Smartphones are everywhere in our daily lives. We use them to talk, text, browse, play, and more.
But with all this use, some scientists have started to wonder how smartphones might be affecting our brains and bodies.
Past studies have suggested that spending too much time on smartphones can lead to problems with focus, memory, and even our ability to pay attention.
However, researchers still don’t fully understand why this happens or what is going on in the brain and body when it does.
A recent study by researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan looked into this issue.
They wanted to explore how smartphone use might be linked to the way people pay attention and how they react physically, especially in terms of how aware they are of what’s happening inside their own bodies.
This awareness is called “interoception.” It means noticing things like your heartbeat, breathing, or stomach rumbling. Some people are very in tune with these inner signals, while others are not. The study also looked at how people respond physically, such as changes in heart rate, when they see smartphone-related things like a ringing phone or a text message.
The researchers, led by Yusuke Haruki, were curious about how attention and bodily awareness might be connected when it comes to smartphones.
They even compared smartphone use to addictions like gambling or drug use because of the way these habits can control someone’s attention and emotions. They wanted to know if being drawn to your phone might affect your body and mind in a similar way.
To study this, the researchers recruited 58 young adults who were all healthy. These participants were asked to do a simple task: look at a screen and find target letters as fast as they could.
In the background, while they were doing the task, two types of images were shown. Some were smartphone-related, like a phone ringing. Others were just scrambled images that didn’t show anything recognizable.
The task was made easier or harder depending on how many letters were shown. This allowed the scientists to see how well people could stay focused when the task was simple versus when it was more challenging.
They found that people reacted differently to the smartphone images. Some participants were easily distracted by them no matter how hard the task was. Others were only distracted when the task was easy. The researchers then used questionnaires to find out more about these groups.
The group that was always distracted by phone images had something in common: they were less aware of their own bodily signals. They also had stronger physical reactions—like faster heart rates—when they saw smartphone images.
This means their bodies were more reactive to phone-related cues, even though those images had nothing to do with the task they were working on.
In other words, for about half of the participants, the sight of a phone screen or an incoming call was enough to pull their attention away from what they were supposed to be doing. It didn’t matter whether the task was easy or difficult—the distraction still happened. And this distraction wasn’t just in the mind. Their bodies reacted, too.
These findings are important because they suggest that smartphones may affect both our attention and how connected we feel to our own bodies. People who are more distracted by phones may not notice their heartbeat or other internal sensations as clearly as others.
This is similar to patterns seen in people who struggle with addiction, where attention becomes fixated on certain cues and the body shows strong reactions.
The researchers believe their work can help us better understand the deeper effects of smartphone use. It could also help in creating ways to support healthier habits, especially for younger people who grow up using smartphones daily.
In future research, they plan to look at what happens in the brain when people get distracted by phones, and how this process starts and grows during teenage years or early adulthood.
In summary, this study shows that for some people, smartphones can take over attention in both the mind and body. This may lead to problems focusing and feeling in tune with oneself. These findings could be a step toward helping people build better relationships with their devices.
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The research findings can be found in Communications Psychology.
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