Researchers from San Francisco State University examined how cell phones are affecting a person’s level of anxiety. It turns out that people who use their cell phones the most had the highest level of anxiety.
One of the pieces of this puzzle is the constant pings that you get while you were doing something else. These pings interrupt what the person was doing and even more importantly the ping is activating the same neural pathways in the brain that gets activated when your fight or flight response is triggered.
For a heavy cell phone user, as more and more pings happen, the person’s neural pathway gets hardwired, so each time a ping happens, you’re in a fight or flight response and your anxiety level goes up.
In addition, with our being flooded with news feeds, social media posts and twits, you’re continuing to trigger your flight or fight response.
So, what can you do about it besides reducing your checking your newsfeed, social media, and twitter accounts? Well, how about simply turning off the ping on your phone. Ask yourselfa simple question - how many texts are really that important that I need to stop what I was doing to answer it.
What if you simple check your texts every half hour or (god forbid)even once an hour? Will it be the end of the world that you didn’t respond instantly? Probably not.
Another reason to stop the pings is that it takes you about 16 minutes to refocus on what you were doing when the ping interrupted what you were doing.
(Reported Prevention, May 2020)
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