There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now
and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the
present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe. But here’s one you
might not have considered: Smartphones are ruining our posture. And bad posture
doesn’t just mean a stiff neck. It can hurt us in insidious psychological ways.
If you’re in a public place, look around: How many people
are hunching over a phone? Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves,
contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August
calls the “iHunch”. I’ve also heard people call it “Text neck”, and in my work
I sometimes refer to it as “iPosture”.
The average head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. When we bend
our necks forward 60 degrees, as we do to use our phones, the effective stress
on our neck increases to 60 pounds — the weight of about five gallons of paint.
When Mr. August started treating patients more than 30 years ago, he says he
saw plenty of “dowagers’ humps, where the upper back had frozen into a forward
curve, in grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” Now he says he’s seeing the
same stoop in teenagers.
When we’re sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel
scared or powerless. Studies have shown that people with clinical depression
adopt a posture that eerily resembles the iHunch. One, published in 2010 in
the official journal of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association, found that
depressed patients were more likely to stand with their necks bent forward,
shoulders collapsed and arms drawn in toward the body.
Posture doesn’t just reflect our emotional states; it can
also cause them. In a study published
in Health Psychology earlier this year, Shwetha Nair and her colleagues
assigned non-depressed participants to sit in an upright or slouched posture
and then had them answer a mock job-interview question, a well-established
experimental stress inducer, followed by a series of questionnaires. Compared
with upright sitters, the slouchers reported significantly lower self-esteem
and mood, and much greater fear. Posture affected even the contents of their
interview answers: Linguistic analyses revealed that slouchers were much more
negative in what they had to say. The researchers concluded, “Sitting upright
may be a simple behavioral strategy to help build resilience to stress.”
Slouching can also affect our memory: In a study published
last year in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy of people with clinical
depression, participants were randomly assigned to sit in either a slouched or
an upright position and then presented with a list of positive and negative
words. When they were later asked to recall those words, the slouchers showed a
negative recall bias (remembering the bad stuff more than the good stuff),
while those who sat upright showed no such bias. And in a 2009 study of
Japanese schoolchildren, those who were trained to sit with upright posture
were more productive than their classmates in writing assignments.
How else might iHunching influence our feelings
and behaviors? My colleague Maarten W. Bos and I have done preliminary research on
this. We randomly assigned participants to interact for five minutes with one
of four electronic devices that varied in size: a smartphone, a tablet, a
laptop and a desktop computer. We then looked at how long subjects would wait
to ask the experimenter whether they could leave, after the study had clearly
concluded. We found that the size of the device significantly affected whether
subjects felt comfortable seeking out the experimenter, suggesting that the
slouchy, collapsed position we take when using our phones actually makes us
less assertive — less likely to stand up for ourselves when the situation calls
for it.
In fact, there appears to be a linear relationship between
the size of your device and the extent to which it affects you: the smaller the
device, the more you must contract your body to use it, and the more shrunken
and inward your posture, the more submissive you are likely to become.
A thought: why not actually design a device around the human
body and to be ergonomic in the first place, instead of changing the designs...
Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using
small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting
with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite,
reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.
Despite all this, we rely on our mobile devices far too much
to give them up, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Fortunately,
there are ways to fight the iHunch.
Keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your
phone, even if that means holding it at eye level. You can also try stretching
and massaging the two muscle groups that are involved in the iHunch —
those between the shoulder blades and the ones along the sides of the neck.
This helps reduce scarring and restores elasticity.
Finally, the next time you reach for your phone, remember
that it induces slouching, and slouching changes your mood, your memory and
even your behavior. Your physical posture sculpts your psychological posture,
and could be the key to a happier mood and greater self-confidence.
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