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We’re inseparable now, you and I. You’re the last thing I touch before I go to bed and the first thing I reach for in the morning.
You make it possible for my avoidance strategies to be construed as thoughtfulness,
I am amazed by how many nights I’ve stayed up three hours past my bedtime staring at your screen. I can’t count the times we’ve gone to bed together and I’ve had to pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming—and believe me, I want to be dreaming, because ever since we met, something seems to be messing with my sleep.
Most of us find it hard to get through a meal or a movie or even a stoplight without pulling out our phones.
We feel busy but ineffective.
We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad. We’ve never stopped to think about why smartphones are so hard to put down, or who might be benefiting when we pick them up. We’ve never stopped to think about what spending so many hours engaged with our devices might be doing to our brains, or whether a device billed as a way to connect us to other people might actually be driving us apart.
It means setting boundaries between your online and offline lives.
It means prioritizing real-life relationships over those that take place on screens.
To prove it, try this game: the next time you’re in public, take a second to notice how many of the people around you—including children—are staring at their phones.
Americans check their phones about 47 times per day. For people between 18 and 24, the average is 82. Collectively, this adds up to more than 9 billion phone checks every day. • On average, Americans spend more than 4 hours a day on their phones. That amounts to about 28 hours a week, 112 hours a month, or 56 full days a year.
Nearly 80 percent of Americans check their phones within a half hour of waking up. • Half of us check our phones in the middle of the night. (Among 25- to 34-year-olds, it’s more than 75 percent.) • We’re using our phones so much that we’re giving ourselves repetitive strain injuries such as “texting thumb,” “text neck,” and “cell phone elbow.” • More than 80 percent of Americans report that they keep their phones near them “almost all the time during waking hours.” • Nearly 5 out of 10 Americans agree with this statement: “I can’t imagine my life without my smartphone.”
Nearly 1 out of every 10 American adults admits to checking their phone during sex.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail: the more I used my phone to navigate my life, the less capable I felt of navigating life without my phone.
what is known so far suggests that spending extended time on them has the power to change both the structure and the function of our brains—including our abilities to form new memories, think deeply, focus, and absorb and remember what we read.
Multiple studies have associated the heavy use of smartphones (especially when used for social media) with negative effects on neuroticism, self-esteem, impulsivity, empathy, self-identity, and self-image, as well as with sleep problems, anxiety, stress, and depression.
the way information is presented on the internet threatens our attention spans and memories, and how smartphones in particular have been deliberately designed to be difficult to put down (and whom this benefits).
Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on the New York Times to see if there’s a new thing, it’s not even about the content. It’s just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling.
“Addicts show a loss of control of the activity, compulsively seek it out despite negative consequences, develop tolerance so that they need higher and higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction, and experience withdrawal if they can’t consummate the addictive act.”
The point is that many of the same feel-good brain chemicals and reward loops that drive addictions are also released and activated when we check our phones.
But phones and most apps are deliberately designed without “stopping cues” to alert us when we’ve had enough—which is why it’s so easy to accidentally binge.
But what really gets us hooked isn’t consistency; it’s unpredictability. It’s knowing that something could happen—but not knowing when or if that something will occur.
“intermittent reinforcements.”
Want to know another device that uses intermittent rewards to drive compulsive behavior? Slot machines.
In fact, the similarities between the two devices are so powerful that Harris frequently compares smartphones to slot machines that we keep in our pockets. “When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got,”
Harris’s observations are particularly disturbing when you realize that slot machines, which are specifically designed to deliver rewards in a way that drives compulsive behavior, are one of the most addictive devices ever to have been invented.
Anxiety is evolutionarily important, because it’s very motivating (a lion who’s anxious about food is more likely to survive than a lion who’s chilling out).
This makes us worry that any time we put them down, even for a second, we might miss something.
many of today’s most popular apps actively encourage users to judge one another.
Those features aren’t there by accident. Designers know that humans have an intrinsic desire for affirmation, and that the more ways there are for us to be judged, the more compulsively we’ll monitor our score.
What’s particularly weird is that we don’t just care about other people’s judgments; we ask for them. We post photos and comments to show others that we’re lovable, that we’re popular and, on a more existential level, that we matter, and then we check our phones obsessively to see if other people—or at least their online profiles—agree.
Put this all together, and it makes sense that spending a lot of time on social media could be associated with depression and lower self-esteem. What doesn’t make sense is that we are deliberately choosing to relive the worst parts of middle school.
the more our phones feel like reflections of ourselves (and our specialness), the more time we’re going to want to spend on them.
That’s why, instead of getting to the root of our negative feelings, we turn to alcohol or drugs…or our phones.
our smartphones excel at one thing, it’s making sure we never, ever have to be alone with ourselves.
two-part study in Science that demonstrated the lengths we’ll go to avoid our own minds.
In the first experiment, volunteers received a mild electric shock, and then were asked whether the experience was unpleasant enough that they would pay to avoid being shocked again. The researchers took the forty-two people who’d said that they would pay to avoid another shock and left them alone in undecorated rooms, without access to the internet or any other form of distraction, and instructed them to entertain themselves with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. They also told the participants that, if they wanted, they could press a button and receive another electric shock—as in, the
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Even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. —John Lanchester
have you ever wondered why social media apps are all free?
This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.
ask yourself why Facebook itself doesn’t provide this option.
numerous studies suggest that the more we use social media, the less happy we will be.
“There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.”
When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching.”
Our brains, just like those of the London cab drivers, respond powerfully to repetition and practice.
Multi-screening trains consumers to be less effective at filtering out distractions—they are increasingly hungry for something new. This means more opportunities to hijack attention. —Consumer Insights, Microsoft Canada, 2015
But just like a muscle, the prefrontal cortex can become tired if we ask it to make too many decisions—a condition known as “decision fatigue.”
a smartphone is a virtual avalanche of information.
Guess what else radiates blue light? Screens. When we use our phones or tablets or computers before bed, their blue light tells our brains that it is daytime and that we should be awake. In other words, when we check our phones
Most of the things we do on our phones—reading the news, playing games—are stimulating activities.
most addictions stem from a desire to feel better and/or to make a bad feeling go away.
