A person’s mental and physical health can be greatly influenced by a range of lifestyle or health-related activities. Modern lifestyle impact our health and a contemporary way of living may raise the risk of certain psychological and physiological health issues. Let’s have a look at how the current way of living affects our physical and mental health.
How Modern Lifestyle Impact Our Health- Our Duty to Children
Introduction
With technology advancements and social media platforms, modern life is expanding at a rapid pace.
In modern living, there is a multifaceted compendium and many-sided synthesis of the evolution of human lives such as technology and social media.
Communication and connection sources are affecting every aspect of our life at such a rapid pace that it might be tough to adjust.
Technology has enhanced the lives of many people, including almost half of all adults. In the United States of America, India, and other wealthy nations, for example, envisioning life without a Smartphone is a challenging effort.
Is technology, as well as communication via social media and text messaging, having an impact on people’s physical and mental health?
Modern technology may have a significant influence on users’ mental and physical health. If you are overly tied to or reliant on contemporary technology, you may experience psychological disorders such as distraction, the expectation of quick fulfillment, narcissism, and even sadness.
However, by striking a balance between online and offline social contacts, managing screen time, and moving ahead, you can keep your mental health in check.
In this section, we will look at how contemporary lifestyle and technology have influenced the physical and psychological health of regular people.
The Effects of Modern Living on Human Health
Lifestyle is a way of life that is practiced by people, organisations, and nations and is influenced by geographical, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual factors.
Lifestyle is defined as the characteristics of a community’s residents at a certain period and location. It encompasses people’s daily actions and functions in activities, occupations, leisure, and diet.
In recent decades, academics have grown highly interested in lifestyle as a critical aspect of health since 60 percent of connected factors to quality of life and individual health are correlated to human lifestyle.
Millions of people throughout the world live unhealthy lifestyles, putting them at risk of sickness, disability, and even death.
An unhealthy lifestyle may lead to a variety of important concerns such as joint and bone disorders, metabolic illnesses, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, violence, and so on.
The relationship between lifestyle and health should be carefully studied.
Today, vast changes have happened during the lifetimes of all people. Unhealthy food, malnutrition, alcohol use, smoking, drug addiction, stress, anxiety, and other symptoms of an unhealthy lifestyle are employed as effective forms of lifestyle.
Aside from that, residents must confront new problems in their daily life. For example, emerging new technologies inside the Internet and virtual communication networks pose huge difficulties to our environment, causing individuals to suffer from physical and mental health issues. The problem is that technology is being abused and overused.
As a result of current research, it is possible to state that: lifestyle has a significant impact on human physical and mental health.
These impacts come in a variety of varieties. Consanguinity or cognition is a prominent kind of lifestyle in several races that may induce genetic illnesses.
Improving this unhealthy lifestyle is a protective factor in lowering the prevalence of genetic illnesses.
Misuse or abuse of medicine may be a serious unhealthy lifestyle in various nations. Self-medication, such as antibiotics, has a deleterious influence on the immune system.
Antibiotics will not be successful in treating a person who is infected with any form of infection.
In all, 10% of self-medicated persons may develop major consequences such as medication resistance. Occasionally, a medication allergy is so severe that it results in death.
The Influence of Modern Technology on Human Health
Technology has the potential to have a large influence on consumers’ physical and mental health.
Being overly connected can lead to psychological issues such as distraction, the expectation of quick pleasure, narcissism, and even despair.
In addition to hurting users’ psychological well-being, technology use may have a significant impact on physical health, causing visual problems, neck strain, and hearing loss.
Individuals’ lives are made easier by advanced technology. Misuse of technology may result in unfavorable outcomes.
Using a smartphone, computer, or other gadgets after midnight, for example, may have an influence on sleep patterns and cause sleep disruption.
Addiction to mobile phones or the internet is a sign of depression.
People nowadays are so fascinated with technology and social media that the thought of quitting any of them may be quite unsettling.
As a result, the use of technology and social media is fast increasing.
Facebook and Instagram alone have a total monthly user base of two billion people worldwide.
Text messaging and social media have become essential components of how individuals communicate with their social pages or groups.
In fact, for many teens and young adults, connecting through social media and text messaging is now more common than face-to-face contacts.
