5 Ways Smartphones Are Ruining Lives
Are you attached at the hop to your smartphone? Let’s check – you have a religious routine of checking your smartphones before going to sleep, even holding it sometimes only to wake up by its shrill alarm in the morning and check for new messages.
As much as you have grown to cultivate a dependence on the smartphone, it has also crept into your lives in a sense that renders it far more harmful than useful to an avid user. And for that, MensXP brings you five of the biggest reasons why this technological boon is turning out to be a bane for addictive users.
1. Sleep Deprivation
It’s already past two in the morning and you are still midway into a conversation with your loved-one on WhatsApp. You are also listening to some music over the headphones to combat the sleep you are getting. You are not alone. Survey suggests more than 66% of people sleep with their smartphones and a majority of those are constantly awake or in a state of semi-awakened state due to the constant notifications on their phone. A rising risk, this has started to affect the user’s daily routine as well as proven to be harmful to a user in the long run.
2. Attention Deficit
You just sent a message through your smartphone a while back, and you check to see the delivery report after five minutes. Ten minutes later you check again to see if that person has replied. You diligently do so over and over again until you aren’t satisfied. Smartphones and its connectivity has become a distracting trait for everyone, and the distractions have degenerated users in various ways. Besides being a constant nagging source, smartphones are known to diminish concentration levels among users who check it often.
3. Fatigue
Smartphone addiction, now a legitimate term, has been observed among various teenagers who have unfortunately been bitten by the smartphone bug. Using the smartphones for a prolonged time is known to affect user’s vision leading to headaches, fatigue and Asthenopia. The use of smartphone consistently has proven to be a physically daunting task leading the user to an unnatural amount of stress on their brain and causing tiredness and exhaustion.
4. The Heads-Down Tribes
The people in Taiwan have coined the term ‘Heads-Down Tribe’ for the people who are constantly attached to their smartphones to check mails or messages. Roughly, every one in five people in South Korea suffer from smartphone addiction. Avid smartphone users have now shown a tendency to sprout neck pain, spinal discomfort and wrist pain due to a constant posture and position that they have adapted to use their smartphones. Similar to the wave of computer addiction seen in the ‘90s, the smartphones, too, have captivated people to an extent where they ignore their health, which leads to various complications.
5. Complete Dependency
Remember when your heart skipped a beat when you thought you misplaced your smartphone? Unfortunately, few people out there have grown to cultivate their dependency on the smartphone into an obsession. An addiction that is far too difficult to curb, smartphones have proven to adversely affect one’s health physically, mentally and psychologically. The stage of complete dependency has led people to believe they’re handicap due to the lack of a smartphone.