Your iPhone [read: cell phone] is ruining your posture & your mood

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Khalifa Jayy

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/o...-ruining-your-posture-and-your-mood.html?_r=0

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.
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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.”
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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.
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Much more at the link. Great read. Sit up straight, folks!
 
I've had shit posture since I was a kid thanks to handheld gaming fam

It's already too late for me
 
I just corrected my forward head posture in the past few months and it literally feels like I've been living the last 13 years of my life at 50%. Unbelievable difference in how I look and feel.
 
Thanks for this.It's incredibly important. Only recently have I discovered how much posture affects mood.

Really wish I knew this when I was younger.
 
I need to be mindful of this. I began correcting my standing posture two years ago as part of my vocal training, and my sitting posture a few months ago after lower back pains started becoming a major nuisance. Until that point I had walked and sat with slumped shoulders for most of my teens and all of my adult life. Luckily I don't own a smart phone and rarely use my cell phone or handheld devices, but I do sit a lot in front of a laptop for school work and other activities.
 
PeskyToaster said:
Then it couldn't be used to decry modernity.
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I had this guy in a art class full of pertentious dickwads and this dude was saying that the walkman was the worst invention ever created. He went on this long winded explanation how we just wall off with headphones and never talk or interact anymore. I made the argument that books did this way before. I don't bother someone reading a book like I don't bother someone with headphones on.
 
STILLethal said:
How?
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Over the past few years, I had developed a lot of seemingly unrelated issues like TMJ, hip injuries (I'm a runner), horrible nasal congestion I thought was related to sinus problems, ringing ears (thought I was losing my hearing from too many concerts), stomach problems, and the occasional anxiety attack. I thought it was stress from work and grad school and my doctor, dentists, and coaches couldn't pinpoint anything wrong. A few months later I got some numbness in my hand and it turned out to be thoracic outlet syndrome.

I started to work on my posture which involved stretching, trigger point massage, exercises, and constantly forcing myself to fix my posture when I was teaching or on the computer. After a few months, every single one of my issues went away. I could hear and smell better than I could ever remember. Turns out lifting with my bad posture in high school overworked my pec minor and my body's been trying to work around it ever since.

Seriously though, the emotional/mental changes were most noticeable. My self-esteem went up and I don't have anxiety anymore. I'm less worried about the future. My body looks and feels better. I have full range of motion in my hips and neck now...and I didn't even think I had too much of a problem to begin with.

I'm super aware of posture now and literally 90% of people I see in public have forward head. I'm not saying that it'll fix everyone's problems but I completely underestimated how much even the smallest bit of continuous physical/emotional tension could affect my day to day life.
 
drtomoe123 said:
Over the past few years, I had developed a lot of seemingly unrelated issues like TMJ, hip injuries (I'm a runner), horrible nasal congestion I thought was related to sinus problems, ringing ears (thought I was losing my hearing from too many concerts), stomach problems, and the occasional anxiety attack. I thought it was stress from work and grad school and my doctor, dentists, and coaches couldn't pinpoint anything wrong. A few months later I got some numbness in my hand...
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Holy crap. I had every one of those same issues (plus vertigo), starting last summer, and it took months to find out what was going on, since there were so many seemingly disparate symptoms. Turns out I always probably had some TMJ problems, and I'd made them worse with years of bad posture, to the point that I had a sudden onset of several things going wrong -- which then has a cascade effect, because you compensate and/or can't exercise.

I'm just now starting to get better, and I'm so glad to hear someone else has made it back! I always felt invincible until this came on, and I've been a shell of myself (mentally and physically) for the past half-year or so. Definitely gave me a much greater sense of empathy for those with anxiety issues.

Are you on some doctor-prescribed program, did you find some books, or are you just winging it with info from all over?
 
flyover said:
Holy crap. I had every one of those same issues (plus vertigo), starting last summer, and it took months to find out what was going on, since there were so many seemingly disparate symptoms. Turns out I always probably had some TMJ problems, and I'd made them worse with years of bad posture, to the point that I had a sudden onset of several things going wrong -- which then has a cascade effect, because you compensate and/or can't exercise.

I'm just now starting to get better, and I'm so glad to hear someone else has made it back! I always felt invincible until this came on, and I've been a shell of myself (mentally and physically) for the past half-year or so. Definitely gave me a much greater sense of empathy for those with anxiety issues.

Are you on some doctor-prescribed program, did you find some books, or are you just winging it with info from all over?
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I know exactly what you mean. I went from feeling relatively stress-free to having some really self-destructive thoughts this summer and the worst part was not having any clue why it was happening. I felt so powerless.

Great to hear that you're coming back from it too. My program has been a mix. I finally got an official diagnosis from the doctor but they referred me to a physical therapist to take care of it. Unfortunately, my insurance didn't cover that so I've been doing most of it on my own. There's lots of quackery out there (especially when trying to learn about trigger point/myofascial release online) but I found these articles on the scalenes, masseter, and sternocleidomastoid to be super helpful and informative. Releasing the muscular tension and massaging my trigger points literally felt like I was being reborn -- muscles were loosening up and my body felt like it was unraveling. I had to take two sick days from work because I was just lazing around massaging myself lol.
 
Sesha said:
Possibly, but not all people slouch when reading, and cell phone use is more ubiquitous these days.
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You don't have to slouch while using a phone either. Also, since books are often heavier it's even harder to hold them level.

The warning about keeping watch on your posture is valid. Using it to demonize modern technology, not so much.
 
drtomoe123 said:
I had to take two sick days from work because I was just lazing around massaging myself lol.
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FZZpure said:
I've had shit posture since I was a kid thanks to handheld gaming fam

It's already too late for me
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This. I was destroying my posture and back before it was cool.

Probably doesn't help that I work at a computer and have trouble keeping decent posture for more than few minutes.
 
I noticed that about other people a while ago, so I started holding my phone up to face level as much as possible.
 
Brawndo Addict said:
It's such a simple little fix but it's hard to break the habit.
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you also don't want other people screen peaking. if i could like grow fins that shoot out of the side of my neck to prevent screen peaking while i had my phone to my face, I'd be more prone to doing that.
 
You guys acting like bad posture is no big deal should know that there are severe long term effects to bad posture (besides looking weird). If I were y'all I would try to better my posture as soon as possible.
 
nah, school desks ruined my posture.
Those horrid things.

Upper body exercises and losing weight can help a great deal, also with lower back problems.
 
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