They say that sitting in front of your computer all day is not good for your health or your posture, which we have to agree with to a certain extent, but is texting just as bad for you? Well according to a paper published in the Surgical Technology International by Dr. Kenneth Hansraj, it seems that texting isn’t exactly great for your posture either.
As you can see in the drawings above, the way we text, which is by looking down at our phones, isn’t very good for our spines as it adds a whole lot of unnecessary weight on our spines. In fact just tilting your head slightly by 15 degrees adds as much as 27lbs of force onto your spine.
According to Dr. Hansraj, “The weight seen by the spine dramatically increases when flexing the head forward at varying degrees. […] As the head tilts forward the forces seen by the neck surges to 27 pounds at 15 degrees, 40 pounds at 30 degrees, 49 pounds at 45 degrees and 60 pounds at 60 degrees.”
Of course given that we have accumulated a lot of bad habits over the years, not to mention we all text and walk while looking down, we reckon it could be a bit hard to try and break this habit immediately, but hopefully this makes us a bit more aware of the health hazards and lets us strive towards better postures!
Filed in . Read more about Health.