We all know how important texting has become to our daily lives. 2014 was the latest estimate evaluating the global text usages is 561 billion messages per month, that is about 19 million messages a day, without including app-to-app messaging like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (Those two combine over 60 billion messages every day, in case you were curious).
Yes, it’s a great way to interact with friends, family and customers, however they are some cold facts we need to consider in relation to our health that will harm us faster than we think and sometimes we won’t even know it came from the position of our bodies when we text.
”Text neck”- a medical condition cause by the downward angle in which we hold out heads while texting, emailing, and using our phones, tablets and computers. The forward position of the head puts pressure and strains in our neck and shoulder muscles up to the point where pinched nerves, herniated discs and low back pain can result from it. In addition to headaches, depression, constipation, and even heart disease with the possibility of shortening in life expectancy.
“Computer vision syndrome”-spending hours a day squinting at a computer screen the size of a deck of playing cards can cause strain in our eyes, eye dryness, eye strain, head and neck aches and blurry vision.
“Teen brain development”- In 2010 a Canadian study was done on a link between texting and adolescent brain development. They found that the teens that texted the most performed poorly on tests, they measured memory and attention span.
Dr Michael Abramson, professor and lead researcher on the study at Monash University postulated that smartphone technology might train teens to work to quickly and make recurrent mistakes. Doctors believe that the average teenager sending and receiving an average of 80 texts a day can lead to depression, anxiety and decline academic performance. It’s scary to know our kids and teens will have significant critical changes in the way their brain will develop.
“Shorten your life expectancy”- Studies have shown that the hunched or rounded back posture we put our spines in while texting can reduce our oxygen intake affecting our lungs and heart function as well as our internal organs and with time we can develop a more permanent outward curvature of the spine called Kyphosis which will limit our physical functionality later in life.
Let’s think for a moment on the position of a healthy and functional spine. It looks like an elongated letter S, with the upper (cervical), middle (thoracic) and lower (lumbar) curves present to allow us to raise the upper torso and head into a vertical position and keep it there. If our spine was a stiff pole, we would need external support to remain erect, instead we have individual vertebrae that work together to bear the weight of the head, shoulders, arms and rib cage. The spine’s job is
heavy lifting and heavy balancing while our bodies twist, turn, run and walk, stretch, throw, crawl and dance. The secret is the S-curve, that allows dynamic flexibility and strength over all kinds of movement. Our enemy is the S-curve being replace by the C-curve, where the three curves merge into one and the body loses strength and function without being able to provide support to the spine.
The average adult spends 23 hours a week texting, that is 3 hours a day with our heads and shoulders rounded forward and our upper spines rounded like a letter C. This is bad posture and it can be avoided if you simply hold your phone up to your face, stand up from your desk and walk around every 20 minutes, look away from your computer or phone screen for a minute every 10 minutes and move better. We can help you with that!