Phones are most definitely a useful tool, but in recent years it has become more and more apparent that something is up with them. New studies have begun to link our pocket computers to many adverse health effects, physical and mental, but they aren’t really that harmful… right?
To get a general consensus on this question, I decided to conduct some interviews with students at West Salem High School. When asked whether he thought he was addicted to his phone, senior John Bateman replied with a simple, “Yes.” He also had affirmative replies to questions asking about whether his phone made him feel irritable or anxious. When asked if he got headaches from excessive screen time, he replied, “Sometimes.”
Another interview with sophomore Liam Heidt, however, saw different results. He hasn’t ever had a problem with being addicted to his phone or being anxious and irritable in association with his phone. He did however find comfort in his phone being around him. When prompted with the question of whether he gets anxious when his phone is not near he replied, “Yes.” He went on to say, “I might get into a bad situation and need to call someone and I won’t have it.”
Seeing as students’ opinions on the topic are varied, it seems it would be best to turn to the experts, and the experts are leaning much farther into the negatives of phones.
One big concern with cell phones is their association with car accidents. According to webmc.com, “[Talking on the phone while driving] is a cause in more than a million crashes a year, or 20% of all car wrecks, including those that injure and kill people.” If 20% of car crashes could be avoided due to the absence of distractions in our pockets it could save millions of people’s lives per year, which would save a lot of grief from families and friends.
There have also been studies connecting the mere presence of our cellular devices to lower cognitive ability. One of such studies by the University of Chicago found that the farther the participants’ phones were from them, the higher they scored on two different tests (Working Memory Capacity and Fluid Intelligence) with the three locations of the phone in the experiment being “Desk”, “Pocket/bag”, or “Other Room.”
The most interesting or concerning thing about this all is that when prompted on whether their phones were affecting them, to quote the experiment directly, “…a majority of participants indicated that the location of their phones during the experiment did not affect their performance (“not at all”; 75.9%) and “neither helped nor hurt [their] performance” (85.6%)”. This is scary because sometimes we don’t even realize how much the constant use of our phones is affecting us in daily life.
A third issue largely associated with phone use is a great increase in child myopia. According to pediatric ophthalmologist Kathy Whitfield, “There is an increased incidence of myopia, or nearsightedness, in children now than in generations past. Since 1970, the incidence has doubled in the United States.” While the impacts of the blue light from screens on our eyes are not yet fully understood, we do know that headaches are a rather common occurrence after looking at screens for long periods of time and it can cause eye sensitivity. Because of this, it is not at all far-fetched that our phones are one of the driving causes of this nearsightedness epidemic.
The greatest and probably least understood issue with our electronic devices is the lasting effects they have on our mental health. There are many traceable effects from social media, video games, and over-reliance on our phones that can lead to addiction, anxiety, and depression. In the words of Jorge L. Almodóvar-Suárez, MD, “Social media, in my view, provides the user with inconsistent positive reinforcement, similar to gambling.” He goes on to add, “The user is not always rewarded with likes and positive responses, but these are quite satisfying when occurring.” This, added to the effects of putting a screen in front of small children leading to less face-to-face contact with other people is leading to millions of people per year struggling with anxiety and depression.
No matter who you are, anyone can have problems due to the overuse of electronics. So, to answer the question, are they really that bad for us? The evidence strongly points to our phones being a great problem for hundreds of millions of people. Even if there are some people who dont have issues with them, it may be time to pause for a second and think about your phone, how much you feel like you rely on it, and how unhealthy that can truly be.
