The Great Phone Epidemic - Part 4

The Great Phone Epidemic – The Electronic Babysitter is eating your Babies Brain! (Part 4)

Claire - April 11, 2014 

Parenting is such a spectator sport these days and you can find a million blogs, articles and research papers to tell you how you are doing it wrong. The developing human, after all these years,  is still a mystery to us in many ways. As we learn more, the advice parents are given is getting more confusing not less. Having said that, I am going to give you my two cents about why you shouldn’t give your baby the phone to play with.

The stifling of the creative.

As adults we have approximately 8,000,000km of neural pathways tucked up in our skulls (seriously, just digest that figure for a second. Wow!). The pathways we use the most become like the highways and those we hardly use at all are like goat tracks up a mountainside. Some are much easier to travel than others, so these become our regular thought patterns which lead to our habits. Creativity and innovation come from exploring the less travelled paths.

In many ways, a baby’s brain is like virgin land. There are so many places to go, but you either need to seek out a track made by the wild animals or beat your own paths. If you were wanting to experience all that the land had to offer, you would spend a lot of time making new tracks. The greater your curiosity, the more creative you would become in where you went. Babies and small children are naturally curious, they strive to understand how the world works and their part in it. They generally use all their senses to satiate the need for knowing. Given free reign they know what cockroaches taste like, how custard feels between their toes, the smell of cat breath. All these crazy and often gross things that babies do build new pathways.

After they have pulled all the books from the bottom two shelves of the bookcase for the third time, we often get exasperated. The natural response to their learning about gravity is to hand them ‘Talking Tom Cat’ on your iPhone while you go about restacking. But here is where things get sticky. Firstly, only 3 of the 5 primary senses are stimulated, vision, hearing and touch, but the range of sensory stimulation is very narrow. Talking Tom Cat only makes a few noises, bub only focuses on a small screen close to their face and touch is only the glass screen. Now compare that to the experience of crawling on grass. The smell of the grass and the slightly damp earth beneath, the sounds of birds and insects, maybe mums voice. Looking at things close up, like an ant crawling along a leaf, things far away like clouds and trees. The different textures. There is a massive sensory difference.

Games on phones are pieces of computer code, they have finite rules with little to no leeway of altering outcomes by thinking outside the box. You are basically lead by the rules to finish where the programmer sends you. Alternatively give a kid some sticks, rope a ball and a good tree and a thousand games could blossom out of it all with different endings. One creates highways out of working within set rules, the other stimulates the ability to problem solve, be creative and inventive.

Movement is life

Did you know 90% of your brains energy is obtained through movement of the spine? Without movement the brain is undernourished and under energised. Now let’s look at this in relation to a baby who’s brain is supposed to triple in size by the time they are 2. If a baby is kept entertained with a phone, how much is their level of movement diminished and therefore how much is their brain being robbed of vital energy during this stage of rapid growth.

 EMF’s (ElectroMagnetic Fields) and the infant brain.

The body of evidence on the dangers of EMF’s is growing every day. Even people like Dr Charlie Teo, a high profile neurosurgeon has considerable concerns about EMFs and the effect they have on the brain, particularly for young children.  Under the age of 25 we go through a process called myelinisation. It is similar to putting insulation around an electrical cable, it helps to keep the electrical impulses in the brain firing the right way as well as stopping interfering pulses coming in. In small children, where not much myelisation has occurred, EMF’s are likely to cause much more damage to cells as they don’t have that protective layer.  The most common area for this to effect is the pineal gland and their “internal clock” (Ah, who needs sleep anyway!). Disrupting a sleep is not only frustrating for parents, but also lowers immunity, disrupts growth and healing, and inhibits cognitive growth. As we can all attest, lack of sleep leads to being grumpy, irritable and stops us from being able to concentrate.

How you want to use this information is going to depend on your own family circumstances, but at least knowing it gives you the choice to make different decisions. Whether it is no devices for under 5 years or restriction on time limits/time of day or self regulation. Good luck!

The Great Phone Epidemic - Part 3

The Great Phone Epidemic – Bye Bye Happy Hormones (Part 3)

Claire - April 11, 2014 

There are two major ways that out body’s cells communicate, the first is the nervous system and the second is our hormonal system. Both not only control the functions of cells organs and systems within the body, they also effect our emotions, how we feel, how we process events and even how we think.

In the last blog we touched on how the posture we adopt while playing on a mobile device can have an effect on our brain and spinal cord, but the problem goes deeper than that. When you spend long hours looking at screens, our eyes perceive lots of ‘blue’ in the light spectrum. Blue light in natural daylight is most abundant in the mornings and almost non existent by late afternoon. In the morning this blue light is a trigger for our brains to switch off the production of a hormone called melatonin, which is not only a hormone that helps us sleep, but it also gets converted into serotonin, one of our feel good hormones. With our retinas being flooded with blue light from phones, iPads,computers and televisions at all hours of the day our brains are not making enough melatonin for healthy sleep and also not having enough to convert into our natural anti-depressant serotonin.

Adding another layer to this are that the types of things we tend to engage in while on our phones are often stress inducing. Reading about injustices, horrific crimes or even about someone’s crappy day can greatly increase your cortisol levels. What about how it makes you feel when someone is wrong? Or you think a snide comment is directed at you? Or even something as simple as a typo can send your stress levels through the roof.  Chronic high cortisol of itself can make you feel pretty ordinary, but because the constant production of cortisol robs the body of “hormonal building blocks”, it also inhibits your ability to make happy hormones. And let’s face it, most of what you read on social media is negative.

