How to defeat your smartphone
Distraction gets a hard rap.
When I was younger, it felt like ‘being easily distracted’ was one of the primary evils to avoid in the world. The phrase felt like a marker of virtue; the ability to control our levels of distraction was seen as a beacon of upstanding personal development.
Now, there’s no doubt that honing how and when to focus is a valuable skill. But everyone talks about the power of focus. Productivity hacks are all geared towards how we can become better at it.
No one talks about distraction.
Our inclination to be distracted has evolved with us over millenia with no real sign of dissipating. Parents today seem just as intent on asking their children to avoid being distracted as in my day, and no doubt in generation upon generation before. So why do we get all continually seem to fall prey to being distracted?
Our brains evolved for scanning threats.
It was beneficial for our survivial if we were finely attuned to the sounds, movements and sudden shifts in the environments around us. If we were out foraging for food and heard a sudden rustle, the benefit of pausing to investigate the source of the sound vastly outweighed the potential cost. If it proved to be nothing more than the wind moving a branch, we lost very little; a few seconds of rummaging through the leaves. But if it proved to be a snake or creeping predator the benefit could be life-saving. The cost-benefit ratio was heavily in our favour to be distracted.
We’re therefore vulnerable to it. Deep down in our animal-brains, we still all live with a voice today that is saying, “What was that? You should check it just to be safe”. It’s an instinct that has kept us alive for thousands upon thousands of years, so why would we ignore it?
Distraction is not necessarily an evil.
It’s an in-built part of who we are, and a useful one still today. When walking down a dark street in fading light, we require the same ancient instinct from our ancestors in order to tune into a movement of shadows to scan for a potential threat. What we might call distraction is often our bodies reacting in a physical way to a particular stimulus, or sudden change in our environment.
But, like so many of our inherited, deeply engrained behavioural traits, distraction is not flawless. And crucially, it wasn’t built for our modern world.
A definition of a stimulus is as follows:
a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue.
In other words, the rustling in a bush, or the flickering of a shadow on a dark street are stimuli. They force us to have a reaction, often in the form of what is popularly referred to as a ‘fight or flight’ response.
This level of stimulus is normal. While each of us will have every different reactions to them depending on our circumstances and experiences, we’ve evolved to be on the look out for, and respond to, these kinds of threats.
But today’s world isn’t just about rustling bushes or flickering shadows or normal stimuli. With the advent of modern technology (iPads, hyper-realistic TVs and screens and of course the kings of them all - smartphones) we have created super-stimuli.
Super-stimuli are examples of technology that are capable of creating disproportionate levels of response to a certain stimulus.
Super-stimuli technology preys on our animal instincts to cause us to react to changes in our environment in a way that doesn’t provide a cost-benefit tradeoff that’s in our favour.
Here is an example. The ding of your smartphone, or lighting up of its screen is a super-stimuli. It is tapping into your inate proclivity to scan for threats. But you’re not in the middle of a wide open grassy field, or strolling down a dark alley alone at night. You’re sitting at your desk trying to write an important email. Or talking to your sister on the couch. Or in bed trying to fall asleep. But your animal-brain doesn’t know that. It simply registers a stimulus, and asks you for a response. Being distracted is simply your ancestors’ way of trying to keep you alive from an imminent physical threat.
But for the most part, we no longer need to guard against physical threats when we’re at home, or in the office. The threat we need to ward off is that of super-stimuli initiating our response systems when they have no business doing so. And thereby getting in the way of doing things that might improve our days, like enjoying reading a book, or actively listening to a friend as they talk, or completing that report you know you need to.
Social media, the apps on our phone, breaking news banners on TV, are all examples of attempts to flood us with super-stimuli tactics to keep us overwhelmed and reacting. Through this constant exposure, the chemical in our brain that drives this response, dopamine, kicks into overdrive and keeps us on the hunt for scanning for unpredictable potential threats or rewards as a result.
None of this is new. We’ve all read the productivity hacks about setting screen limits, or hiding your app icons elsewhere on your phone, or even turning your phone into a grey colourscale to make it less visually enticing. All of which are valiant attempts to battle against the super-stimuli, but are ultimately doomed to fail.
The inconvenient truth is that we are (almost) powerless in fighting against super-stimuli.
Your ingrained evolutionary instincts will defeat your attempts at will power or discipline when it comes to trying to ignore a pinging, lit up phone or device. It is too powerful. It sends our ancient instincts into overdrive and forces embedded parts of our brain to ask ‘What if, what if, what if, what if???’ until we give in.
We cannot defeat the stuper-stimuli beast. It is foolish to try. You will lose. It’s like the boss at the end of the hardest video game you’ve ever played, and there are no cheat codes.
But there’s no shame in admitting defeat.
We have only one response to super-stimuli, but it’s foolproof.
And that is to remove them.
I bought the above alarm clock last month.
Of all the apps available on smartphones these days, one of the most pernicious has to be the alarm clock. For many, we sleep with this distraction super-stimuli within an arm’s reach every night. It may be the last thing we engage with at night, and the first thing we see in the morning. And that’s where the cycle starts. We turn the alarm off, and can’t help but notice the whatsapp notification, or news headline, or social media post we’re tagged in. And immediately the first thought of our day is something related to someone else. We lose the opportunity to simply be with who we are in that moment.
I didn’t like the effect that was having on my life. I wanted to read more in bed. I wanted to wake up and see how I actually felt, not be immediately influenced by a message or headline. So I stopped trying to fight the distraction. I admitted defeat in this fight. In fact, I refused to fight, by removing my opponent.
Silent, charging in another room when I head to bed, its super-stimulus powers are removed. I don’t need to fight any more.
Now, the last thing I see before I go to bed is a book. And a little wooden clock that makes no noise as the second hand glides around, an ambition my teenager self could only dream of. And the first thing I think about in the morning is… well, whatever I’m feeling that morning. And then I choose to deal with that how I wish. Rather than responding to something I have no control over.
Modern technology has given us a lot. But with its gifts, comes responsibility: a responsibility to recognise when it’s taking too much in return. And it’s in those moments that we need to help out our animal instincts not by fighting against, but by walking away from technology’s super-stimuli power.
And in doing so, removing it.
Final Thought Fun Fact: It turns our books are the exact right level of stimulus to engage with prior to relaxation. The chemical that social media companies prey on to keep us hooked - dopamine - works by presenting us with unpredictable and variable rewards or gains. That’s what keeps us coming back for more and more while scrolling endlessly. When you couple that with smartphone screens, sounds and tactics, we’re powerless. But when coupled with only the unpredictability of text on a page, storylines unfolding paragraph by paragraph, it’s just the right amount of dopamine to entertain, but not overwhelm, before trying to sleep.