It’s been especially important over the past few months — while voters have been preparing for profound Election Day decisions — to pay attention to news and information.
If you’re like me, however, election concern somehow slid into mindlessly, compulsively checking and rechecking, scrolling and scrolling more. There’s no doubt that my quest for information turned into hunger for validation, as I’d hunt the updates-and-opinions haystack for the particular needles that provided just the right sort of spin, reinforcing my personal point of view.
And did the hunt satisfy? Did it inform, reassure, add any value to my day? Or did it simply habituate me to needing frequent blasts of dopamine?
Dopamine is famously the “feel good” hormone, but it’s more than that too. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in motivation and mood. It reinforces behaviors, like eating and reproducing, that we humans need to survive by flooding the zone with pleasure and incentive.
Congratulations to us: Technology has facilitated an oversupply of dopamine via things that just aren’t good for us.
“This is why junk food and sugar are so addictive,” says The Cleveland Clinic. “They trigger the release of a large amount of dopamine into your brain, which gives you the feeling that you’re on top of the world and you want to repeat that experience.”
The smartphone experience is no different than the junk-food experience. Social media and other internet sites that need your traffic have gotten insidiously good at manipulating the way they time updates and dole out dopamine rewards so that you keep coming back to check and click, check and click.
(Please, Facebook, can I have another? No? OK, how about now? No? OK, how about now? Ah, there it is. … OK, how about now?)
“Most of us have become so intimately entwined with our digital lives that we sometimes feel our phones vibrating in our pockets when they aren’t even there,” says Science in the News from Harvard University.
How often do you reach for your phone and why? Who’s really in control here, anyway?
Not me, I realized recently. I was starting to see “afterimages” of scrolling screens inside my closed eyelids as I tried for sleep. That’s when I knew it was time to go on a digital diet.
Ask yourself
While social media and the internet can be wonderful tools for connection and enrichment, a mountain of evidence now connects them with mental health problems for people of every age.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Surgeon General called for mandatory warning labels on social media platforms because of a whole range of potential risks and ills for youth: association with depression and anxiety, body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors, low self-esteem, poor sleep. Nearly half of adolescents reported social media making them feel worse, the U.S. Surgeon General said.
The same sorts of problems crop up in adults too. Surely you’ve heard of “phubbing” — that is, “phone snubbing” — the nickname for ignoring your partner while lavishing attention on your phone. Phubbing is associated with relationship dissatisfaction and depression, according to several studies. (One such study employs the witty subtitle: “My life has become a major distraction from my cellphone.”)
Are you a phubber? Here are three clues that you may be, according to Healthline:
- You carry on simultaneous conversations, on your phone and in person, at once.
- You keep your phone at hand at all times, including at dinner. (Just in case. Just because.)
- You can’t get through dinner, or whatever given social activity, without checking your phone.
As part of a mental health self-check, the National Institutes of Health recommends asking yourself: “How much time am I spending online? Is it taking away from healthy offline activities, like exercising, seeing friends, reading, or sleeping? What content do I see, and how does it make me feel?”
Distracted driving
Another crucial reason to check your phone habit is distracted driving. Feeling irresistibly compelled to check your phone while behind the wheel is a genuinely dangerous problem. (It’s also illegal in many states, including Washington.)
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, annual traffic fatalities caused by driver cellphone use have been hovering around 400 for the past several years. Drivers using cellphones was a factor in 12 percent of fatal accidents and 8 percent of injury accidents in 2022.
In a 2021 telephone survey by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 34 percent of respondents said they’d read a text message or email while driving, and 23 percent had manually typed or sent a text or email while driving.
Manipulating a cellphone while driving nearly quadruples your risk of being in a crash, according to the NHTSA.
Try dieting
If you identify with any of the above — from craving your phone a little too much, to watching phantom screens haunt your dreams — then you may be overdue for a digital diet. Here’s a list of tips, drawn from numerous sources (especially a recent Wikihow article).
- Quantify. Apps with names like RescueTime, Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing can track precisely how often you visit given sites and how much time you spend there. Armed with that data, you can make better-informed decisions about screen time.
- Set limits. Activate apps that block or limit chosen sites. You can customize settings like “work” and “family” to fit different real-life situations. I only just discovered that my modest Android phone came with an app called Zen Space, which allows me to block whatever I choose — notifications, social media apps, texts and emails — for however long I choose. In “Deep Zen” setting, the phone is almost completely disabled and won’t come back to normal life until my set time has expired. So even if I reach for it, it won’t play ball.
- “Do Not Disturb.” Find that crucial setting to stop the beeps, buzzes and other frequent prompts to reach for your phone. Or leave it in airplane mode.
- Go gray. Our eyes are drawn to the rainbow of colors on our screens. Make them less appealing by switching to black-and-white only.
The above may be the easy stuff, because — ironically — you’re using the power of your phone to limit the power of your phone. What follows requires using the power of your own self-control.
- Out of sight. Put it in the other room. Put it in the closet. Put it upstairs. Put it away.
- Back seat. Especially while driving, put your phone physically beyond reach. Stow it in back.
- Not in the john. Don’t bring your phone into the bathroom.
- Never in bed. No phones in the bedroom, experts say, or even in the hour or so before sleep.
- Make a mealtime pact with your partner or family: all agree that the family table is a no-phone zone.
- Leave it behind when you’re busy living real life: exercising, socializing, pursuing hobbies, enjoying nature.
- Schedule screen time and non-screen time. Limit social media and browsing to a specific daily time. Keep the appointment, then be done with it until tomorrow.
- Schedule long e-breaks. Can you forsake your phone for a whole day? For a whole weekend? A resource site called itstimetologoff.com recommends a 5:2 digital diet: five days on, two days completely off.
- Delete apps that drive your compulsion, like Facebook and Instagram. Radical, I know. But is it really?
- Turn it off.
I’m interested in pursuing this topic further, because our digital existence is not going away. It’s up to us to manage it. Drop me a line with your strategies and success stories for wrestling your life back from your phone!
