With every passing day, these pieces of technology continue to become an integral part of our daily lives. From simple tasks that aid our memory to accessing the far reaches for information and communication, they’re something we’ve become accustomed, even addicted to using.
That’s right. Cellphones. Gender, age, race, career and economic status are irrelevant when it comes to owning a mobile phone.
In fact, Stats Canada reports that 89 per cent of all Canadian households have at least one mobile phone. It’s really no wonder you can walk anywhere, at any given time, and see that familiar artificial light glowing upon somebody’s face.
Business people use them to keep in touch with their clients, parents use them to keep in touch with their kids, workers use them to track financial expenses…but is that all?
No, with all of the applications and extras available, your spare time can be taken up by looking after virtual communities, sending selfies to friends and strangers, following celebrity gossip by the minute and updating the world on your ordinary life.
Normally, there should be nothing wrong with this. When the brain is “bored,” it looks for avenues to tread, build, or think upon. The personalized technology we have available though, steals the opportunities to brainstorm from us.
Where we once had the silence to reflect or create when faced with spare time, we now have multiple avenues of coding that take us along for a ride with bright colours and catchy words to occupy our minds. Ask anyone why they look at their phone and you’ll get the same answers, “I’m just bored,” and “There’s nothing else to do.”
“So, what’s wrong with killing boredom? What’s so wrong about going on my phone to do what I want to do, when I want to do it?” Well, if you group a large number of like-minded people together (regardless of generation, economic status, etc.) over a period of time, you get a city full of self-serving, dead-eyed zombies that not only ignore responsibility, but their mental health.
Studies done internationally have discovered that the artificial light from our smart devices, when used at night, affects melatonin production and disrupts the circadian rhythms that help us fall into deep, restorative sleep. This causes an increase in stress and depressive symptoms.
Prolonged use throws production off completely.
When the body has not had the chance to properly rest due to disrupted light patterns, it will adapt by whatever means it can. Just as jet-lagged travellers doze off or daydream, people who heavily use their mobile devices are beginning to do the same.
Entering these small states of rest allow the brain to do its primary jobs: making sense of the world and working out frustrations not recognized by the conscious. I truly believe that those who are already affected by stress further increase their symptoms by ignoring them every spare moment they get by going online.
Daydreaming is a power tool that the brain utilizes to deal with frustrations and new information that would otherwise be dealt with at night. It may not seem like much, but if you have 5 minutes of spare time each hour of the day, excluding the eight hours you need for deep sleep, that’s one hour and twenty minutes you have every single day to yourself to reflect. This means that instead of utilizing your brain’s power tool to help your body get back on track, more energy is sacrificed to the internet; energy needed for more important tasks.
There are those who are sacrificing these minutes, as well as time spent with significant others, kids, time spent driving and working all to be on their phones.
Distracted driving due to mobile phone use is a growing epidemic; one out of every four car accidents is linked to texting and driving in particular.
We are ignoring the world in front of us in order to connect with the world at our fingertips.
Imagine how much healthier, and what things we could do if we decided to let the world stay in our pockets. Go ahead, imagine. It’s healthy.
Acknowledge your problems, feel what you feel, and think what you need to think when you get these moments.
I think society can benefit far greater from a population of thinkers and dreamers rather than the distracted and stressed out population we have been spiraling into.
