Does your cell phone interrupt your brain?

CINCINNATI (WKRC) - A new report says your cell phone might be interrupting your brain.

The report from Cleveland Clinic psychologists says your smartphone can interrupt your brain chemistry.

It may have to do with the fact that people’s brains are constantly interrupted by their devices from alerts to emails to messages. That likely can alter brain chemistry in one of three ways.

The first way has to do with what's called a “switch cost” in the brain. It's when there's an interruption and people switch away from what they were doing to pay attention to something on the phone and then have to try and come back to it. Psychologists in this report say that it may interrupt the efficiency in the brain by about forty percent. When you step away from a task and have to reorient, it's not as simple as it seems.

The second way has to do with waiting for notifications. This puts your brain on high alert most of the time. You wait for the next notification, and when you are finally notified, you get little surges of the stress hormone known as “cortisol” that causes your heart rate to increase. It also can give you sweaty hands and tighten muscles. If for some reason you are not able to check your phone immediately, those feelings of anxiety can last until you do.

Finally, psychologists in the report say that people’s brains also can have a chemistry change in the way of an addiction. When people gratify the urge to check the alert, they reward the brain and can become addicted to the reward, so that they keep repeating the behavior. Now this may not be a problem for you until you find it's keeping you from productivity.

To reduce the odds of encountering these problems, you have to put boundaries on the use time, and perhaps actually step away sometimes.