Wandering around in the upper valleys and mountains of the Yorkshire Dales on my own these past few months has given me plenty of time to ponder. In fact, it has been a game-changer in so many ways.
On the day before the summer solstice, I was at the top of one of the most famous mountains in England, Pen-y-Ghent, basking in a glorious moment. I had pushed aside my fear, conquered a mountain on my own and opened up a new world of exploration.
I called Jason to share the celebration, and then, once we finished, I did something strange yet familiar. I started checking the apps on my phone: social media and the weather, amongst others.
In front of me was the spectacular vista of the Yorkshire Dales. So, why was I staring at my smartphone screen, scrolling through my Facebook feed?
This was a familiar scene: compulsively checking my iPhone.
I first noticed this impulse back in the summer of 2018 when I was on a wilderness vigil. A wilderness vigil is a rite of passage where a person spends four days and four nights out in the woods alone, with just a tarp and some water. As I was lying there in the woodland day after day, I was conscious that my hand wanted to reach for my iPhone and swipe up the screen. Of course, I didn’t have my iPhone with me: this is why I noticed the compulsion.
As far as I can recall, this was the first time I realised I had perhaps developed an unhealthy relationship with my phone.
Over the past six years since my wilderness vigil, I have taken steps on and off to address this and since my experience at the top of Pen-y-Ghent, I have taken things up a notch. Recently, I removed the social media apps from my phone, which has made a huge difference, and now only check specific Facebook pages relating to work, but I still have a way to go.
Knowing I am not alone with this challenge, I thought it would make a good topic for this month’s Mystery School shamanic journey circle: our addictive relationship with our devices. I was on the train to Manchester to meet up with my friend and planned to revisit a fascinating book during the journey ‘The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-tech World’ by Larry D. Rosen and Adam Gazzaley. Written by a psychologist and neuroscientist, it explores the daily challenges we face in the highly engaging but extremely distracting high-tech world in which we live.
I had only got about one page in and had already thought up a distraction to pull me away. The irony!
I hopped onto my phone and sent my friend an update about my journey, along with a gif. I then went back to the book and, within a few minutes, found myself back on Messenger, this time chatting with another friend who had sent me a photo of a chap she had begun dating. I then went on to the weather app to check the weather, which is a bit of an obsession of mine. I then decided to play games on my brain-training app. I never did return back to reading that book during the journey.
Can you relate to this? Do you feel the urge to constantly check your smartphone? Or find it challenging to stay focused on a task without being drawn to distractions?
I have been reading quite a bit around this topic over the past few months. It is fascinating discovering what is going on here, and reassuring to discover that this impulse is not our fault.
So, what is going on here: why are we so easily distracted? Why does it matter and what can we do about it?
This is the focus of this blog.
Double trouble
Rosen and Gazzaley, in their book ‘The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-tech World’, explain there are two factors at play. We are living in an information-saturated world, and we have growing expectations that we need to be available all day, every day.
Most of us carry a device that is as powerful as a desk computer a decade ago where there are multiple channels of information, making it increasingly difficult to go to a single website or app without having our attention lured away. Alongside this, societal expectations demand immediate responsiveness and continuous productivity.
There are some alarming statistics. The average adult spends 4 hours on their smartphone every day. That is nearly sixty full days per year and one-quarter of our waking lives. Studies show US adults and teenagers check their phones up to 150 times a day, which is every 6-7 minutes in waking hours.
We carry our phones with us everywhere: around the house, to the office, on the street, to the bathroom, even into our beds. 75% are within 5 feet of their phone day and night, 80% pick up their phone within 15 minutes of waking, 12% use their phone in the shower and 9% during sex. As a Mystery School member put it last night… those 9% people need to get themselves another lover!
But why do we behave in this way?
It was pretty eye-opening when I discovered that this isn’t our fault for two reasons.
One is because, from an evolutionary perspective, we merely act optimally for our survival. Our old minds, the minds that we evolved with that made our species so successful, are now operating in a new world.
The other is because there are organisations who a vested interest in keeping our attention locked onto our devices, so they are exploiting our natural tendencies.
Our old minds
Let’s take a look at our old minds first by exploring three traits that humans evolved with that helped survival.
Information seeking.
We naturally love seeking out new information: our brains are wired to love discovery. We evolved this trait as we foraged for food for survival. We love novelty, so much so that when we experience something new, we get a hit of our pleasure hormone - our feel good hormone - dopamine.
Dopamine.
Let’s look more at this feel-good hormone dopamine. At a basic level, dopamine is a signal that we have found something or are doing something of importance. It is our biochemical guiding star. Think of it as a tool that our brains use to record when something is worth doing again and motivate us to repeat the behaviour in the future.
