REASONS TO STOP OVER-USING SMART PHONES

You are at a concert, Katy Perry is on the stage singing "roar". The crowd is going wild, everyone is singing along. Except you, you are busy recording the entire video to put on an Instagram story to update 400 followers of your who don't care what you are doing right now. In today's fast paced world, our whole day revolves around our mobile phones starting from the alarms to wake you up to dimming the lights at night. All with the help of one click. Smart phones are abominable because - they have caused us, human beings to be over dependent, have affected our health- physically and mentally and have limited our ability to think on our own.

From the moment we get up to the moment our head hits the bed, our phones control our entire day be it finding the best route to get to work, appointments, birthdays, making phone calls everything is fulfilled by one device- the smartphone. As much as it has made our lives simpler, we cannot deny the fact that it has sucked the use of memory from our lives and we have become over dependent on them. Gone are the days when we used to remember the birthdays of our loved ones, now it has been replaced by facebook notifications and a birthday wish on their timelines. It has sucked the fun and romance out of things like remembering the phone number of your other half, these things were counted as romantic gestures are now just replaced by a phone. We are now incapable of remembering the most tiniest of things because we don't give ourselves the chance to remember it. Why? because we don't need to. A study by Kaspersky conducted a survey of 6,000 mobile phone users, it found that 71 per cent of them can’t remember the phone numbers of their children and 87 per cent can’t recollect the phone numbers of their children’s schools. According to some of the respondents, losing their Smartphone will cause them to forget what they’ve been up to.

The over-use of cell phones and mobile phones has affected our health physically and caused increased neck pains, weaker eye sight and bad posture in human beings. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is another example of an effect that we can see already. Constantly using our hands, usually in extremely repetitive motions, has led to a huge increase in the prevalence of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. A study published in 2015 found that, as well as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, smartphone overuse can cause thumb pain, median nerve pain (palm pain), and a reduced strength and function in the hand. The harms of smart phones do not end here, they have now become a threat to our lives as well. Texting while driving distracts you from what's happening on the road. It just takes a few seconds of inattention to lead to an accident. In 2015, nearly 3,500 people were killed and approximately 391,000 people were injured in car accidents involving distracted drivers. 

Social media is a major part which distinguishes a phone from a smart phone. Applications like Instagram, Facebook  help us connect with the world but also influence our buying choices so much that we end up more confused than ever. This also decreases the idea of self-thought and likeability of a person before buying a certain product. It has limited the idea of thinking on our own because why think when you can just look almost anything up? studies have shown that we are able to think creatively when we observe our surroundings, sit in a different atmosphere but being glued to our screens keeps us glued to our desks causing reduction in new ideas or thought. The internet has also proved to control our thoughts with regard to the content we create, it provokes us to write content which is "viral". It has practically caused our brains to freeze nullifying its whole purpose. Almost every function fulfilled by the smart phones can be replaced like clocks for alarms, remembering appointments by heart or writing in a handbook instead of using Siri, using I-pods instead of music applications. If we consciously decide, we can easily find a replacement for the purpose of a smartphone and lead our lives more productively and efficiently.

In conclusion, smartphones are a bane to human beings than boon causing over dependency, affecting our health- mentally and physically and also limiting our use of the human brain and the whole purpose of it. Human beings worked well and fine before the invention of smart phones and the over dependency is the reason for our won destruction.