What’s with you 24/7 and negatively affects your mental, physical, and emotional health? Can’t think of anything? Because surely, if the answer was easy, you would have addressed the issue already. But this tricky little gadget doesn’t just affect your health, it’s also highly addicting.

If you still don’t understand, I mean your phone. Smartphones are now indispensable gadgets that permeate our professional, social, and leisure time. They are so necessary that we carry them everywhere—even to sleep! But are we really aware of the full harmful effects of our phones?

Physical Health

Moms have long cautioned our use of phones, and as it turns out, they may be right to be worried. Mobile phone use (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350886/) has been shown to induce changes in brain activity, reaction times, and sleep patterns. It can also cause neck pain and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome with extended use.

Neck pain can occur if the neck is constantly tilted downwards for an extended period of time while using phones. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a condition of the hand and arm that causes pain, numbness, and tingling. Extended use of phones can result in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome due to the repetitive motions commonly used while texting or operating our phones putting strain on our hands and arm. To mitigate this, take regular breaks from using your phone and stretch your hands, and be conscious to use them at eye level.

Another less-known problem associated with phone use is the increased risk of acne and other skin conditions. This is because our phones are one of the dirtiest appliances we use as we seldom take care to clean them, and place them on all sorts of surfaces. This makes phones one of the highest carriers of germs, and rubbing at our faces or skin with the hands we use to operate our phones can carry these germs over to our faces. To minimize the risk of this, use a phone sanitizer (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PDPZL83) to regularly clean your phone case and screen to kill the bacteria.

Mental and Emotional Health

Phone usage can also affect your mental and emotional health. Phones may be our gateways to the wider world, but they also provide a highly stylized and curated version of the world that may be miles away from reality.

It’s been widely documented that social media (https://www.healthline.com/health-news/social-media-use-increases-depression-and-loneliness#The-bottom-line) can affect our mental health, especially when we see the picture-perfect lives of our peers. Social media isn’t meant to depict our actual lives, but to produce an idealized version of it so that we can keep up appearances. The problem is that when we see pictures of exotic vacations and romantic getaways, we don’t enjoy them so much as lament that we can’t have as exciting lives as our friends. This is known as social comparison. And social comparison can breed jealousy and envy of others’ lives, and lead to lower self-esteem, feelings of loneliness, and depression.

You can fight this by consciously reminding yourself that these social media posts are all staged and painstakingly curated—yes, even that ‘candid.’ It’s that one good one in a sea of bad ones that gets posted. If it still seems difficult to disassociate yourself from social comparison, then try limiting your social media use. There are apps that can be downloaded on your smartphones into which you can program how much social media time you’re going to give yourself daily, and which will remind you once you’ve hit your limit.

Social media can also affect our emotional health by providing us access to a wealth of information. This is because there is definitely such a thing as too much information.

A phenomenon most call doomscrolling (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210226-the-darkly-soothing-compulsion-of-doomscrolling) had taken over many of our lives at the beginning of 2020—enough that it became Oxford English Dictionary’s 2020 word of the year and was officially initiated into the dictionary. Doomscrolling is the practice of compulsively scrolling through social media feeds filled with bad news. It is a search for information in a world filled with uncertainty and fear, but all it really achieves is in painting a bleaker and bleaker picture of the world. Oftentimes, doomscrolling can lead to a skewed perception of the world due to the persistent flow of bad news as social media algorithms push bad news onto us in an effort to garner more engagement by capitalizing on our fear. This can lead to heightened levels of anxiety and depression.

Doomscrolling is difficult to battle because it is a compulsive behavior. However, some people have started ‘hopescrolling’ in an effort to mitigate the effects of bad news. Hopescrolling simply refers to consciously searching for and sifting through positive news to remind yourself that the world is not as bleak as news sites make it out to be. You can also curate your social media feeds by rooting out people who post negative content in favor of those who post positive content to brighten up your day and chase away the gloom.

In this day and age, it’s impossible to survive without a phone. But we need to be aware of all the different ways in which our phones could negatively affect us. Once we have this awareness, the rest is just building up good habits. And ultimately, like all healthy habits, practice makes perfect.