In the past decade, smartphones have gone from being a status item to an indispensable part of our everyday lives. And we spend a lot of time on them, around four hours a day on average.
There’s an increasing body of research that shows smartphones can interfere with our sleep, productivity, mental health and impulse control. Even having a smartphone within reach can reduce available cognitive capacity.
But it’s recently been suggested we should be more concerned with the potential for smartphones to shorten our lives by chronically raising our levels of cortisol, one of the body’s main stress hormones.
The Stress Hormone
Cortisol is often mislabelled as the primary fight-or-flight hormone that springs us into action when we are facing a threat (it is actually adrenaline that does this). Cortisol is produced when we are under stress, but its role is to keep the body on high alert, by increasing blood sugar levels and suppressing the immune system.
This serves us well when dealing with an immediate physical threat that resolves quickly. But when w ..
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