Smartphones Increase Stress, Shorten Lives...
How to Deal with Smartphone Stress
By Brad
RidoutNOVEMBER 6, 2019
Ongoing stress—like constant alerts and
notifications—can lead to health problems and shorter lives.
In the past decade,
smartphones have gone from being a status item to an indispensable part of our
everyday lives. And we spend a lot of time on
them, around four
hours a day on average.
There’s an increasing body of research that
shows smartphones can interfere with our sleep, productivity, mental
health and impulse
control. Even having a smartphone within
reach can reduce available cognitive capacity.
But it’s recently been suggested we should be
more concerned with the potential for smartphones to shorten our lives by
chronically raising
our levels of cortisol, one of the body’s main stress hormones.
The Stress Hormone
Cortisol is often mislabelled as the primary
fight-or-flight hormone that springs us into action when we are facing a threat
(it is actually adrenaline that does this). Cortisol is produced when we are
under stress, but its role is to keep the body on high alert, by increasing
blood sugar levels and suppressing
the immune system.
This serves us well when dealing with an
immediate physical threat that resolves quickly. But when we’re faced with
ongoing emotional stressors (like 24/7 work emails) chronically elevated
cortisol levels can lead to all sorts of health
problems including diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and
depression. The long term risks for disease, heart attack, stroke and dementia are
also increased, all of which can lead to premature death.
While many people say they feel more stressed
now than before
they had a smartphone, research has yet to determine the role our
smartphones play in actually elevating our levels of cortisol throughout the
day.
A recent study found greater smartphone use was
associated with a greater rise in the cortisol
awakening response – the natural spike in cortisol that occurs
around 30 minutes after waking to prepare us for the demands of the day.
Awakening responses that are too high or too
low are associated with poor
physical and mental health. But smartphone use did not affect
participants’ natural pattern of cortisol rises and falls throughout the rest
of the day. And no other studies have pointed to a link between smartphone use
and chronically elevated cortisol levels.
However people still do report feelings of digital
stress and information and communication
overload.
Checking work emails in the evening or first
thing upon waking can lead to the kind of stress that could potentially
interfere with natural cortisol rhythms (not to mention sleep). Social
media can also be stressful, making us feel tethered to our social
networks, exposing us to conflict and cyberbullying, and fostering social
comparison and FoMO (fear
of missing out).
Despite being aware of these stressors, the
dopamine hit we get thanks to social media’s addictive design means
there is still a compulsion to check our feeds and notifications whenever we
find ourselves with idle time. More than half of under 35s regularly check
their smartphone when
on the toilet.
Some Tips
Dealing with smartphone-induced stress is not
as simple as having periods of going cold turkey. The withdrawals associated
with the unofficial condition known as nomophobia (an
abbreviation of “no-mobile-phone phobia”) have also been shown to increase cortisol
levels.
Rather than going on a digital detox, which has
been likened to the fad of the juice
cleanse diet, we should be aiming for digital nutrition. That is, maintaining a
healthier relationship with our smartphones where we are more mindful and
intentional about what we consume digitally, so we can maximise the benefits
and minimise the stress they bring to our lives.
Here are some tips for healthier smartphone
use:
1. Use Apple’s “Screen Time”,
Android’s ActionDash or
the Moment app to take an audit of how often
you use your phone and which apps take up most of your time
2. Turn off all but the
most important app notifications (such as private messages) so you can take
back control of when you look at your phone. You can also allocate certain
times of the day to be notification free
3. Turn off the “push” or
“fetch new data” option on your smartphone’s email. This way emails will only
appear when you open the mail app and refresh it. As an added bonus this will
help extend your phone’s battery life
4. Take some time to
complete a digital declutter, which includes unfollowing people/pages (there’s
an app for
that!) and unsubscribing from email lists (that
too!) that cause you stress or don’t benefit you. Remember you can
unfollow friends on Facebook without defriending them
5. Create tech-free zones
in your house, such as the kitchen table or bedrooms. An “out of sight out of
mind” approach will help keep smartphone-delivered stress from creeping into
your downtime
6. Set a digital curfew to
support better restorative sleep and don’t keep your phone next to your bed.
Instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning, start your day
with a brief meditation, some exercise, or a slow breakfast
7. Be mindful and curious
about how often you pick up your phone during the day simply out of boredom.
Instead of bombarding your mind with information, use these opportunities to
clear your mind with a short breathing
exercise. There’s even a mindfulness exercise that challenges you to
hold your phone while you meditate
on your relationship with it, so you can reclaim your phone as a cue
to check-in with yourself, rather than your emails or social media feed.
Brad Ridout is a research fellow, registered psychologist and
deputy chair of the Cyberpsychology Research Group at University
of Sydney.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons
license. Read the original
article.
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