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.
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.