The technology is so pervasive that it sometimes appears difficult to cross without it.
According to the American Psychological Association’s assessment on stress, 99 percent of adults in the United States of America own electronic devices; 86 percent own laptops, 74 percent own a Smartphone, and 55 percent own a tablet. This might be a sign of empowerment and prosperity, but it also has a negative connotation.
We may claim that all of these technical and scientific advancements have robbed us of our serenity and inner calm.
Well-Being and the Digital Cloud
Many individuals think that disconnecting or taking a digital detox from time to time is highly important for psychological state or mental health; nevertheless, just 28% of these people turn off from technology on a regular basis.
Interactions and dialogues on social media networks may have a substantial influence on an individual’s well-being and pleasure.
Many studies have found that spending more time on social media is associated with a higher risk of loneliness, sadness, and anxiety, which begs the question: Are miserable and unhappy individuals utilizing social media, or does social media impact human happiness?
Happiness
According to the relationship contradiction, most people are less popular on social media than their friends, which can lead to feeling less joyful and cheerful.
As far as we know, it has never been demonstrated that users of social media networks are less popular than their peers, but they are less happy.
According to this study, happiness is connected to popularity, and the majority of users on social media networks are not as happy as their friends as a result of this friendship-popularity relationship.
Overall, according to the study report, social media users may experience greater degrees of social discontent, sadness, or bereavement as a result of comparing their popularity and happiness to that of their friends.
Happy social media users may believe that their friends are more popular and happier than they are – and unhappy social media users may believe that their friends are more popular and happier than they are in general.
Isolation
Time spent on social media may also have an impact on one’s psychological condition or mental health.
The longer persons aged 19 to 32 use social media networks, the more likely they are to become socially isolated.
Analyzing such issues might be difficult because psychological difficulties and social isolation are epidemic among young individuals.
Modern life tends to separate us rather than bring us together. While it appears that social networks provide opportunity to fill social holes, many academics believe that it cannot be the answer that people hoped for in the beginning.
Depression
According to the study report, young individuals who spend too much time on social media are more likely to develop depression.
Constant checkers were 2.8 times more likely to develop sadness, weariness, and obesity than persons who checked their emails and social media accounts less frequently.
People do not have to abandon social media entirely; simply modifying their behavior on social networking sites and taking a vacation from time to time might help improve their spirits.
The rise of the “constant checker”
Constantly monitoring technological gadgets has been related to increased stress levels.
The last decade’s technical advancements and social media developments have resulted in the “continuous checker.”
A continuous checker is someone who continually, almost compulsively, checks their emails, messages, and social media accounts.
Being constantly or indefinitely connected throughout this technique has been related to increased stress levels.
Furthermore, 18% of participants identified technology use as a major source of stress.
The stress level among individuals who are not frequently involved with technology and social media is rather high.
For example, 43 percent of frequent checkers, compared to 26 percent of non-constant checks, are concerned about the influence of social media on their physical and psychological well-being.
Furthermore, as a result of technology, more constant checkers than non-constant checkers feel separated from their families, even when they are in the same room, and more than one-third of constant checkers say they are unlikely to meet with friends and family members due to social media engagement.
Aggression and video gaming
Other types of interaction that have a poor image include video games for youngsters; some study reports show a link between video games and violence. However, no such correlation has been shown between hostility in real-life violence and movies or video games.
There are a variety of resources or meditation in society to commit to the topic of decreasing crime.
There is also the possibility of recognizing the wrong disadvantage, such as media violence, which may distract society from a variety of urgent concerns such as poverty, destitution, education, professional inequalities or occupational disparities, and psychological condition.
According to the study report, while four hours of video game play might induce depressive symptoms in teens, continual usage of social media and instant messaging can minimize these symptoms in certain people.
While playing video games for four hours a day may be concerning, not everyone who engages in it is at danger of acquiring signs of depression, addiction, or anxiety.
If teens are hanging around playing games with their pals or constantly speaking with their friends online, this might be part of a general growth pattern or a conventional biological process.
Despite the potential threats to a psychological state, trends in the previous decade demonstrate that the use of technology and social media is expanding, so these difficulties do not look to be going away anytime soon, and there is no way to change habits.