that reduced physical activity leads to an increase in obesity and is the fourth-largest cause of death worldwide. Lack of movement leads to obesity, which means an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. And not only will it be easier to get them, but it will also be more difficult than to deal with them.

Depression

Child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans says that 20 years ago, she faced one or two child suicide attempts a year, and now four cases a month. She believes that the increase in the number of depressed adolescents suffering from anorexia nervosa, youth with suicidal ideation, is directly related to gadgets, where “they travel freely in a dark world that is often not intended for children”.

Insomnia

More than 60% of young people between the ages of 18 and 21 are reading or playing games in bed. However, the director of Logboro University’s Sleep Research Clinic notes that 2 hours of text reading on a smartphone stops melatonin production and causes a serious sleep problem.

Reduced concentration of attention

According to research from the Association of Psychologists of America, it is known that smartphones significantly weaken human attention. Just the presence of a smartphone near a person can greatly reduce concentration on the work being done. The person is constantly distracted and checks at whether a message has been received.

Of course, GoBeauty does not call for the complete abandonment of the use of smartphones and similar digital devices. You just need to know the measure and apply adequate countermeasures.