If you spend any time on any busy sidewalk, you will see heads lowered and eyes directed downward. A recent study of college students revealed that a quarter of people crossing pedestrian crossings were glued to a device.
“I don’t think people are aware of how much they are distracted and how much their proprioception changes when they walk and use their phone,” said Wayne Giang, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Florida, who has studied the relationship between phone use and walking injuries.
In fact, our devices can cause what some experts call “inattentional blindness.” One study found that participants were half as likely to notice a clown on a unicycle (a blatant provocation) while walking and talking on the phone.
But that screen in your hand not only diverts your attention, it also changes your mood, your walk and your posture, and it also hinders your ability to get from point A to point B without getting into trouble.
This is how the phone interferes with your walk
According to Giang, when we walk and use the phone at the same time, we reflexively adjust the way we move. Pedestrian videos show that people using their phones walk 10 percent slower than those who are not distracted.
“There are a number of changes in gait that reflect the slowing down,” said Patrick Crowley, a project manager at the Technical University of Denmark who has studied the biomechanics of walking while using a phone. “People take shorter steps and spend more time with both feet on the ground.”
These changes slow traffic on sidewalks, and if walking is a large part of your daily physical activity, walking around with a phone can impact your fitness, said Elroy Aguiar, associate professor of exercise science at the University of Alabama.
Looking down at a smartphone while walking (instead of standing upright) can also increase the load, or force, placed on the muscles of the neck and upper back, contributing to the symptoms of “neck syndrome.” of text”. On the other hand, research published in the journal Gait & Posture indicates that all of this could reduce balance and increase the risk of trips or falls.
How it affects mood
When scientists want to study stress, they often ask people to do several things at once. This is because multitasking is a reliable way to stress people out.
There is evidence that walking while using the phone also works this way, even if we are not aware of it at the time. An experiment revealed that the more people used their phones while taking steps on a treadmill, the more their levels of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, increased.
A 2023 study looked at the psychological effects of walking in an outdoor park while looking at your phone or not. “Usually when people go for a walk, they feel better afterwards, and this is what we saw in the phone-free walking group,” said Elizabeth Broadbent, one of the study’s authors and a professor of health psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
“In the groups that walked with the phone, these effects were reversed,” Broadbent added. “Instead of feeling more positive after walking, people felt less positive: less excited, less happy, less relaxed.”
Broadbent and the study’s co-authors attributed these negative effects to the phone user’s lack of connection to the surrounding environment. It is now widely accepted that spending time walking in natural spaces is beneficial for mood and mental health. “It seems to be important to focus on the environment and not the phone to get these benefits,” Broadbent said.
The dangers of being distracted
Most of us know that walking and using the phone is risky. Some cities, like Honolulu, have even passed laws to regulate distracted pedestrians, but research into these dangers has yielded some surprises.
Giang’s work has looked at the connection between “walking distracted by the phone” and emergency room visits. Using government data spanning the years 2011 to 2019, he and his colleagues discovered nearly 30,000 walking injuries caused by phone use. While many of those accidents occurred on streets and sidewalks, nearly a quarter occurred at home. Tripping over something or falling down stairs is a real risk, Giang said.
Giang’s study revealed that age was one of the most important risk factors related to walking injuries. Young people between 11 and 20 years old had the highest proportion of injuries, followed by adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s, perhaps because young people use phones more than older people, Giang said.
How to stay safe? If she wants to check her phone, Giang recommends stopping for a moment, preferably out of the way of other pedestrians.
If you are indeed going to walk and use the phone at the same time, he recommended avoiding doing so when you are near stairs, pedestrian crossings and busy or uneven terrain: according to his research, these are the places where it is most likely to have an accident.
“Even the most alert and conscious people get hurt walking,” Giang added. “If you are also distracted by the phone, in short, you are putting yourself at risk.”
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