Less than a decade after the appearance of the first iPhone, the first thing many users put on in the morning is their smartphone, faster, more often and more than the coffee cup, the toothbrush or even the partner next to them in bed.
Throughout the day, our smartphone is in our pocket or bag, we can check our emails during the day, and no matter what we do, many of us are bombarded with notifications of new messages, social media posts, breaking news, app updates and more.
Some recent studies suggest that this ubiquity of smartphones makes us more and more distracted and hyperactive. These symptoms often appear in cases of neurodevelopmental disorder, i.e. ADHD. Those who conducted the study have 221 - Millennial students from the University of British Columbia - to participate in a two-week study.
During the first week, they asked half of the participants to "minimize" the interruptions caused by the phone by activating the "do not disturb" settings and keeping their phones in sight. They trained the other half and asked them to leave their usual alerts on and keep the phone as close as possible to them.
In the second week, they reversed the instructions. The order in which they gave instructions to each participant was randomly determined. It was confirmed that people felt more distracted by their phones when they had phone alerts on, as opposed to when they didn't..
The specialists measured hyperactivity by asking the participants to identify how often they felt the 18 symptoms of ADHD in each of the two weeks. These items were based on the criteria for the diagnosis of ADHD in adults specified by the American Psychiatric Association and Statistical Manual (DSM-V).
Following the questions, they covered a wide range of potential problems, such as making careless mistakes, difficulties in sustaining attention or listening to the people around. The hyperactivity questions were similar, evaluating things such as the feeling of restlessness, excessive talking and interruption of the people around.
The results were clear: phone interruptions made people much less attentive and more hyperactive, but it did not clearly demonstrate that these findings would clearly suggest that smartphones can cause ADHD.