Dopamine plays a crucial role in helping us recognise, remember, and be drawn to activities essential for survival, such as eating, sex, and social bonding. By heightening our senses and focusing our attention, dopamine ensures we remember these experiences, guiding us to re-create them in the future.
Cortisol.
We have another hormone that we have evolved with that is relevant to this exploration: cortisol. Back in the day, cortisol helped us survive physical threats such as being chased by something. A dose of cortisol would speed up our hearts, increase our blood pressure, hyper-focuse our attention and flood our muscles with energy so we could run away.
The new world
So, we evolved with a love of seeking out new things, a way of feeling good when we do something of worth so that we repeat it, and the ability to react quickly to something that threatens our survival. Fast forward to the modern day world, and these traits we evolved with that enabled us to become so successful are still working away in the new world, only this new world is very, very different now.
Humans have been adapting to radical new ways of living for thousands of years. First, there was the agricultural wave spanning 3,000 years, when farming replaced the hunter-gatherer life. Then there was the Industrial Revolution, which lasted for 300 years, which saw the creation of factories and cities. In the 1980's there was the computer wave, also referred to as the electronic era.
We are now living in the Information Age where the pace of change has ramped right up. Since the onset of the internet in the 1990’s every 3-5 years there has been a new wavelet of development. There was the communication era that brought us email. Then, the mobile era meant we were no longer tied to desktops, with laptops and the early cell phones. Then, there were social online communities and virtual communities through social media. And finally, the last wavelet has brought us the smartphone: a telephone, music player, video player, camera and information source all wrapped up in one device. It enables us to access all forms of information at any time day or night. The invention and wide-spread uptake of the smartphone has taken things up to a whole new level as we now have a computer in our pocket.
Enter stage-left… the antagonist.
There are large companies who are taking advantage of the three naturally evolved human traits I have described. In fact, social media companies such as Facebook employ teams of expert psychologists and neuroscientists to design methods to use these traits to hook us in.
This is because we are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. If we are looking at our screens, we are consuming content that has the potential to lead us to buying things.
It might sound alarmist, but our brains have been hacked by companies using algorithms that have been specifically designed to keep us glued to our screens. I’ll share some examples to illustrate this.
Sean Parker was Facebook’s founding president who has since become a conscientious objector to social media. He spoke about the thought process that went into building the social media platforms, with Facebook being the first to do so. He spoke about the intention to design Facebook in such a way that it consumed as much of a person’s time and conscious attention as possible. To do this, they copied tactics from a different device: the slot machine. Slot machines are considered to be some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented.
Former tech insider Tristan Harris, founder of the Centre of Humane Technology, who is helping to raise the alarm describes this as: “When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we have received. When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we ‘Pull to Refresh’ our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what email we got.”
So, with this in mind, let’s now take a look at those three traits the human species evolved with to succeed: Information seeking, and dopamine and cortisol production.
Information seeking
Our love of seeking out new information means we naturally want to switch from screen to screen. It is how we have been hardwired. As soon as boredom sets in, we seek out the next thing to get that hit of dopamine, hopping from app to app.
Dopamine
Dopamine is also released when we see likes or comments on our social media posts. These are rewards. This is what Sean Parker shared on this:
“We give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop … it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
Also, dopamine is released in response to anticipation and unpredictability, which explains our compulsion to check notifications. Our brains enjoy suspense, releasing more dopamine when a reward is uncertain than when it's guaranteed. App developers exploit this by ensuring that new information is delivered unpredictably rather than at set times, which keeps us constantly checking our phones. This anticipation, regardless of the actual value of the reward, triggers dopamine release, making us repeatedly seek out these unpredictable updates.
Cortisol
Remember I explained earlier, cortisol is a stress hormone that our bodies release in response to perceived threats. The trouble is that our cortisol system can’t tell the difference between physical threats, like being in danger, and emotional ones, like stress from work or social situations. It reacts the same way to both, whether the threat is significant or trivial. In modern life, we're often dealing with emotional stress rather than physical danger and it links to the emotional condition FOMO.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a common issue driven by our constant connection to phones and social media. This fear makes it hard for us to be fully present, scattering our attention and making us anxious. When we feel this anxiety, our bodies release cortisol, triggering a stress response. When our phones are nearby or when we hear a notification, our cortisol levels rise, causing us to feel uncomfortable.
This is where dopamine comes in, which creates an ongoing cycle of an addictive relationship with our phones.
As, to relieve this stress, we instinctively reach for our phones, which gives us a quick hit of dopamine, that feel-good hormone. Over time, we become conditioned to think that checking our phones is worthwhile, even though it often isn’t.
