What if the tech companies injected something into our culture that dramatically affected our bodies in all sorts of unpredictable and yet unknown ways?
Well, they have. They’re called smartphones.
Binge eating and poor sleep are just two of the symptoms suggested by recent studies, along with addictive tendencies in children and young adults. The University of California, San Francisco, found that exposure to social media and television was associated with the development of a binge eating disorder one year later among children ages 9 and 10. And King’s College London found that 40% of students between the age of 18 and 30 were addicted to their smartphones and were reporting trouble falling asleep and tiredness throughout the day as a result.
There are individual scientific and social explanations for these effects, but the one common problem cited by the experts is this: We’re letting our phones control us.
Children are gorging themselves with food because they have not learned the importance of moderation. Instead of getting bored and finding organic ways to entertain themselves, children are handed iPads and iPhones and asked to sit tight. This might keep them occupied (or sedated), but it’s teaching them poor behavior. Children learn that they need to get as much screen time in as they can before their parents say time is up, and they’re using that same strategy at the dinner table too.
The same goes for young adults. They have a habit of mindlessly scrolling, so they sit up on their phones for hours, and eventually, this begins to delay the body’s internal clock. Many of these students will end up pulling all-nighters unwillingly.
However, there could be one upside to all the screen time usage: Your smartphone could keep you from going blind. Scientists at the University of Birmingham in England found that screens could be used to prevent glaucoma blindness, which is the leading cause of blindness. The researchers used sound waves, delivered through a user’s phone screen, to detect rising internal pressure behind the eye and monitor the user’s vision health. This mobile test would allow medical experts to diagnose and treat glaucoma much sooner than they can now, the study found.
But again, moderation is key. Too much screen time strains the eyes and the muscles that help them focus, and the blue light released by digital devices contributes to retinal damage, especially in children. So, the same device that might detect early onset blindness can also contribute to a host of other vision-related problems at the same time.
This just goes to show that technology is a double-edged sword — in large part because we lack the fortitude to control it. No device has made communication so immediate and information so accessible as a smartphone. But it’s also the most time-consuming and addicting technological triumph we have, and we can’t seem to break ourselves from the bad habits it helped us create.
