20150310 - mobile phone

Is Your Mobile Phone Brainwashing You?

Smartphones have taken away our boundaries and over our lives, says unplugging expert Orianna Fielding

By Kim Hookem-Smith | Health & Fitness On Trial – Tue, Mar 3, 2015 18:40 GMT

“I realised I wasn’t awake. My life wasn’t my own,” says Orianna Fielding, explaining why she’s become a digital detoxing expert.

Fielding moved to Costa Brava in Northern Spain for a better quality of life, and after a while managed to slow down to the pace of life there – allowing herself to relax and just ‘be’.
Until the smart phone came along.“The world was on to me 24/7 – I was 100 per cent digitally connected. But I realised that I was personally disconnected from my real surroundings. I was in the most beautiful place, where people would come to escape, and I couldn’t escape my phone.”
What Are Our Phones Really Doing To Us?
It’s been creeping up on us, scientific study by scientific study, that perhaps these pocket gateways to the internet, are doing us more harm than good. And with today's warnings from scientists that we're 'offloading' our intuition to these machines, it's time to take a good, hard look at our relationship with our smartphones.
They change our brain chemistry. EEG tests have revealed that the brains of those who use smartphones compared to those who use regular phones are different. We are literally changing the shape of our brain.
And it’s been claimed that using two screens (such as Tweeting through a new TV show on Netflix) can cause a kind of ‘brain damage’.
Not to mention the fact that our over-reliance on technologies such as digital maps mean our ‘caveman’ brains are withering – affecting our memory and other innate skills perfected by evolution.
They mess with our emotions. Studies have found that Facebook negatively affects our self-esteem and can increase feelings of depression. Constant comparisons to others’ airbrushed lives can lead to loneliness and feeling your life isn’t as good.  ‘Connected but alone’ is now a Thing. We’re relying on the immediacy of a tap on the phone, instead of experiencing the real intimacy of personal relationships.

They rob us of sleep. Both physiologically and psychologically, using your mobile phone in the hours before bedtime can prevent you sleeping or give you a disturbed night. The blue light the screens emit wakes our brains up and constantly hoping for a response to our latest Tweet, status update or Instagram image keeps us mentally alert.

And they can harm us physically too. Overuse can give us RSI, neck and back problems. And smartphones are teaming with illness-causing bacteria.

Even if you think you have a healthy relationship with your phone – you might well be storing up problems for the future.

Signs Your Phone Is The Boss
In her book Unplugged, Fielding has laid out 12 signs that you’re suffering from digital overload. Many directly relate to mobile phones.

They include:

• Checking your phone first thing in the morning, getting up in the night to check for messages or using it in bed
• Slipping away from real activities to check up on online activity
• Bumping into someone because you were looking down at your smartphone
• Getting easily distracted and finding it hard to focus fully on one area (multitasking)
• Turning to your phone (or another device) to avoid an unpleasant task or because you’re feeling stressed
• Wanting to curb your smartphone usage and not being able to stop

 https://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/blogs/health-blog/is-your-mobile-phone-brainwashing-you-184028221.html