I just knew my relationship with technology wasn’t a healthy one. I was feeling more distracted than ever and I just knew it was my use of technology that was screwing me up. But what to do? After all tech has also been incredible for me and I didn’t want to go off the grid.
That was back around in late 2017, here’s what I did & what I learned.
Getting educated
I started looking for pioneers and found three heavyweights.
“Technology hijacks our personal vulnerabilities” – Tristan Harris, former Google Design Ethicist (Google has ethics? Hmm).
“We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works” – Chamath Palihapitiya, ex-Facebook VP of User Growth.
And then the biggest fish of all – Facebook’s first President, Sean Parker on Facebook’s early mission – “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”. How sinister is that?!
Technology is screwing us up, we can all feel it – the rise in anxiety, FOMO, addictive behaviour; the lowering of attention span, focus, memory.. never mind the changed social habits and their consequences.
I firmly believe that tech is not the enemy, tech is just a set of tools. Our relationship with tech is the problem and until now it hasn’t been anything near a fair fight.
How the exploitation works
So what happens in our brains and what are these psychological vulnerabilities?
There’s two important concepts to share with you.
The first is neuroplasticity, which is that we can rewire our brains and our brains physically change based on how they’re used. If we practice focus, like in some forms of meditation, we get better at focus because the neural pathways in our brain become stronger. If we practice piano then the neural pathways dealing with hand-eye coordination and reading music develop and eventually we call it talent. If we keep using our brains to practise worrying, eventually we become much better at worrying…
The second is that our primitive, ancient brain that’s evolved over tens of thousands of years has developed to keep us alive. For the vast majority of human history survival has been the priority. It’s been stunningly effective – during this period of tens of thousands of years of evolution despite the fact we’re not the strongest, fastest or possessors of natural weapons like claws we have become the world’s dominant species and apex predator. Day to day survival is no longer a threat to most of us in the Western world, but we are still wired for survival, not happiness.
So here’s some of the ways I discovered that the exploitation works.
1) The manipulation of dopamine -a brain chemical that activates pleasure related receptors in the brain.
Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University is showing that“Dopamine is not about pleasure, it’s about the anticipation of pleasure. It’s about the pursuit of happiness.” and that humans “keep those dopamine levels up for decades and decades waiting for the reward.”
Our dopamine system doesn’t work to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire i.e. the anticipation of pleasure. This neurological hardwiring has kept us alive as a species.
2) Related to that we have a novelty bias – our brains are constantly looking for what’s new in our environment in order to assess threats. It mattered to our species’ survival if the new thing was a sabre tooth tiger or a rabbit. Technology gives us constant novelty.
3) Intermittent reinforcement – now we’re getting into the juicy stuff, this one’s huge and at the core of many of the tech products designed to hook us in. This is a powerful cognitive quirk made famous by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1950s.
Behaviours are reinforced by the anticipation of rewards linked to those behaviours. The quirk is that those behaviours become significantly more rapid and persistent when the schedule of rewards is variable and random i.e. we’re not “rewarded” every time and we don’t know when the reward might come.
This is why checking email is so compelling, because we might be “rewarded” by the novelty of a new email, we know it won’t be there every time so we keep checking, hoping for a hit of novelty. The unpredictability gets us hooked. If we knew we were going to get X number of likes and comments every time we post we’d both post less often and check the post less often.
Guess which other industry loves these principles? A variable, random schedule of rewards is at the very core of the addiction power of casino games like roulette and slot machines. Except we don’t let our teenagers loose on those let alone unsupervised… nor do most of us frequent them multiple times a day, casually shrugging it off as a harmless way to pass the time or check on our own digital importance.
4) We hate the anxiety that the feeling of missing out on things can cause a.k.a. FOMO, a term now in the Oxford English Dictionary defined as “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media.”. Even the dictionary makes the clarification that FOMO is “often aroused by posts seen on social media”. But our hardwired curiosity & search for novelty keeps us going there, increasing the anxiety. Before social media and the mobile internet the opportunities to experience FOMO at all were pretty limited.
5) We are social creatures – going back to how we have evolved, as mentioned we’re not the fastest, strongest or anything-est animal around but we learned to use our cognition and superior communication abilities so that a group of humans could hunt, kill and feed off a wooly mammoth. Other species didn’t stand a chance.
However, this co-dependence meant being separated from the pack and having to fend for ourself equalled a relatively near death. Remember this evolution happened over a very long period of time – at least tens of thousands of years – and our primitive brains are evolving significantly slower than the ways we have dramatically changed the world in just the last 20 years.
The evolution of being separated from the pack meaning a sure death is probably behind our need to feel loved, or at least significant. To the extent that now we have the means we actively ask people for their judgements (a.k.a. likes, comments, shares).
Linked to that is our irrational fear of being alone with ourselves i.e. without external stimuli. For the vast majority of us a short period of isolation does not equate to anything near life threatening, but our addiction to and/or expectation of constant stimulation has exacerbated this irrational fear.
6) No stopping cues any more – there used to be a limited number of digital / technological activities that we could even do e.g. a limited number of TV channels. Not so these days. Have you ever been to the end of your Facebook or Instagram feeds? Right?? But we used to be able to. Until they realised with no stopping cues, we just carry on so they removed them. Netflix and YouTube autoload the next show now to exploit our laziness and propensity to dislike change.
