4 Ways Your Phone Is Damaging Your Health

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There's no denying the smartphone is an amazing invention and we’re all pretty reliant on them these days. The average person spends around 3 and a half hours on their phone every single day, which could be a bit of a problem. Phones are an important part of most people’s daily life, but there could be a big downside to that. There have always been people that say we spend too much time on our phones and it’s not good for us, but how true is that? Unfortunately, those people could be right because using a smartphone regularly can do some damage to your health. That doesn’t mean that we should all stop using them, but you do need to watch out for these smartphone related health problems.

Eye Strain

Looking at screens for too long isn’t good for the eyes and over the years, it could do some serious damage. If you’re spending hours and hours looking at your phone all day long, you might end up needing to get some glasses. Luckily, there are some simple things that you can do to avoid this. The reason that our eyes get strained when we’re looking at a screen is that they get dry because we don’t always blink as often. Making an effort to take notice of how regularly you blink and do it more often can help to stop eye strain. The 20:20:20 rule is another technique that eye doctors recommend. If you’re using a screen for a long period of time, you should take a break every 20 minutes and look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This will help your eyes to readjust and they won’t get strained as often. You can also change the settings on your phone and put it into night mode, this takes out the blue light which is particularly bad for your eyes and impacts your sleep.

These are all great ways to reduce eye strain when you’re using your phone, but sometimes, it might not be enough. If you’re using it for too long every day, these techniques aren’t going to do enough to reduce the eye strain so it’s worth considering cutting down on your usage.

Hearing Problems

Excessive exposure to loud noises can cause long term hearing damage. Using headphones all of the time is one of the biggest causes of this kind of hearing loss. If you’re using your phone to listen to music or talk on the phone and you always have the volume up high, you could be causing some serious damage. If you don’t do anything about it, you could end up with irreversible hearing loss. Always make sure that you turn the volume down and if you’ve been listening to loud music regularly, you should see a hearing doctor to make sure that there isn’t any damage. Even listening to headphones at a moderate volume can damage your ears so you have to be really careful.

Sleep Problems

Putting your phone into night mode is always a good idea because if you don’t, you’re going to have a lot of trouble sleeping. The blue light tricks your brain into thinking that it’s still day time so when you try to fall asleep, you won’t be able to. But even if you’re using night mode, using your phone right before bed still makes it harder to get to sleep. You’re overloading your brain with a lot of information rather than giving it time to wind down and get to sleep. It’s best to leave your phone for at least a few hours before you go to bed, you’ll find it so much easier to get a good night’s sleep.

Bad Posture

So many people have issues with their posture because they’re sitting at desks all day long at work. But did you know that your phone could be causing your problems as well? When you look down at your phone regularly, you can develop something called ‘text neck.’ Constantly tilting your head forward instead of standing up straight can ruin your posture and it’s very hard to correct so you’ve got to pay attention to your spine when you’re using your phone. Try to sit up straight and hold the phone directly in front of your face when you’re using it, rather than looking down all of the time.

You shouldn’t let this scare you into ditching your phone completely because it still has a lot of positive uses. You just need to think about how you’re using it and whether it might be having a negative effect on your health.