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July 6 - November 7, 2024
it’s well worth investigating what skills the hours we’re spending on our phones each day might be training us to develop – and at what cost.
We’re scrolling and swiping between screens. And even when we stay within one app – say, a news app or social media – we’re usually still not focusing on anything for more than a few moments. Every tweet, message, profile, and post pulls our brains in a different direction. We end up acting like water bugs, skittering on the surface without ever diving in.
The result is what seems like should be an oxymoron: an intensely focused state of distraction.
if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.
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.
our brains both prefer and are programmed to seek out and be distracted by new information. And that’s exactly what our phones encourage them to do.
the prefrontal cortex can become tired if we ask it to make too many decisions – a condition known as “decision fatigue”. When our prefrontal cortex becomes tired, our focus wavers and our minds wander. We lose our ability to distinguish between what’s important to pay attention to and what’s not. The more information we’re presented with, the more of a problem this becomes. (As a relatively new part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex is also one of the weakest. Under stressful conditions, it tends to freak out and hand the reins to more primitive areas of our brains – which is not a good
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IF YOU’VE NOTICED THAT READING a book or printed newspaper doesn’t feel the same as reading the same material on your phone or computer, you’re not crazy. It’s not the same. When we read a book or the paper, most of the distractions we encounter are external – a barking dog, or the sound of a vacuum cleaner. This makes it relatively easy for our brains to decide what’s important and to ignore what’s not. This also leaves our brains with plenty of available bandwidth to think about and absorb what we’re reading. When we read words in print – which is to say, without links or ads – we primarily
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every time we encounter a link, our brains must make a split-second decision about whether to click on it. These decisions are so frequent and tiny that we often don’t even notice that they’re happening. But we can’t make split-second decisions and think deeply at the same time – the two acts use different and competing brain regions. Every decision, no matter how tiny or subconscious, pulls our attention away from what we are reading. This in turn makes it harder to absorb the content of what we’re reading – let alone to think about it critically, or remember it later. Second, unlike a dog
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the more we read online, the more we teach our brains to skim. This can be a useful skill to hone, especially when we’re constantly faced with such information overload. But it becomes a problem if skimming becomes our default – because the better we become at skimming, the worse we get at reading and thinking more deeply. And the harder it is for us to focus on just one thing.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORSE OUR FOCUS gets, the more valuable we become. Just as social media companies make money by stealing (and then selling) your attention, informational websites make money by distracting you. Even subscription-based sites, such as newspapers, depend on page views and click-throughs for revenue. That’s why online articles contain so many links and why slideshows are so common. Focus isn’t profitable. Distraction is.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. —Plato, Phaedrus
If your brain is busy trying to hold too much information in its working memory – if its cognitive load is too great – it won’t have the ability to store that information, let alone process it in a way that makes it useful, or to create the proteins necessary to transfer the memory into long-term storage. It’s like trying to organise your wallet while juggling: you can’t. And that brings us to our phones: everything about smartphones overloads our working memories. The apps, the emails, the news feeds, the headlines, even the home screen itself – a smartphone is a virtual avalanche of
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when our working memories are overloaded and our cognitive loads are too great, our brains don’t have the resources necessary to connect new information and experiences to our pre-existing schemas. Not only does this reduce the likelihood of those memories becoming permanent, but the weaker our schemas become, the less likely we are to have insights and ideas. We lose our capacity for deep thought.
In their quest for happiness, people mistake excitement of the mind for real happiness. —Sayadaw U Pandita, In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha
A lot of the time, you’ll end up feeling stressed about something you truly cannot control, like politics or stock prices. But in a way, situations in which you could take back control – say, by answering that stressful email right then and there – are even worse: in order to restore your sense of equilibrium, you have to remove yourself from whatever experience you had been having.
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 at night, we’re giving ourselves jet lag. Screen time, particularly in the hour before bedtime, both keeps us up later and harms the quality of our sleep. But the quality of light is just one way that our phones affect our sleep cycles. Most of the things we do on our phones – reading the news, playing games – are stimulating activities. Imagine how difficult it would
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even short-term sleep deprivation “can affect judgment, mood, ability to learn and retain information, and may increase the risk of serious accidents and injury”. When you’re tired, it’s harder for your brain to filter out distractions. You have poorer self-control. You’re less able to tolerate frustration. And your brain has difficulty deciding what’s important to pay attention to and what’s not. And short-term sleep deprivation doesn’t require you to have one crazy night. Even just a week and a half’s worth of sleeping six hours a night (instead of seven to nine) can, according to the
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Creativity requires you to be well rested – as Judith Owens, director of Sleep Medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., has said, “Sleep deprivation can affect memory, creativity, verbal creativity, and even things like judgment and motivation.” And creativity is often sparked by boredom, which is another mental state that our phones are great at helping us avoid.
