If you are reading this article on the smartphone, focus your attention on how you are holding the phone. How do you keep it? How he replied Steve Jobs from his personal email to a user in America who said his phone didn’t pick up (“You’re holding it wrong”), picking can be important, especially for your well-being.
Yours little finger holds the bottom of the phone? Index, middle and ring fingers are on the back of the device as you use the thumb to scroll the article? This intuitive method, which almost all of us use every day, actually it is wrong and could create problems to the nerves of your hands, and more. So let’s try to understand what the risks are and how to hold your smartphone to limit damage.
The risks of holding your smartphone in the wrong way (and how to fix it)
We’ve all gotten used to going from typing with ten fingers on the keyboard to typing with just the thumbs of the smartphone, some without even slowing down the typing pace very much. And when there is from scroll the feed of our social network favorite, we always do it with one hand. It doesn’t matter that smartphones are getting bigger and bigger (remember when 5 inches diagonal seemed excessive?).
The one-handed grip of the smartphone comes naturally. But perhaps you have already heard of the term “little finger from smartphone“. The weight of the smartphone on the thin phalanges of the little fingers has deflected the fingers of some users, who when they stretch out their fingers can clearly see a crease on the little finger of the hand with which they hold the smartphone. And it’s not even the only one ‘deformation‘from excessive use of smartphones.
Too much weight on the little finger
Ann Lund, a hand therapist at Mayo Clinic, told the Washington Post that ours little finger can not “tolerate pressure and position as well as other fingers “. Michelle G. Carlson of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York adds that the weight of the smartphone can I will injure the ligament that connects the little finger to the hand.
Ben Lombard, a British physiotherapist, has published a tweet shared over 50 thousand times on the dangers of this practice. And he explained to the Huffington Post that “we tend to hold our phones with our little fingers underneath to support the weight of the smartphone and with the wrist rotated inside to rotate the screen towards your face. This can cause compression of the ulnar nerve if sustained for too long “.
Mockup psd created by rawpixel.com – www.freepik.com
The ulnar nerve branches from the armpit to the elbow and ulna, and then goes all the way to the little finger of your hand. Check all the little muscles in our hand. But if stressed by the weight of holding the smartphone for too long, he ends up creating even chronic pain and can even damage nerve tissue.
Holding the smartphone too long in the hand, the wrist also suffers
If the “smartphone pinky” wasn’t enough, there are other problems that can plague our hands if we hold the smartphone the wrong way and for too long. In 2017 Professor Peter White of Hong Kong Polytechnic published a study in which he analyzed the effect of prolonged use of electronic devices on the median nervewhich runs along the forearm, passes through the wrists and reaches up to the fingers.
According to the study, anyone who used their smartphone for more than five hours a day had pain in the wrist and palm of the hand, in percentages higher than those who instead limited the use of electronic devices. In a subsequent study, White concluded that deviating the position of the wrists from neutral (with the palms extended) creates deformations of the median nerve.
So she recommends keeping your wrist in the position more neutral as possible. In particular, avoid “keeping thumbs and fingers in bent but static positions when using mobile devices, especially for one-handed use”.
How to hold the smartphone in your hand, to avoid problems
Hand surgeon Steve Beldner explained that “our hands were not designed to handle small objects”. Ideally, we should keep the thumb furthest from the rest of the hand, especially if we shake the smartphone for long periods. So much so that he suggests reducing the pressure on the smartphone by keeping a thick one behind the device when using it. A cover with MagSave for iPhone it won’t fix the problem, but it might help.
Mockup psd created by rawpixel.com – www.freepik.com
Hand doctor Dina Delopoulos suggests resting your hands frequently, doing flexor stretching. To do this, you have to bend the fingers backwards with the other hand until they are perpendicular to the wrist.
But the best solution is to place your smartphone on a surface whenever possible, swiping using your other fingers and not your thumb. Alternatively, hold the smartphone with one hand (with the wrist in a neutral position and the little finger next to the other fingers and not below), swiping with the index finger of the other.
Most likely, none of these positions will come as natural to us as the one-handed grip. And that’s not a problem: intense and prolonged use risks damaging the nerves and flexors of the fingers and hands. It might be enough, when you realize to be shaking for too long, do some stretching and keep your wrists and little fingers neutral, with the thumb as far as possible from the other fingers or by shaking with the opposite hand. The image above might give you an idea of how to do this.
Other useful tips could be use dictation more, instead of typing using thumbs. And use time and functions like the Digital Wellbeing of Android or lo Screen Time iOS to let you know when you’ve been on social media for too long. There is no more comfortable and even healthier grip, but a little awareness might be enough to avoid hand problems. And if you feel pain, don’t hesitate to speak to a doctor.