Taking selfies isn’t so bad. It gets a bad rap but, hey, who cares? People used to spend months painting their own self-portraits, which sounds a lot more vain than popping off a gram of your new bangs so maybe we should all stop worrying about the psychological implications of selfies and start worrying about the physical ones because, you guessed it: selfies, like seemingly everything else, can be detrimental to your health.
This is according to Dr. Levi Harrison, a San Francisco-based physician who is warning people that twisting your wrist around to take too many selfies can cause “selfie wrist,” a form of carpal tunnel syndrome. According to MSN, selfie wrist is marked by “a tingling or sharp pain, which comes from flexing your wrist inward or holding your phone too long without moving.”
That doesn’t sound great but, well, who among us hasn’t had a tingling sensation in the wrist now and then? No big deal, right? Surely no reason to stop taking our precious selfies. And that might be true, except for the fact that a 2018 study discovered that over the past six years, around 259 deaths had been associated with taking a selfie. Two hundred and fifty-nine! Most of those came from Russia, Pakistan, India and the United States, and were probably owing to people trying to capture that perfect tornado-selfie but really, is it worth the risk?
The good news in here is that at least a few of the cases of “selfie wrist” appear to be user error — in which the selfie-induced injury came from something other than the actual selfie — like tripping while not paying attention on your phone, or running into a wall or even something about trampolines. So never fear: keep it up with the selfies. Just be careful while you do it.
Or better yet, take up painting and craft your master-selfie.
