How smartphone use is affecting your mental health and altering your brain chemistry

We're all on them, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Smartphone use: is too much bad for our mental health?

You wake up. Reach for your smartphone. Connect it to the internet, wait for a slew of notifications. You exit the shower. Check it again. Breakfast, bus. Facebook, Instagram. Waiting for the barista to make your coffee? What's new on Whatsapp. Lull in a conversation? Glance through Reddit. Time for bed? Time to tweet. Just ten more minutes, over and over again. Sound familiar?

If it does, you’re far from alone. For large swathes of the population, this is what a relationship with a smartphone now looks like. But just how much of an effect can these curious little devices and the habit loops they’ve ensnared us in have on our collective mental well-being?

The age of the smartphone

In the past decade, swiftly and right under our noses, the smartphone has moved in and firmly established itself as the simply indispensable piece of market technology. It acts at once as phone, computer, camera, entertainment system and so much more. You’d sooner ask what it is they can’t do. Its position as commodity and cultural artifact is indisputably total, to the point where not owning one could read as genuinely bohemian.

And so, the smartphone wields an immense power—widespread use is changing everything about the way we interact, experience, and feel, both individually and socially. Think of how different things were just a decade ago, on the cusp of their arrival, or how alien the 90's with its dial-up internet already feels, and you’ll begin to understand how rapidly technology changes the landscape of the world.

Now think of the countless everyday instances where we let our phones ‘take over’ for a little while. We use their integrated maps to not only find out where everything is, but how to get there and how long it will take too. This could be shrinking the part of our brain that is normally responsible for that. Ever given up on trying to remember an actor's name after a few seconds of trying and googled it instead? Yeah, that probably isn't too healthy. There are a number of ways smartphone use is altering our memory, dubbed digital amnesia.

Have you taken tens of photos on a hike, or videoed a gig? Turning your attention to your phone, even just to use the camera, is literally stopping your brain from properly establishing memories. It seems that truly living in the moment is becoming harder and harder to do. Has the smartphone, once one half of a symbiotic relationship, become a true extension of the self, an appendage all its own?

Social media, perhaps the driving force behind smartphone use, is where people spend a lot of their time these days, where they interact, organize, plan, reminisce, congratulate, commiserate, agree, argue. Yet, for all its posturing to better connect us, it is fundamentally constructed around delivering short-term gratification and dopamine hits. They want us to scroll mindlessly and the brains behind them use every trick in the book to get us doing so. When the sellers are using similar tactics to those employed in the gambling industry, is it hyperbole to think of the consumers as addicts?

The children of tomorrow

I’m reminded of a time I taught kids at a summer camp a couple of years ago. We were positioned in an idyllic Italian village under the Dolomites and the classes were three hours long (a litmus test of their attention span). Pretty soon a measure needed to be put in place: hand your phone into the counselor before class, no ifs or buts. They were all glued to them, playing the same games and browsing the same apps.

I watched over a girl’s shoulder as she steamed through her Instagram feed, rapid-liking every post without the remotest inclination to actually observe the content, like some kind of purpose-built bot. I was transfixed by what I saw, and wondered beyond the mere surface-level implications for this kind of behaviour. Trying not to sound like too much of a cynic or technophobe, I do worry about the ways in which young minds are developing differently to previous generations with all of this noise going on around them.

I knew what the girl was doing. The purpose of the app, to share photos, self-express, socialize, had become gamified to her, now a binary process of simply sending and receiving likes, far removed from its seemingly benevolent origins. I shudder to think of young children weaponising likes and followers and using them to bully, or worse, considering them indicative of real-life worth. And let's be clear: children are using smartphones quite a bit these days.

Personal progress

I’ve never tracked my app usage—I fear the numbers may horrify me. I do occasionally deactivate my Facebook and delete an app here or there, but we all know how easy it is to reverse those measures. I'm not one to make drastic changes on a whim, and I'd rather enjoy the benefits of smartphone use than simply delete everything or chuck it away.

I feel the best and most realistic path moving forward is to develop healthier habits around phone usage and live alongside this device in some kind of harmony. And despite some shifts in the right direction, there's so much more to go. I still get anxiety before, during, and after posting things. Without thinking I open apps I have just closed, having already bled them of all usefulness over and over again. I check and re-check and check again, like returning to a fridge you know is empty. I find my focus slipping constantly, the urge to pick it up and unlock it habitual, ever-present. I can't tell you how many times I found myself on an app while I was supposed to be writing this. But I'll keep trying. And if you haven't begun to cut back, well, there's no time like the present.

What do you think? Has this article touched a nerve, does your smartphone use get in the way of a happy, productive day? Remember, just because something is normal and widespread doesn't necessarily mean it's good for us.

Leave a comment below, share the article with friends, get a conversation going. And if you’re doing so from a phone, think about putting it down for a while afterwards.

This article too much of a downer? It's not all doom and gloom. Here are some Instagram accounts that are guaranteed to brighten your day, and a piece we wrote on how Ireland's attitude toward mental health is changing.