Welcome to The Rise – your weekly dose of circadian sunshine, decentralised health wisdom, and actionable tips to help you live healthier, stronger, and more empowered.

This week, we’re tackling a topic that  effects pretty much every single adult (and teenager) on the planet. It involves that device in your hand, or your pocket, or on your desk which is doing things to your body, brain, and face that you may not want to face. Here’s what’s in this issue and why it matters:

• How phones and socials are shrinking the brains of kids and adults
• Why your phone is making you dumber even when it’s off, face-down, and untouched
• The aging your phone is causing that no serum is going to fix
• History of the treadmill which is more bizarre than you can imagine
• 3 golden rules for living alongside your phone without letting it quietly wreck you

Have suggestions or something you’d love to see covered here? Help me better serve this vibrant community of health rebels and send me your feedback here.

Much love and sunshine, ☀️

Sandy xx

Issue #118 • 3 May, 2026

🌅 Rise Report

The MRI Study That Should Make Every Parent Put Down the iPad

Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital used MRI to examine the brains of healthy children aged 3 to 5. Children who exceeded one hour of screen time per day showed measurably lower white matter integrity, the brain’s internal communication network, in areas responsible for language, literacy, and cognitive skills. These kids also scored lower on language and literacy assessments.

The brain does its most critical development of its entire life in those first five years, and screens compete directly with the neural pathways being built for reading and attention. The worst offender was the screen babysitter where passive, solo screen is allowed and kids are left to their own devices (literally).

It’s Not Just About Kids

But before you breathe a sigh of relief because your kids are grown or this how nothing to do with you, the research on adults is just as confronting. A landmark meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin in December 2025 synthesised data from 98,299 people across 71 studies and found that frequent short-form video use, that means TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, was consistently linked to poorer attention, weaker inhibitory control, and reduced working memory.

The mechanism behind this is neurological. Exposure to fast-paced, high-reward content desensitises the brain to slower stimuli, making sustained focus and concentration progressively harder. It’s not called brain rot for nothing – it actually is rotting brains.

The takeaway? In my opinion, kids should stay completely off phones and iPads until after 5 at the very minimum. And then after that, the less the better. Whilst studies are starting to come out showing the harm of screen time, we truly have no idea of how phones and iPads are affecting us or our kids long term.

How Your Phone Is Making You Dumber – Even When It’s Turned Off.

Think your phone only does damage when you’re staring at it? Think again.

Researchers at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin tested this with nearly 800 smartphone users. Participants completed cognitive tests, measuring working memory and fluid intelligence, under three conditions: phone on the desk face-down, phone in their pocket or bag, or phone left in another room entirely. The out-of-room group won, significantly. The effect held even when phones were switched off, so even when participants were confident the device wasn’t affecting them, it was affecting them anyway.

The mechanism behind the results is this: your brain knows your phone is there, so it quietly devotes resources to not thinking about it. As lead researcher Dr Adrian Ward put it:

“Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process, the process of requiring yourself to not think about something, uses up some of your limited cognitive resources.”

That cost is very real, measurable, and it’s happening whether you notice it or not.

The takeaway? The phone doesn’t have to be in your hand to be in your head. When you need to think clearly, in a meeting, with your kids, doing work that matters, leave it in another room completely.

Your Phone Is Ageing Your Face. And No Serum Is Going to Fix It

OK girls, let’s be honest with each other…Most of us have spent more than we’d like to admit on creams, serums and lotions trying to hold back time and keep those lines at bay. I’m not judging. I’ve been there too. But what if the culprit we should be looking at isn’t our skin type, our hormones, or the inevitable march of time, but the device sitting in our hand right now?

Because your phone is ageing your face two ways at once. You may want to sit down for this one…

The first is mechanical, and once you know this you cannot unknow it. Every single time you look down at your phone, the skin across your neck folds and compresses. Do that dozens of times a day, every day, for years on end and you are literally training those folds to become permanent creases. Dermatologists and the beauty industry have a name for this and it’s called “tech neck”.

And what used to show up in women in their 60s and beyond is appearing in women in their 20s and 30s. The neck has thinner skin than your face, fewer oil glands, and less underlying support. It shows what you repeatedly do to it. Every look-down is a rep in the wrong direction, beautiful.

The second mechanism is invisible, which makes it more insidious. The blue light emitted by your screen penetrates your skin more deeply than UV rays, reaching the dermis where your collagen and elastin live. Research published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology found that blue light activates enzymes that break down collagen and accelerate skin ageing. Whilst a 2020 study confirmed it increases free radical damage over time too.

The skincare industry will happily keep selling you solutions to a problem your phone is creating. But let’s be honest…there’s no serum on earth that addresses the source. Only you can do that. It’s time to put that phone down – not permanently but perhaps a lot more than you’re doing now.

The takeaway? Raise your phone to eye level — this one free adjustment eliminates the mechanical compression of tech neck entirely. For blue light, there no way around it. Less is more and definitely avoid screen time late at night and early mornings when it’s dark outside. That blue light lighting up your face is not the healthy glow we’re looking for.

