“Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.” - Epictetus
Throughout September, we’ve looked at how some of the small, seemingly inconsequential aspects of life can throw us off balance. These are the subtle forces that often go unnoticed but, in the long term, have a big impact on the ease we experience in life and our overall sense of well-being. We’ve seen how circadian and ultradian rhythms, clutter, and ultra-processed foods may not seem consequential in the moment but have strong downstream effects on our health in important ways. There are many of these small forces that can disrupt our health; what we’ve looked at so far are those that have generated considerable research. This week we look at an environmental factor that has sparked over a decade of scientific study, an invention that has grown and proliferated faster than any other in human history--our smartphones.
Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and addiction specialist at Stanford who studies digital addictions, calls smartphones the equivalent of the “hypodermic needle that delivers our digital drugs of choice”, be that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or the ever-growing crop of apps. Although Dr. Lembke’s claims may seem like hyperbole, they may not be overstated, as data shows that smartphone users unlock their devices an average of 50 or more times per day, leading to endless interactions that require swiping and tapping, which can happen as frequently as 2500 times in the process. For many, especially teens, checking messages on a device is the first order of business upon waking and the last thing checked before sleep. And although many of us report increasing anxiety related to time spent on our devices—as many as 46% of users express concern that they are overly attached to their smartphones--our increasing shift to working, communicating, and interacting virtually has made time spent on our devices a growing, but necessary, burden for living in a wired world.
Most of us recognize the potential for problems with our devices but we aren’t so sure what we should do about it. Unlike other addictions, we can’t simply quit our phones cold turkey. We increasingly live in a world in which the business of life is conducted virtually—banking, payments, travel, hotel keys, and communication all take place on our phones. Living life without a smartphone makes life more complicated. My 85 year old father-in-law insists on using a flip phone, making communication laborious, clunky, and just downright annoying. But just because our use of smartphones is growing does not equate to an addiction. For every person who compulsively checks social media at a red light, there is another who goes for hours without even touching their smartphone, or even knowing where it is. And a growing body of research is questioning claims about the dangers of the amount of time we spend interacting with our phones. The most recent research shows it is not just scrolling and tapping that is unhealthy, but the reasons we are distracted by the phone in the first place. It seems mindlessly turning to one’s phone does more harm than using it for a specific purpose.
Part of what makes smartphones appealing is the immediacy and control they offer; with just a swipe or a tap they make life easier to navigate. But their appeal is also part of their addictive quality, and by design they are quite good at hacking into our brain’s reward center. They are especially effective at gaming our levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is part of the brain’s reward system. Dopamine is important as it is the substance that motivates us to physically move and initiate behavior while lending direction to our actions. On many fronts, it gives us our “get up and go”, as well as helps us determine precisely in which direction we’d like to head.
Each of us have baseline levels of dopamine that keep us functioning with sufficient motivation and direction. These levels get disrupted when we are chronically exposed to pleasurable stimuli at levels that create a spike. When exposed to something we enjoy, dopamine levels rise above our baseline, and with continued exposure they keep firing until they gradually burn out, resulting in a drop that causes us to stop the behavior. In most situations, one exposure may not be too disruptive to our baseline, but repeated exposure hacks into the reward system, making that stimulus more likely to become a habit. The result is complete disruption to our baseline levels; we need peaks to stimulate the dopamine and, with each exposure, need more of it to feel any sense of enjoyment. Eventually, a pleasurable experience gets forged into a habit that requires peaks and valleys to give us any satisfaction. It is interesting to note that Steve Jobs, who introduced the first smartphone, initially resisted the idea of a phone that was a computer. Once his IT team illustrated the potential seductive quality of the device, he quickly designed ways that tapped into our dopamine levels to help us get hooked.
Dopamine is particularly sensitive to environmental cues. Herein lies the problem with our smartphones: they are quite effective at manipulating dopamine levels by offering the right amount of stimulation. Each vibration, beep, buzz, or ding is just enough to engage our dopamine neurons so that we will pick up the phone and swipe. A buzz or a chirp stimulates the anticipation of a reward, which is enough to cause dopamine to rise. Typically, the stuff on our phones is not very interesting, but every once in a while we get a hit of something exciting that bumps up our dopamine. It is this variability, the uncertain nature of the reward that, just like a slot machine in a casino, makes our phones so potentially addictive.
Much has been written about the addictive qualities of social media and how news organizations hack our attention with negative content. But the lure of our smartphones exists even if we don’t touch it. Studies have found that simply having your smartphone nearby can interfere with cognitive functioning. We have a limited amount of brain power and when our phone is nearby or noticeable, a portion of our attention gets assigned to it, leaving us with less brain power for other activities. This fracturing of attention is both pervasive and quite subtle. One study found that participants who completed a cognitively demanding task when their phone was on their desk, face down, showed significant impairments in working memory and fluidity of thought compared to those who stored their phones out of sight. Those who weren’t allowed to bring their phones into the test room attained the highest scores. Interestingly, almost all the participants in this study reported that their phone had no impact whatsoever on their performance, when clearly that was not the case.
The presence of a smartphone has been shown to reduce our enjoyment of social situations. Numerous experiments have shown that social interactions are consistently rated as less enjoyable when phones are within view of those in the group, and levels of enjoyment fall significantly when notifications are turned on than when they are silenced. What can be worse than attempting to engage in an intimate conversation with someone who is distracted by their blinking, beeping phone? Our brains are not good at multitasking, so having our attention scattered, even if it is by a seemingly innocuous chirp, strains the connections we make with others.
Studies show that the influence our smartphones have on our attention can be measured by how mindless our attachment is to it. A sure sign that you are hooked is when you automatically turn to your screen at any opportunity—riding the elevator, waiting for the metro, sneaking a peek during a Zoom meeting. And research confirms that mindless scrolling is what creates the highest levels of stress, feelings of isolation, and depression. Cultivating a measured relationship to our smartphones can help to break these unhealthy bonds. Studies have emphasized the importance of a more mindful approach to smartphone use. Those who check their smartphones for specific content at designated times of the day and limit the amount of time they dedicate to the screen tend to report much lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of life satisfaction.
Life in the present moment tends to be mundane. Our normal baseline levels of dopamine are appropriately calculated for the gentle fluctuations of everyday life; it’s hard to compete with the potential thrills that can be found with a simple swipe on a phone screen. But becoming overly attached to the siren song of a smartphone’s endless notifications, demanding that you look right now, is sure to decrease your overall enjoyment of life, just as any other addiction eventually creates an unbearable burden. And, although it is hard to reset our dopamine levels once we’ve rode the roller coaster of peaks and valleys, working to get back to our natural baseline levels of dopamine reminds us that everyday life is much more interesting. Doing so may show you what you’ve always known—that you really don’t enjoy staring at your phone. A lot of life happens right in front of us while we are busy looking at our screens. Make the time to turn it off, look up, and engage with the big world that is unfolding in front of you. You may find that it is the small wonders, those experiences that provide the gentle waves of pleasure, that offer the greatest and most meaningful gifts in life.
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