Don't let this blog kill you
Here's a two-year-old article that somehow popped up on my screen last night. It's about how having a cell phone can shorten your life if you don't resist its more addictive attractions.
If they happened only occasionally, phone-induced cortisol spikes might not matter. But the average American spends four hours a day staring at their smartphone and keeps it within arm’s reach nearly all the time, according to a tracking app called Moment. The result, as Google has noted in a report, is that “mobile devices loaded with social media, email and news apps” create “a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress.”
“Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” says David Greenfield, professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. “It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.”
A "constant sense of obligation." The folks who wrote that, put their finger on something important. We would all do well to take a minute and think about our relationship with the internet. It's supposed to make life better.
I never had a “smartphone” until my wife gave me a iPhone as a gift two years ago. She reasoned that ‘I needed one’. Well actually I didn’t, and the thing is on constant silence mode and is basically out of my sight the majority of the time. I think that I was the last person on earth without a cell phone and I never really saw the need for one. Too small to be a real computing device and too intrusive for someone like me who values his privacy.
ReplyDeleteI see how they have turned my nieces and nephews into young adults without the ability to make small-talk, and who are constantly staring into their phones and awaiting the next text or call. Almost like it is an extension of their own bodies.....which for all intents and purposes it is.