What if Your Phone Made You Fat?

The average person checks his or her phone every 12 minutes. Assuming that one sleeps eight hours a day, that’s 80 times a day a person is checking her phone. What would happen if every time we checked our phone, we gained one ounce of weight? That’s five pounds of weight gain per day, or 35 pounds a week!

Fortunately, this doesn’t happen, but something similar does happen. Every time you pick up your phone, you have used what we can call an ounce of brain energy to do so. Sometimes that is a good investment of that energy, and you receive a return of greater knowledge, important insights, or actionable information.

Often the return isn’t positive - it’s negative. Checking your phone may result in anger, a negative attitude for the rest of the day, or some trivial information about someone else’s life whom you’ve never met and probably never will. It’s the equivalent of eating junk food and adding inches to your waste line.

Of course, checking your phone less in general is beneficial. Having a period of time at the end of the day where you don’t check your phone at all improves your sleep. Short of that though, just being more conscious about the purpose for checking your phone can result in better mental nutrition and improve your mood. Are you checking to see how many 'likes’ you got on your last post, or checking to learn something new and valuable? The amazing device we carry with us nearly all of the time is a rich source of knowledge and wisdom, but it is also full of junk. If you carefully choose what to look at on your phone, it’s possible to use it to grow as a person. If you just give into impulse, it will make you fat.