Smartphones spoil our posture, mood and memory

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

There are many reasons to put your smartphone aside. One of them is that constantly checking notifications robs us of a sense of reality and real communication with friends and family. But there is more important news: smartphones ruin our posture. And this promises not only trouble with the neck, but also problems with mood and productivity.

If you are in a public place, take a break from the article and look around. How many people near you are huddled over smartphones? They don't follow their posture, and technology is to blame for that.

Steve August, a physical therapist in New Zealand, calls this body position iHunch. Another version of the name - iPose - was suggested by Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School.

On average, a person's head weighs from 4.5 to 5.5 kilograms. In order to be more comfortable looking at the phone screen, we have to tilt our neck 60 degrees. Thus, we significantly increase the weight that our neck holds - up to 30 kilograms! When Steve August began his medical practice about 30 years ago, he noticed that the hump occurs mainly in the elderly. Now the doctor bitterly says that adolescents are increasingly complaining about the same problem.

When we are sad, we slouch. We take the same body position when we feel fear or powerlessness. Studies have shown that people with clinical depression adopt a posture that painfully resembles the iHump. One study published in 2010 described depressed patients and their posture: neck extended forward, shoulders drooping, and arms pulled up to the body.

Posture not only reflects our emotional state: it can induce certain moods. In 2015, Dr. Shwetha Nair and her colleagues conducted an experiment. They asked participants who were not depressed to sit upright or hunched over. Then the volunteers answered questions similar to those you might have heard in an interview, that is, in a rather stressful situation.

The result of the experiment showed that those subjects who hunched over in a chair rated their abilities low and were negatively disposed in general.

The researchers concluded that sitting with your back straight is an easy way to improve your resistance to stress.

Slouching also affects our memory. In 2014, a study was published in which participants were also asked to sit upright or bent over. All of them were given a list of words to memorize: half with a positive meaning, half with a negative meaning. Those who sat upright were able to reproduce many more words, mostly “good” ones. But those who stooped in the chair, remembered mainly those positions that had a negative semantic load.

In 2009, scientists proved that Japanese students who held their backs straight while studying were more productive in class.

How else can slouching affect our behavior and mood? Maarten W. Bos and Amy Cuddy have explored this topic in more detail. They asked participants to spend five minutes on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or PC. Then the scientists began to observe how quickly the subjects would start asking if they could leave. It turned out that the size of the device is of key importance. Those who sat with the phone in their hands in the characteristic, gnarled position did not insist on leaving and showed less ability to stand up for themselves, even when the five minutes of the experiment were long gone.

There seems to be a direct relationship between the size of a gadget and how much it affects us.

The smaller the device, the more we must adapt the body to use it in a comfortable way, and the more we submit to our own smartphone.

Ironically, we use smartphones and other small gadgets to increase our productivity and efficiency. But interacting with them undermines our self-confidence and good mood. Regardless, we continue to rely on our gadgets, spend a lot of time behind them, bend over the screens and are not going to change anything anytime soon.

But you can fight such a stoop.

• When holding your phone, tilt your shoulders and head back, even if you have to raise the screen to eye level.
• Stretching and massaging the muscles between the shoulder blades and the sides of the neck will restore elasticity.
• The next time you take out your phone, remember this note. Gadgets make you slouch, which ruins your mood and memory.

Your posture influences your psychological state and can be the key to good mood and self-confidence.