A Deep Sigh May Help Reading Comprehension on Cell Phones

Whether you're home with your family or out for the day, look around you and you will notice others around you are fixated on cell phones. You're often cell phone-fixated too, perhaps even right now while reading this. The reality is that this behavior is normal in cultural settings around the globe.

Beyond strain to the eyes, though, the brain is also impacted by digital reading from cell phones (Honma et al., 2022). Healthy individuals were studied for how their reading comprehension was affected by being asked to read words from paper or from cell phones. The visual environment (reading on the screen) changed their respiratory patterns and brain function. The combined respiratory and brain changes reduced their cognitive performance, specifically their reading comprehension. The brain was shown (using functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to work harder in the prefrontal cortical area for the cell phone readers versus the paper readers. The cell phone readers also didn't sigh as much as those who read from paper.

Sighing, stress, and reading comprehension

Sighing has been found to reset individuals, bringing relief and reducing physiological tension in anxiety-sensitive people (Vlemincx, Diest, & Van den Bergh, 2016). So, if reading on our cell phones leads to our brains working harder, yet we don't as often receive the psychological and physiological benefits of a sigh when we are reading from our phones, what might be the implications of this for traumatically stressed cell phone users? Honma et al.'s research was conducted with healthy people who were not described as stressed. I wonder, though, how reading comprehension might be affected among children and adolescents with taxed mental bandwidth due to living in stressful environments of war and poverty. Researchers have uncovered the influence of several demographic and socioeconomic factors on the relationship between war-related traumatic events and post-traumatic stress occurrence among school-aged children and adolescents (El-Khodary, Samara, & Askew, 2020). Despite the stress and trauma of war and poverty, these children are still expected to learn in their school settings.

Educators who work with students in traumatically stressful environments might consider engaging their students in deep respiratory activity such as sighing, because it can aid students' cognitive performance during reading. Although the Honma et al. study showed that sighing occurred more frequently during reading from the paper medium, research is needed with students from traumatically stressed environments who are also frequent users of cell phones. We don't know whether deeper respiratory patterns are optimally occurring among such students to enhance cognition as needed during reading comprehension. For now we can conclude that among healthy busy adults who rely on reading from cell phones, the research evidence suggests that we should remember to take deep breaths when consuming the written word from our smartphones so that we can better comprehend what we're reading.