38 | New Scientist | 28 September 2019Are screens bad for our bodies?
Smartphone pinky, tech neck, bone spurs
at the back of our skulls: the ailments we are
meant to have inflicted on ourselves through
excessive phone use all sound terrifying.
Hence the headlines. In truth, there is no good
evidence that such alarming conditions are
caused by our tech habit.
Any harm is likely to be far less spectacular.
The World Health Organization, for example,
recommends limiting screen time as a way of
tackling obesity, voicing no health concerns
related to screens in particular.
What about the effect of staring at small,
bright screens on our eyesight? In the past
few years, more children in the UK have been
prescribed glasses, says Max Davie at the
Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
in London. This has led some to claim that
phones and tablets are to blame. But Davie
thinks the increase in prescriptions has more
to do with aggressive management of existing
conditions. “At the moment, we don’t have
sufficient evidence for a causal link,” he says.
One thing that does appear to be taking
a hit is sleep. Studies have shown that people
who are given a book to read in bed find it
harder to go to sleep if they read it on a screen
rather than on paper. This is probably because
of the blue light that most screens emit,
which throws off our circadian rhythm
and tricks us into thinking it is daytime.
Of course, most of us who look at our
phones last thing at night aren’t reading
a book. Much sleep disruption is related
to mental stimulation: waiting for the nexttruth about
Phones stand accused of warping our brains
and harming our children. Douglas Heaven
examines the evidence
Y
OU’LL get square eyes!” my mother
used to say as I sat for hour after
hour glued to the TV. I ignored her,
of course. It was just something parents said.
Fast-forward a few decades and now I’m the
parent. My 5-year-old lives in a world where
screens aren’t fixed pieces of furniture, but lie
around on the kitchen table, on the sofa, by the
bed, constantly accessible. You can’t even avoid
them by going outside. “Screens are not only
in our pockets, they’re on billboards, buses
and bins,” says Tim Smith, a psychologist at
Birkbeck, University of London.
The concerns have multiplied with the
screens. In the past decade, we have heard
that they will rewire our brains, strip us of
cognitive abilities and damage our mental
health. Many of us feel more distracted by
them, feeling grumpier, guiltier and more
tired as a result. The list of ills makes square
eyes sound benign.
So should we take these concerns more
seriously? Given the amount of time so many
of us spend with our lit-up devices, it is an
important question.
The trouble is, many of the most emphatic
answers are the least reliable. Smartphones
and tablets are not only TVs, they are chat
rooms, shopfronts, banks and photo albums.
We use them to work and play, to record
physical activity and monitor sleep. We can
look up peer-reviewed papers or scroll through
anti-vaxxing forums, crucial distinctions that
disappear when we use the umbrella term
“screen time”. As the fears grow and the debate
becomes ever more heated, it’s time to separate
the proven health advice from the hyperbole.Features
T
h
e
screen time
“ notification, say, or scrolling through endless
news feeds. Insufficient or disrupted sleep has
been linked to increased risk for all manner
of health problems, including depression
and other mental health concerns (see “Are
screens messing with my head?”, below).
“If there are any recommendations to
be adopted, not using screens in the hour
before bed seems to be the one with the
greatest support,” says Smith.
Are screens messing
with my head?
From video games to gambling, the apps
and websites we can access on our phones
have sparked widespread concern. Big tech
companies are also adept at tapping into our
need for social validation, hooking us on likes,
retweets and follower counts. In testimony
to a US Senate hearing in June, Tristan Harris,
a former Google designer and co-founder of
the Center for Humane Technology, argued
that the internet has created a culture of
mass narcissism.
This has led many to worry about the
emotional stresses of a hypersocial world on
adolescents. A quick online search brings up
dozens of papers linking screen use or social
media with detrimental effects on mental
health, including depression, anorexia and
suicide. Some figures suggest girls are more
affected. “After two decades in decline, the
mental health [problems] of 10 to 14-year-old
girls have shot up 170 per cent in the last eight
years,” Harris said in his testimony.
Such sound bites are alarming. They are >