When we sit down with our friends and chat, we produce feel good hormones like oxytocin and beta endorphin. These hormones help us to feel relaxed, happy, trusting and connected to other people. If you add to this equation, sharing food and physical contact, like hugs, these hormones are dramatically increased and therefore the feelings are more intense. Social interaction via the internet totally bypasses this hormonal input. You just can’t reproduce that squishy-feel-good experience over a screen, your body is not adapted to do it. Not only is it a poor substitute for physical socialisation, but can even false levels of distrust and increase hostile feelings. Have you noticed how often people will say things on twitter they would never say to someone’s face? Cyber-bullying and trolling can show up the incredibly ugly side of humanity, but at least part of those tendencies come from the lack of oxytocin produced in virtual communication. Have you ever felt annoyed at someone online, but felt completely differently when you saw them in person?

Spending long periods of time on our phones has a multifaceted effect on our hormonal system. So much so, it can impact how we feel about ourselves, with lowered serotonin and increased cortisol as well, eroding our relationships as our oxytocin levels crash. Spending phone free time with your friends and family can help heal these hormonal upsets.

The Great Phone Epidemic - Part 2

The Great Phone Epidemic – Is your iSlouch destroying your Spine? (Part 2)

Claire - April 7, 2014

If “Sitting, to your spine is like a sugar, to your teeth” then spending hours on your phone does to your spine what becoming a meth addict does to your dentition.

You may have heard about the impact that sitting has on our spines. There are a number of studies coming out at the moment comparing the health impacts of sitting to those of smoking cigarettes and the conclusion is not great: Sitting is the new smoking.  It compresses and dehydrates the discs and promotes an unhealthy environment that can lead to serious decay of the spinal bones. It puts pressure on the nerves exiting the spine and reduces the flow of life-giving cerebrospinal fluid to the brain, essentially starving it. But sitting is nothing compared to how the posture we assume when we are looking at our mobile phone and the severe consequences this has on your spine.

It is near on impossible to spend any time on your phone without dropping your head forward and down to look at the screen. This is within the normal healthy range of motion for your neck, but holding that position frequently or for extended periods of time it can put your entire alignment out and put excessive tension on the central nervous system. As your head drops forward, it’s relative weight increases, which means the muscles require much more energy to hold  it in that position. As the muscle fatigue, your shoulders begin to round forwards also and the curve of your middle back begins to increase. Next, your core muscles begin to fatigue and you spine starts to make a C-shape. Or if you are standing, you throw your pelvis forward to stop yourself from falling on your face.  With habit, the muscles and ligaments either stretch or shorten permanently and some atrophy while others work so hard that scar tissue is laid down. Then we begin to assume this posture all the time. This decreases your ability to get the full range of motion in your neck which eventually leads to spinal decay and spurs growing on the bones.

As we look down and forwards the spinal cord is stretched and compressed as it travels down the spinal column. This stretch can be so great that sometimes the brain stem is herniated down into the top vertebrae. This is the part of the brain that controls the most important function in the brain, such heart rate and breathing. Having that sort of pressure all the time can have untold effects on your future health.

At the other end, as the pelvis is forced forwards the pressure is greatly increased in the discs of the lumbar spine, squeezing the fluid out of them and robbing them of the nutrients they require to stay healthy. This also leads to bone spurs, “slipped discs” and lower back pain.

Each year we are seeing younger and younger people come into see our Chiropractic Doctors with some level of degeneration in the spine and/or serious symptoms like migraines, neck pain, low back pain as well as breathing problems and even high blood pressure. This iSlouch posture is an epidemic with a dramatic impact on the health of our society.

The Great Phone Epidemic – Part 1

The Great Phone Epidemic – Part 1

Claire - April 7, 2014

6:15am on a cold Monday morning in the middle of winter back in 2003. It was my very first day as a Technical Chiropractic Assistant. As the team gathered around the appointment book and started finding the patient files in the cabinet for the mornings appointments, a group began to gather on the veranda outside. I looked out to see tradies, people in suits and a couple in gym gear waiting for us to open. They were chatting and laughing among themselves and it continued as they filed inside and sat in the “hot seat” area. The music was cranked up, adjusting began, the talking increased, the energy sky-rocketed and it felt like a party. I thought to myself, ”Wow this is the best place in the world to be on a Monday morning. This place rocks.”

It was an amazingly busy practise and every adjusting set seemed the same. People made friends with those that had appointments around the same time and the party atmosphere was the standard. There were kids happily playing in the kid’s corner or running back and forth to show mum the plastic cow. Not only did it feel good being there, what I saw in the way of changes to people’s health was phenomenal.

Fast forward to today and “Hot Seat” areas in Chiropractic offices all over the world look very different during adjusting time. The music is still there, the people are still there but the energy has changed and the conversation has all but stopped. Now as soon as bottoms hit the seat, the phones come out and the focus is directed at the world of social media, games, emails, text messages… anything but the physical environment. This is the same on the train, in coffee shops, on the beach, at the family dinner table; there seems to no situation where the phone doesn’t make an appearance. We are spending so much energy connecting with people virtually that it appears we are losing sight of those immediately around us.

It is not just the teenagers falling into this pattern, older people do it, parents do too, kids and even toddlers and babies are handed the phone to stop them from communicating.

This phone epidemic is starting to have a huge impact on our health as a society and in a number of different ways. Spending hours interacting with our phones is changing not only how we interact with other actual people, but also our posture, our hormonal systems, our neurology, our immune systems and even down to our cellular biology.  Over the next few blog posts we are going to explore some of these serious effects of the phone epidemic.