Dear Agnes,
My phone is both my lifeline and my Achilles’ heel. I use it for just about everything, and I mean everything – work-related tasks like scheduling meetings, communicating with colleagues and clients, adding to-do’s, taking notes, and keeping an eye on the stock market. On the personal side, it’s my go-to for calendaring family events, tracking my finances, and, of course, the time-sucking black hole of social media scrolling and commenting. And the list goes on. I don’t even want to admit to you what my iPhone report says for screen time at the end of the week; it’s straight-up embarrassing.
Sometimes I wonder how people managed their lives before we had this piece of technology that’s practically glued to our hands. How did they keep track of everything on their plates? Perhaps, in today’s world, we just have so much more going on. I don’t know, but I’d 100% be lost without my phone.
The other day, when I was riding the subway home from work, I couldn’t help but notice how many people had their faces buried in their phones, myself included. It was scary, Agnes. So, a few days later, I tried this rather hilarious experiment – I silenced my phone and put it in a drawer, just to see how long I could be without it. Well, that didn’t last long. The moment my son asked me about the time of his Sunday basketball game, I quickly pulled it out of the drawer and checked my calendar. I realized then that I don’t want to be this person, always stuck to it.
It doesn’t make sense for me to preach to my children about limiting their screen time when I can’t even do it myself. I don’t blame them for calling me a hypocrite. Phones are such a necessary evil. I understand why Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use phones.
So, Agnes, I’m reaching out for help. How can I detach myself from this device addiction and regain some balance in my life?
Looking forward to your wisdom.
Sincerely,
Glued to My Phone
Dear Glued,
The first thing I’d like to convey is that this is not a failure of willpower on your part. You mentioned addiction. Addiction is what happens when the reward pathways in the brain overpower our rational faculties. This happens for very good reason. The things that in ancient times triggered the release of dopamine that our devices now reliably provide were exactly the things essential to our survival as a species: the thrill of the hunt, the pleasure in finding a berry patch, high fat and high (natural) sugar foods, social bonding, competition, and, of course, sexual activity.
Dopamine, through mediating attention and pleasure, essentially gives the brain the message “This was important: do it again!” It effectively puts learning on steroids in the service of our survival. Unfortunately, these days there are many things that produce this effect in the brain without contributing to our survival, including social media apps. Our brains simply haven’t caught up to our rapidly shifting environment in terms of discerning what is actually good for us to attend to and what is not where dopamine is concerned.
To make matters worse, your poor prefrontal cortex is up against teams of psychologists who’ve designed that little device in your hand to be as compelling to your brain as possible. It’s really not a fair fight. They don’t call it the attention economy for nothing, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that your time and attention is being stolen from you. Deliberately.
Perhaps reframing this can get you started: shift your mindset from “I am just an individual, personally failing” to “I am doing my bit in a collective standing-up to the potent forces seeking to profit from our vitality”. Superhero yourself, if it helps. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save yourself and those you love from the instant reward but ever-expanding emptiness, not to mention inevitable decline of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health, that are the unfortunate end results of a life lived interacting with a screen. And you will need to be deliberate and strategic in how you go about your mission.
I can give you a few standard pointers here, like turning off notifications whenever possible, having dedicated times for responding to emails, and setting your devices to grayscale, which is surprisingly effective at making some social media less engaging. How to fully reclaim your attention though, is a subject that would be a book! Fortunately, Nir Ayal has written that book. In Indistractable, Ayal posits that the ability to consciously focus one’s attention on what’s truly beneficial in one’s life is the most important skill one can cultivate in an age of ever increasing digital distraction. I tend to agree. Research indicates we lose a full 20% of our cognitive capacity by the kind of task switching that constantly tending to notifications imposes on our brains.
I’m old enough to remember life before smartphones, and can offer one final observation on the calendar issue. Back in the day, the family calendar was a large paper calendar in the kitchen with a pencil attached to it. A couple of years after I had learned to read dates, I was responsible for adding my events to the calendar. If your son is of an age to know how to text, I expect he’s fully capable of learning to enter his basketball schedule in a calendar, then send you invitations. Far too often I see women taking responsibility for family members long past the time to hand it off. I’d suggest you take your great observations about some of the interruptions in your life as an opportunity to both lighten your mental load and empower others to take on tasks you may be doing for them unnecessarily. If it’s happening with the basketball schedule, you’ll likely find other instances of this in your life as well.
In loving support,
Agnes