Removing stopping cues has been a really subtle but powerful change.
The above scratches the surface of the depth of these issues and there’s other things I found, but in the interests of keeping relatively concise they are the core and most important ideas I want to share here.
So now we know how the manipulation works…
How do we embrace technology and keep some balance?
First, why embrace? Why not detox?
I don’t believe in the effectiveness of any kind of detox be it digital, nutritional etc – except as a reset – unless the underlying behaviours change. If our underlying behaviours don’t change then nothing will change. From what I’ve seen most detoxes don’t effectively address habit change (it’s much easier to sell a holiday in the sun with a few promises…).
Why embrace? Because technology is not the enemy in itself and it has also been an incredibly positive force in my life. I don’t want to go “off the grid”, I want to manage my behaviours so that I’m in charge and so that they’re geared towards my productivity and happiness rather than what Google & Netflix want me to do (tell me that link isn’t sinister?).
So here’s what’s worked for me and related ideas.
1) Awareness.
A) Awareness of the manipulation described above, how and when it works and the consequences for stress, anxiety, insomnia, attention, focus and happiness. Part of the reason I shared hw the exploitation works is that the awareness fo it alone was enough to start shifting some habits and behaviours.
B) Awareness of our behaviour. Ever tracked your smartphone usage? I pick smartphones as it’s now easy to track the actual usage vs what our cognitive biases tell us. Usage tracking apps will tell you how much time you spend in various apps and the number of opens. Before I started tracking I would have told you as a fairly frequent checker that I check my email inbox 10-12 times a day. The first day I started tracking it I had opened my email app fifty times before lunchtime. Turns out I was going there habitually, compulsively and often unconsciously!
Needless to say the awareness alone dramatically started changing the behaviours.
2) Environment
The intervention here is to change your environment to make desirable behaviours easier and undesirable behaviours harder.
a) Physical environment – want to stope eating a certain type of food? Remove it from your house, then you need to make an effort to actually eat that food and often the desire will pass before you do anything about it. The same works with technology. I started keeping my phone a couple of metres away when working so it isn’t within reach. The simple act of having to move to reach it creates a little delay and intervention that my brain uses to ask itself “What the f are you doing?”. If the mere sight of it is a trigger (more on triggers below) then keep it out of sight too. Likewise I close my laptop when doing work that doesn’t need it.
b) Digital environment – lot’s of easy interventions here. Turn off all notifications on everything! I keep my email program closed when not using it (and now limit how often I’ll even go into it by scheduling those times in my diary and am building the discipline to stick to them more and more – it sounds extreme but I’m up against the collective might and brainpower of Google here!). What’s difficult to start with becomes easier the more we do it (neuroplasticity). More digital environment ideas below in the “little hacks” section.
3) Habits
Habits work via triggers, actions and rewards. More on that here from the expert in this space Charles Duhigg. Once we start noticing our particular triggers we can start changing the actions and rewards, making conscious choices. Something that’s helped me is starting to see my triggers as invites from my own mind i.e. “my mind is inviting me to do this thing” and asking “Why is my mind giving me such crappy invites do make choices that aren’t in my best interests?” (all of the answers lie in the evolution stuff we discussed above). But of course for this to be effective we do need to be able to notice our triggers…
4) Meditative practices & mindfulness
Some meditative practices train attention and focus. The more I’ve meditated the more I’ve noticed how my own mind works and what’s going on in my life, including triggers for all sorts of behaviours and reactions. One of the core tenets of mindfulness is present moment awareness, i.e. noticing. These are foundational skills for mental hygiene, training our minds the same way exercise trains our bodies so that the increased skills help us in everyday life.
Some meditative practices also train us to ride out uncomfortable feelings, which is really useful when we need to ride out cravings and urges which almost always pass if we leave them alone. There’s no shortcuts here but working at the right things is rewarded the same way the correct work towards any skill is.
For short cuts we have…
5) Little hacks – none of these will foster deep seated change by themselves but they can make the journey easier for sure.
The Chrome extension StayFocusd lets you blacklist specific sites at specific times in advance, and then when you try to go to them it flashes up “Shouldn’t you be working?” instead. Web app Momentum throws up motivational messages instead, if that’s more your thing.
Grayscaling your phone has been pretty effective for some of our guests as it seems to take the shine away from apps. Another great product for all devices is f.lux which adjusts the colour of your computer or phone according to the time of day, to reduce glare and blue light at night.
Finally, not exactly a “little hack” but I’ve found it really effective to adopt set morning and pre-bedtime routines, especially the former. By setting my own routine (which at the moment involves hydration, yoga, exercise, meditation, day planning, a smoothie and getting into the most important task first – all before I unlock my phone) I deliberately programme my behaviour instead of relying on my morning willpower to get me through or falling prey to the subconscious urge to fire up Instagram, WhatsApp or something else that will lead me down a rabbit hole.
Conclusion
All in all I don’t think there’s a quick fix to this. I’ve found unwinding one or two habits at a time soon picks up momentum.
In short my top tips are raising your own awareness (and hence your standards), cultivating the skills learned in meditative practices and changing the environment to help even up the playing filed a little more.
All the best in your quest to find more digital balance!