We’ve always known that social media messes with our mental health. Now, it turns out, it may also be chipping away at your vascular architecture. It begins with a notification. Not from your phone, but from your body. A sudden thump in the chest, a little fatigue that outlasts the weekend, a strange anxiety you can’t pin down. The phone, as usual, is still in your hand.
This Digital Wellness Day, while many of us are focused on detox apps and screen time stats, the European Heart Journal – Digital Health dropped a more urgent update: people who spend over 30 minutes a week on phone calls are significantly more likely to exhibit early symptoms of hypertension, a precursor to more serious cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.
Impact of smartphone overuse on cerebro-cardio-vascular health (Image courtesy Oxford University Press)
Thirty minutes per week is roughly the length of one office conference call or a single rant to your best friend about the power going out again. We’re not talking about power users. We’re talking about all of us! Longer use of smartphone in this study was associated with a time-dependent raise of the risk of new-onset hypertension during a 12-year follow-up, reaching a 25% higher risk when smartphone is used more than 6 hours a week.
What Is Digital Wellness Day?
Digital Wellness Day began as a grassroots movement and is now observed globally, born from a paradox that only tech could create: Apple’s launch of its ScreenTime feature in 2018 coincided with the takedown of dozens of third-party wellness apps from the App Store. Developers pushed back, a petition went viral, and out of the digital rubble came the Digital Wellness Collective — a global collective promoting healthier digital habits.
Out of that initiative came the explicit need for an education and training body dedicated to equipping leaders with a common definition of digital wellness and a set of research-based metrics and skills for achieving a more positive digital culture. In March 2020, just as the global pandemic was emerging, the Collective formally reorganized as the Digital Wellness Institute and launched its flagship certificate programme for Certified Digital Wellness Educators along with Digital Wellness Day: an annual international holiday and global movement with a resource hub for free year-round educational resources.
The Physiological Push Notification You Might Be Ignoring
According to Dr. Manohar Sakhare, Consultant Cardiologist at Manipal Hospital, Kharadi (Pune), digital stress shows up in sneaky, almost polite ways like a software glitch running in the background.
Scrolling through shopping sites also counts as screen time (Getty Images)
“The body provides us with subtle hints if we know what to observe,” he says.
These hints include:
- A racing heart at rest
- Chronic fatigue despite sleep
- Mild chest pain or breathlessness during simple activities
- Gradual, unexplained rise in blood pressure
- Poor sleep after evening screen use
- Restlessness or anxiety after long scrolling sessions
You might think you’re just tired. But your nervous system, bathed in blue light and dopamine hits, is sounding an alarm. You just can’t hear it over the ping of your group chat.
From Phone Addiction to Angioplasty
The physiological mechanics are nuanced but not mysterious. “Prolonged phone usage activates your sympathetic nervous system, which spikes cortisol, raises blood pressure, and disturbs heart rhythm. Add poor posture, sedentary lifestyle, and nighttime screen bingeing to the mix, and you’ve got a code-level assault on heart health,” says Dr. Sakhare.
Avoid all screens at least one hour before bed (Getty Images)
Research from the European Heart Journal confirms the connection: regular, even short-duration screen-based phone use correlates with early signs of heart disease, especially hypertension. If you’re experiencing recurring symptoms like those listed above, Dr. Sakhare recommends early testing: ECGs, Holter monitors, or stress tests. In more advanced cases, you may need stent placement, angioplasty, or bypass surgery. These procedures have thankfully become less invasive over the years but are still clear red flags of chronic neglect.
5 Ways to Disconnect for Digital Wellness
- You can’t escape screens. But you can set boundaries. According to Dr. Sakhare, here’s what digital wellness for your heart should look like:
- Limit total screen time to 3–4 hours daily
- Avoid all screens at least one hour before bed. Blue light disrupts melatonin, and sleep is the heart’s repair shop.
- Take breaks away from the monitor every 30 minutes.
- Silence nonessential alerts. The constant buzz tricks your body into chronic low-level alertness — the biological equivalent of living inside a crime novel.
- Do heart-positive things daily. Walks. Stretching. Meditation. Hydration. Real conversations.
Our bodies are not unlike the devices we use: electrical systems governed by rhythms, signals, and feedback loops. When the input is excessive, and the system is overloaded, something has to give. For many of us, that something might be the most critical organ of all. So, on this Digital Wellness Day, ask yourself a question rarely found in phone manuals but vital to human upgrade: Is your heart crashing behind the screen?
Reference:
https://academic.oup.com/ehjdh/article/5/4/481/7656519
Read more:
- What Is Text Neck, The Pain That’s Caused By Smartphones?
- You May Feel Fine, But Your Heart Says Otherwise: The Dangers of Ignoring High Blood Pressure
- National Banana Day 2025: One Banana a Day Could Keep the Cardiologist Away
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