This creates a cycle: we feel stressed, check our phones for relief, and reinforce the habit, which makes the cycle continue.
High levels of cortisol affect our health. It interferes with the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making and rational thought.
Normally, the prefrontal cortex works with the dopamine system to help us make good choices. But when cortisol is high, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t function as well. This leaves us with less self-control and a stronger desire to quickly ease our anxiety. As a result, we’re more likely to engage in behaviours that give us a fast dopamine hit but aren’t good for us in the long run, such as… wait for it… reaching for our phones.
In this state, not only does our self-control weaken, but our brain also becomes less sensitive to serotonin, a chemical associated with feelings of contentment. This makes us even more prone to seeking out short-term rewards, perpetuating a cycle of stress and poor decision-making.
Essentially this is a perpetual cycle that keeps us locked into checking our phones again and again.
Tired brains
On top of all of this, flicking back and forth between real life and our screens is exhausting for our brains. And spending hours switching between apps is also tiring. When we do this, we are using our working memory – our frontal context – which is like doing maths all day long. Compare how you feel after 4 hours on social media with spending the same amount of time hanging out with a friend. One leaves you depleted and one leaves you invigorated.
This is why, when we get to the end of a day we haven’t any energy to do anything other than… wait for it… look at a screen. And it helps explain why we feel we don’t have any time available for leisure, but actually we have more time than people in the 1950’s.
That’s how invasive the technology time trap is. It makes us feel more time impoverished than we actually are. And it makes us feel exhausted.
It also leads us to believe we are having fun, but in actual fact, we aren’t. We are getting our dopamine hit from being on our devices, but it isn’t actually making us happy. Instead, it is actually driving us to forget what it is that we do love doing, those things that bring us the most joy.
Ultimately, we are being controlled and manipulated. We can’t reply on our natural instincts to get us out of this pickle. We need to be conscious about what is going on and actively make decisions to take a different course against what our natural impulse is.
If we don’t, we are giving ourselves away and we will lose ourselves. We will be less likely to get the life we want and we won’t be happy.
The solution
So, what is the solution. This is worthy of an entire blog but I will touch on some insights I have gleaned over the past few months since I had that realisation on the top of Pen-y-Ghent.
The obvious solution might be to detach ourselves from our devices and go on a digital detox. But this is unlikely to be a long-term solution for many as when we do need to re-engage we are likely to slip back into the same habits. We are talking about an addiction after all. And this is an addiction that has become completely normalised. It's now common to see groups of people in restaurants all staring at their phones instead of engaging with each other. People walk along the street staring at their phones rather than look at where they are walking. Imagine replacing those phones with cigarettes or syringes: that's the level of dependency we're dealing with.
The truth is, I don't have the answer. I've made some progress over the past few months, but I still feel the pull of my phone. And for those of us who need social media and email for work, like I do, there is an additional level of complexity to the challenge. Here at The Way of the Buzzard, Facebook and email are our main channels for keeping in touch with our community. It is a decision we took many years ago, and we are well aware that by posting on Facebook, we are compounding the problem for people, encouraging them to stay engaged with Facebook and email to be a part of our community. As yet, we don’t have a solution to this predicament, but we are discussing it at length exploring options.
One step I took myself was removing Facebook from my phone. It took me a week to muster the will to do it, and six weeks later, I still occasionally find myself frustrated that it's not there, but I’m not giving in. I’ve also set a goal to check emails and social media only twice a day on my laptop. I keep away from my Facebook feed and just go to specific pages. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m improving.
As one of our Mystery School members said during last night’s shamanic journey circle, it is about being mindful and not mindless.
Since making these changes I’ve noticed that I’m more focused, reading more, and I have notably more time - time I’m spending with Jason and walking up mountains. When I reach the top of a mountain, I enjoy the view rather than immediately grabbing my phone.
Ultimately, when we remove the time spent on our phones, we need to fill that void with something meaningful: something that puts us in a state of flow. Flow expands us, makes us calmer, and leads to a more fulfilling life. This isn't what social media companies want, but it's what will make us happier.
I have found these three steps go a long way to finding the antidote to smartphone addiction:
- Give our minds undistracted time.
- Do other things to connect with people.
- Find out what we love.
We’re at a critical point. We need to be aware of what's happening and consciously decide to act against our natural impulses. If we don't, we risk losing ourselves and missing out on the lives we truly want.
This is crunch time.
We each have one brain. Our interactions with our devices are powerfully affecting us and we are being programmed. We each need to decide how much of our intellectual independence we are willing to give up.
Resources
The three books I recommend on this topic are:
The Power of Fun: Why fun is the key to a happy and healthy life by Catherine Price
The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D Rosen
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari