How Our Daily Modern Activities Are Leading To Lesser Productivity
Human beings have made amazing advances in science and technology over the last few centuries and decades. While many new inventions and machinery have made our lives so much simpler and have made information so much more accessible to all of us, it is not always the boon we think it might be for us. As we have moved towards a more modern approach to life, the problems that we are facing have also become more modern and unique in nature.
These problems are new so it is difficult to figure them out, let alone try to solve them in the bigger scheme of things. Do not misunderstand us, we love technology and recognise how indispensable it has become in our daily lives which is mostly for the better. People have gotten closer and distances have reduced all thanks to it. But the cost attached to solving our problems is in turn creating more problems for the human race in the long run. For the benefit of brevity, we will be sticking to talking about these problems on an individual level.
1. Encourage to be couch potatoes
Since most of our devices require a charging point or a well-functioning wifi connection, we are spending more and more of our time indoors rather than outside, as we were meant to be. It is a proven fact that when you are short of inspiration or ideas, it is always a good bet to go for a walk so that you can refresh yourself. Being around nature and breathing in fresh air energies the mind and rejuvenates the body. But with increasingly sedentary lifestyles which require sitting for the most of the day, taking over our lives, it is becoming difficult for us to experience extended time outdoors.
2. Increased screen time is causing more headaches and migraines
It is no secret that our screen times have gone through the roof because of numerous factors such as working from home, scrolling aimlessly on our social media feeds the entire day (if you want to know how to stop doing this, check out another article that we posted a few days ago). While we believe that spending more time on our devices may lead us to do more work and hence better productivity, you are in for a rude shock. Many hours spent on our laptops and phones actually cause digital fatigue and tire out our brains. This in turn is a major cause for lesser productivity.
3. Switching between multiple screens is causing memory failures
A recent study has proven that switching our attention from one screen to another throughout the day, without focusing on any one of them for a long period of time can lead to adverse effects on our brains. It also states that our memory has more of a chance to fail in such a case which can potentially prove to be extremely detrimental to our lives in the long run.
4. Less retention of information is required due to everything being instantly accessible
Tying it in with the previous point, the need for us to remember things has been reduced by a lot because we can find anything these days with the click of a few buttons. While this has made information more widely accessible to most people, it has led us to not remember a lot of essential things like phone numbers in cases of emergencies when our digital devices tend to give up on us.
5. Impatience to achieve goals and get instant results
As we have heard so many times before, the need of getting instant results has greatly diminished our patience levels which may prove to be detrimental in cases where things are bound to take time. This can also lead to debilitating anxiety in extreme cases and may have many other adverse effects on your health as well.
6. No moments spent doing nothing which actually causes lesser productivity as our brain needs time to be unoccupied to function well
In order to live a fulfilling and happy life, it is extremely necessary to take out some moments from your day in which you just do nothing and sit idle with your thoughts. The importance of having such moments has greatly been underestimated these days and this has led to many people suffering from burnouts at least once in their lives. While pressure at work is something that is not in our hands but taking out some time to just sit with ourselves and our thoughts can prove to be very beneficial for both our mental and physical health.
7. Irregular sleep cycles can ruin your immune responses
Bingeing has taken over our lives, we binge everything, from food to television shows on streaming websites and apps. But this leads to irregular sleep cycles. It is imperative for the body to sleep for at least 8 hours every night at largely similar sleeping and waking times to heal and function properly. If you sacrifice your sleep to watch another episode of your favourite show, it may have a heavy impact on your health in the form of weakening of your immune responses which are essentially used to fight off diseases.
8. More processed foods in our diet than fresh foods
As our lifestyles have become fast-paced, our eating habits have also undergone a massive transformation. We have become more partial to consuming more processed ready to eat, less time-consuming foods rather than fresh fruits and vegetables. This has led to many health problems occurring in people, especially deficiencies related to certain vitamins and minerals. While our food has also become unhealthier and sometimes even toxic, it is best to fulfil the various nutrient requirements of our body through the use of multivitamins. There are many of these in the market which can be bought according to your specific nutrient need which is missing from your regular foods.
Now that you have seen all of the different ways in which our modern lifestyles can adversely affect our lives, you might want to switch up a few things in your daily routine to mitigate the detrimental effects of these. While it is impossible to completely relinquish technology as our lives have become incredibly intertwined with it, it is still manageable to limit our use of it in order to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