the importance of boredom to creativity is summed up by this quote from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the award-winning, crazy-talented genius behind Hamilton: An American Musical: “I remember when I was a kid, I was in a three-hour car ride with my best friend, Danny,” Miranda told an interviewer for GQ. “Before we got in the car, he grabbed a stick from his front yard, and the entire drive home he made up games with this . . . stick. Sometimes the stick was a man, sometimes a piece in a larger game, or he’d give it voices, pretend the stick was a telephone. I remember sitting there next to him with my
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HOW TO TAKE BACK YOUR LIFE We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening, the itch of [our cravings]. We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives.
“Mindfulness is about seeing the world more clearly” – including ourselves.
like overzealous (and slightly deranged) party planners, our minds are constantly presenting us with invitations to do certain things or to react in certain ways. You hit a traffic jam and your mind invites you to give a fellow motorist the finger. You find yourself alone on a Friday night and your mind invites you to conclude that you are worthless and you have no friends.
In other words, what we think of as irresistible impulses are actually invitations being sent by our minds. This is an important insight because once you recognise this, you can ask your mind why it’s inviting you to such crappy parties. Why couldn’t a traffic jam be an invitation to a mobile karaoke session? Why couldn’t a solitary Friday night be an invitation to watch a film that you can’t convince anyone else to see?
As Brewer explains in The Craving Mind, most addictions stem from a desire to feel better and/or to make a bad feeling go away. If you try to cut back on your phone use without first figuring out what you’re trying to achieve or avoid, you’re dooming yourself to failure. Either you’re going to relapse, or you’re going to find another, potentially more destructive habit that achieves the same effect.
The more you practise being mindful, the more it becomes obvious that your brain has a mind of its own. (I like to think of my mind as a good friend who also happens to be totally crazy.) The moment you recognise that you don’t have to say yes to every invitation is the moment you gain control over your life – both on and off your phone.
If we simply acknowledge our discomfort without trying to fight against it – in other words, if we ride out the wave – our cravings will eventually fade on their own.
For example, let’s say you catch yourself reaching for your phone. Practising mindfulness means that instead of trying to fight your urge or criticising yourself for having it, you simply notice the urge and stay present with it as it unfolds. As it does, you can ask questions about it. What does the craving feel like in your brain and in your body? Why are you having this particular urge right now? What reward are you hoping to receive, or what discomfort are you trying to avoid? What would happen if you reacted to the impulse? What would happen if you did nothing at all?
The next time you find yourself tempted to look at your phone, pause instead. Take a breath and just notice the craving. Don’t give in to it, but don’t try to ma...
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“[W]e must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.”
WEEK 1: TECHNOLOGY TRIAGE Day 1 (Monday): Download a Tracking App Day 2 (Tuesday): Assess Your Current Relationship Day 3 (Wednesday): Start Paying Attention Day 4 (Thursday): Take Stock and Take Action Day 5 (Friday): Delete Social Media Apps Day 6 (Saturday): Come Back to (Real) Life Day 7 (Sunday): Get Physical WEEK 2: CHANGING YOUR HABITS Day 8 (Monday): Say “No” to Notifications Day 9 (Tuesday): The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Apps Day 10 (Wednesday): Change Where You Charge It Day 11 (Thursday): Set Yourself Up for Success Day 12 (Friday): Download an App-Blocker Day 13 (Saturday):
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if you slip back into an old habit – which, let’s be honest, is likely to happen – don’t beat yourself up. Instead, just get back on track. One way to do this is to simply acknowledge that you’re disappointed, and then do something to offset the behavior you feel bad about and to regain momentum – kind of like a carbon offset, but with your phone.
There is nothing wrong with mindless distraction. There are times when zoning out on your phone is exactly what you want to do. What is problematic – and what we’re trying to avoid – is letting a state of mindless distraction become our default.
The point of breaking up with our phones isn’t to deprive ourselves of the benefits of modern technology. It’s to set boundaries so that we can enjoy the good parts of our phones while also protecting ourselves from the bad.
What do you want to pay attention to?
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