Five Ways Your Smartphone Can Completely Mess Up Your Life

These days, a decent smartphone can almost be considered a necessity. It bridges the gap between people regardless of distance, serves as a pocket-sized personal assistant/high-tech Swiss Army knife, and can keep you occupied and entertained for hours. The smartphone serves a lot of purposes that all contribute to the process of making life significantly easier for the busy professional. Some people even consider smartphones (especially the new ones) status symbols that help them sleep better at night (and make everyone else hate them).

Unfortunately, a smartphone is as much of a double-edged sword as…er, an actual double-edged sword. The iPhone or Android phone that you consider to be an integral part of your everyday life could very well be the key to destroying your life as well. Here’s a list of five reasons how.

Your Credit Card Info Can Be Stolen via Your Smartphone

If there’s one thing that remains consistent about the criminal mind, it’s that it always manages to catch up with and even bypass every new security measure that the law-abiding and security-loving world can come up with. For example, there are smartphone apps that can actually steal your credit card info from YOUR smartphone, right under your nose. All the thief has to do is to stand in close proximity to you, allowing HIS phone to greedily suck your credit info from yours like a hungry vampire in a blood bank. Hell, hackers can even use free charging stations to infiltrate your phone and steal all of its juicy secrets. For a piece of technology that’s supposedly so sophisticated, a smartphone seems ridiculously easy to hack, doesn’t it?

You Lose the Ability to Focus

There’s a reason why experts strongly discourage using smartphones while driving. That sort of stunt is dangerous and can get people (including you) killed. Don’t let that fool you into thinking that the whole “distraction” thing only applies when you’re driving, though; it’s actually quite possible for you to get so distracted that you’d miss even the most attention-grabbing things, like a juggling clown on a unicycle riding up and down a street. No, seriously.

Your Senses Are Wrecked

Apparently, staying connected takes a heavy toll on your senses, too. Studies have shown that constant usage of smartphones can actually damage your eyesight. This is mainly due to the fact that the microwaves emitted by smartphones can cause irreversible damage to your eyes, especially since the heat generated gets completely absorbed through the eyes, but has no way to get out of the body. Before you start thinking that your other senses are safe, though, think again. Prolonged use of your smartphone for calls can damage your inner ear and cause hearing loss. The effect on your hearing is just as devastating when you use your smartphone to listen to music at full volume. Yeah, unplug those earphones now, buddy.

You Could Get All Sorts of Diseases from Your Phone

Smartphones are very useful, very easy to bring wherever you go, and very dirty. As in, ridiculously dirty. Think about it – you use your hands to touch, operate, pick up and grab all sorts of things. Your fingers probably pick up more dirt than a tabloid gossip columnist. Now, imagine those very dirty fingers going over the surface of your phone’s screen. Repeatedly. It’s the repulsive, disease-ridden equivalent of smearing peanut butter all over a slice of bread. I hope I didn’t ruin peanut butter for you with that last statement.

Your Personal Relationships Suffer

The problem with being so darned easy to contact is that it also becomes just as easy for problems to follow you around. Work-related stress tends to spill over into personal time and vice versa, and when these two mix, no matter what the outcome, you will always lose. Not only is your mood affected by things beyond your control at the moment, you also inadvertently sour the mood of anybody you happen to be with. Eventually, your relationships will crack under the strain of you worrying about everything at once, and you’ll end up doing more damage to your life than any of the problems you’re stressing over.

I’m not saying you should throw away your smartphone; the best way to counter these problems would be to limit the amount of time you spend fiddling with your phone.  Then again, if you really DO want to get rid of your smartphone, I’d be more than willing to take it from you. Out of the goodness of my heart, of course.