🤓 Smarty Pants

The Treadmill: From Prison Punishment to Home Gym

The treadmill was invented in 1818 as a prison punishment. By 1898, it was banned for being too cruel. Now we pay $150 a month to walk on one under fluorescent lights. How did we get here?

Sir William Cubitt, a British engineer, designed the original treadmill to punish idle prisoners. They walked on it for hours as hard labour, grinding grain and pumping water. The Victorians called it the “stepping wheel” and used it to break spirits as much as to grind flour. By 1898 it had been banned under the Prison Act — officially too cruel and inhumane for convicted criminals.

Then in 1952, an American physician named Dr Robert Bruce reinvented it as a cardiac stress test – a controlled way to push the heart and measure its response. From there it migrated from the hospital to the home, with the first affordable home treadmill hitting the market in 1968. By the 1980s it had become the centrepiece of a multi-billion dollar fitness industry.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The same device the Victorians considered too brutal for prisoners is now something we voluntarily step onto, pay for, and feel guilty about skipping. Now, I get it. Some people can’t get outside. If may be snowing, it’s dark and people feel unsafe. If it’s the only way you’re going to move your body today, fine. Walk on the thing. But let’s call it what it is: a compromise.

Because the gym it lives in, is drowning in harsh LED lighting and suffocating in recycled air (to name just a couple of things). And the sensory mismatch with treadmills is real. As John Rock kindly pointed out….”Your visual and vestibular systems are not receiving the same input as you would be if you were walking or running outdoors. The hip extensor muscles are aided as well. The impact forces on a moving belt are not the same as running outdoors. Serious runners who do too much training on treadmills get injured easily when they transition to outside running. The likely factors are the ones I have previously mentioned.”

And after all this, you know what the really funny thing is…whilst the idea of a home treadmill sounds great at the time, you can find plenty of second hand ones looking almost new. Their only wear and tear? The blemishes and marks from coat hangers.

☀️ Sandy’s Sunshine 

I fondly remember the days when mobile phones didn’t exist, and yes, we did somehow manage to travel the world without Google Maps, without translators, and without being notified every five minutes that we were apparently late to something.

I appreciate the convenience phones bring. But I often wish our mobile phones were just phones, rather than supercomputers armed with socially engineered apps and social feeds constantly pulling us out of the real world and into a screen.

Convenient or not, to put it bluntly, we are not equipped biologically for the device we have collectively agreed to carry everywhere and stare at for an average of six-plus hours a day. Our brains were built for a pre-digital environment. The phone’s designers, and I mean this structurally, built something our nervous system cannot easily look away from and that is harming us at the same time.

So in appreciation that phones aren’t disappearing any time soon, here are 3 golden rules I genuinely recommend.

1. Never sleep with it in the same room.

Not on silent, not face-down, not in a drawer. In another room. Yes, I know, it’s your alarm. Get an old-fashioned alarm clock and evict the phone from the bedroom. The blue light suppresses melatonin, yes, but the deeper issue is that your nervous system simply cannot fully enter rest-and-recovery mode when the most stimulating object you own is within arm’s reach. Your brain knows it’s there, and as we’ve seen from the research above, that alone costs you. This is the single highest-leverage change on this list.

2. Never pick it up in the first hour of the morning or before natural light.

Your cortisol awakening response (CAR) is the natural hormonal surge your body uses to set your energy, mood, and circadian clock for the entire day. It peaks in the first 30–45 minutes after waking. Picking up your phone in this window, and with it emails, news, social media, and texts,  hijacks that process and replaces your body’s natural morning signal with artificial urgency.

Super brain Jim Kwik puts it perfectly: the moment you pick up your phone, you hand your creativity, thoughts, and ideas over to someone else’s notifications, emails, and messages. Your morning brain is your most creative, most expansive brain. Protect it fiercely.

Go outside first. Sunlight before screen light. Always.

3. Distance is your friend. 

I say this with all the love in the world: if you’re carrying your phone in your bra, in your back pocket or somehow on you, please stop. I know it’s convenient, but this one really matters.

Every phone emits radiofrequency energy  and the closer it is to your body, the more your body absorbs. The physics is simple: distance dramatically reduces exposure. You don’t need to be afraid of your phone to respect it. Think of it the way you’d think of keeping a little space between yourself and something hot. Keep it in your bag rather than your pocket when you can, leave it on a bench rather than beside your plate, and when you’re not using it, give yourself and your body a little breathing room.

Enjoying these tips? This week I’ll be publishing the full 10 Golden Rules for Safer Phone Use exclusively for paid members, including a few that may just surprise you. Become a paid member here to make sure you don’t miss it. 🌅

🔢 Number Crunch

96: The number of times the average person checks their phone every single day. That’s once every 10 minutes, often without realising it. It represents a 20% increase in frequency over two years. This addictive behaviour is driven by dopamine-triggering notifications and social media, with over 85% checking their phones immediately upon waking or before bed

“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.”— Christian Lous Lange (1921)