Is your Phone changing your Brain?

Most of us love our smartphones, but some really, really love them! Nearly half of the people that use smartphones spend more than 5 hours a day on their phones. But how does this affect our brains?

Well, your phone gives you superhuman super powers! Remember back in the day when someone asked you something and you couldn’t google the answer? Now we have Google Translate, Google Maps, Shazam and so much more, however there could be a downside to all these things…

Even having your phone close by, with the notifications off, it still makes it a lot harder to concentrate! A recent study asked 800 people to complete mental test with their mobile phones nearby, in their pockets or in another room and the results were a complete fail.

The people who had their phones in another room had the best results and the people who had their phones the closest, like on their desks had the worse results. So, what is going on here?

Having your phone close by means it is constantly pulling your attention, even if it is not turned on! It impairs your ability to concentrate immensely, but this needs to be ignored.

Have you ever felt your phone vibrate in your bag or pocket, pulled it out to check and realised it’s all in your mind? This is an extremely common experience and it is called phantom vibrations. These vibrations could be a sign that our brains are anticipating a new notification on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. This is not only distracting but it also affects your sleep.

Researchers recently had about 600 people download an app that tracks phone use as well as sleep and those who used their phone more often slept less and had bad quality sleep compared to the others.

Make a change and put your phone in another room when you have something important to do. It’s also a good idea to put it in “night shift” mode before you get into bed.

It’s obvious that no one is ever going to completely give up their smartphone; however there are things we can do to boost our brains and avoid changing it too dramatically with our mobile devices.

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