8

CAUGHT IN THE CLICKSTREAM

My first mobile phone was the size of a small shoebox. An exciting accessory that came with my job as a junior reporter at The Daily Record — Scotland’s highest-selling national newspaper — it was heavy as a rubber dive brick and had a battery life of approximately 23 minutes. If I stood at just the right angle on my tiptoes in a corner of a room, I could make and receive calls. Every incarnation of mobile phone I got from that point was smaller than the one before, until one day I had a flip phone so tiny I could barely read the messages on its screen without a magnifying glass. With expensive, metered phone plans it became an art form to condense everything you had to say into 160 characters or less, for fear of being charged an extra 25 cents for a superfluous exclamation mark.

Getting an iPhone changed everything. This wasn’t just a phone; it was a computer, a stereo, a television, an infinitely resourced guide to the universe. It has revolutionised my life in myriad ways — equipped me with a sense of direction I do not naturally possess, allowed me to set fitness goals and track my exercise, and offered a way to share pictures, videos, and conversations instantly with my family on the other side of the world.

At first, it felt like liberation. For someone who is, to put it generously, technologically challenged, this device was both easy to use and breathtakingly brilliant. I was so amazed by its potential it was as if I was holding a magic wand in my hand. Nowadays, it feels less like magic and more like a hostage situation.

We are connected 24/7 and there’s no pushing back the tide. A 2016 Ernst & Young report found that more than 80 per cent of Australians own a smartphone. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, the figure is 96 per cent. Some technology experts say that embeddable phones, which will literally be implanted into our bodies, could be commercially available by 2023. And our brains are evolving accordingly. We are always checking, checking, checking. The blue light from the screens in our hands has become mesmerising. Melbourne and Sydney recently joined many other cities in the world in installing lights on the footpath at busy intersections to stop ‘mobile phone zombies’ from stepping into traffic. The in-ground lights that flash red and green were introduced after a rise in the number of pedestrians distracted by their smartphones walking into incoming traffic and getting injured.

We live in a time where we are bombarded with information on our phones, tablets, laptops, televisions, and even internet-enabled watches and refrigerators. This glut of digital noise has become so all-pervasive it has earned its own name: Macmillan Dictionary describes ‘infobesity’ as ‘the condition of continually consuming large amounts of information, especially when this has a negative effect on a person’s well-being and ability to concentrate’.

The Ernst & Young report, which surveyed 1,500 Australians, found that 24 per cent of people felt overwhelmed by information overload when using their phones. Forty per cent said they were struggling to keep up with the rapid increase in digital device capabilities. And just like me, they took their phones everywhere. One in four used their mobile in the bathroom, one in five while driving, and more than half during meals at home. Seventy-seven per cent used their smartphones while watching television, and 64 per cent when in bed.

I often feel that my life would be simpler if there were fewer ways for me to keep in touch. There are texts and WhatsApp messages, emails from three separate accounts, instant messages, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter notifications and direct messages. Then there’s voicemails and missed calls and Skype and FaceTime. Sometimes, I get to the end of the day and I have a nagging sense of having not responded to someone and I can’t remember which platform it was on.

There are times when I’m so agitated I can barely sit through a 30-minute TV show without feeling the impulse to check emails, Facebook, my bank balance, the latest weather forecast, or any one of the other countless apps that light up my home screen like a poker machine. Sometimes the sense of fullness inside my skull is so intense I worry that my brain will blow a fuse, plunging me into darkness. Some days I wish for that.

I read those ‘Why I Quit Facebook’ articles and silently cheer the escapees who have found a way to flee the cult. So many of us seem to be hooked on a habit that has crept into our daily lives in ways so insidious we can’t imagine ever breaking free. In some ways, there is comfort in knowing that this is a shared phenomenon, but it still feels pathological. The only way I could write this book was to download an app on my laptop that allows me to block my emails, social media, and news sites for long periods of time. Without it, this chapter might have been little more than a series of tweets. An entire industry has sprung up to help wean us off our addiction. There are multiple apps to choose from: SelfControl, Freedom, Cold Turkey, LeechBlock, RescueTime, Zero Willpower. I went with Freedom, which more than 350,000 people around the world are using, according to their site, to emancipate themselves from digital distraction.

Freedom’s creators claim studies show that every time we check an email or social media notification, the mind requires 23 minutes to refocus on the task at hand. I’m certainly better able to concentrate when I don’t have 16 windows open on my laptop at once. The compulsion to check goes away temporarily when my brain knows it’s not even a possibility. If I try to click on a banned site, Freedom tells me You are free from [insert site here], which always makes me feel rebellious, like a child who’s run away and joined the circus. The app allows me to choose which sites I block and for how long, and I can synch all my devices to cut down the temptation to cheat. If I want to be hardcore, I can put it on ‘lockdown’ mode, which basically reverts my laptop to an old-school word processor and blocks the entire internet. Suck on that, Zuckerberg!

When I was quite unwell, Veronica suggested I try to limit my use of screens as it was clearly aggravating my anxiety. I decided to try a few days without using my phone at all. But I quickly realised that emancipation had its drawbacks. Leaving the house, I instinctively reached for my phone at the tram stop to check my tramTRACKER app and find out how far away my ride was. When I went for walks, I couldn’t play music or record my route and steps on my fitness apps. I had to go back to hailing taxis rather than the cheaper and more convenient Uber service I preferred. Trying to find a carpark, I realised that many inner-city parking bays could only be paid for using a smartphone. When I left Veronica’s office, I wrote our next appointment time on my hand because I didn’t have a calendar. The receipt she gave me had to be physically taken to Medicare for a rebate, rather than sending a screen capture through the app on my phone. I couldn’t order in food from my favourite takeaway place because they only offered delivery through an app. No emails were sent or received. No bank balances were checked. No photos were taken. I got lost — a lot. Luckily I wasn’t in a hurry to be anywhere, as it occurred to me my phone had been my watch for the past several years. Opting out of using a smartphone seemed like a good idea, but in an environment entirely geared towards its use, it was like trying to navigate my horse and cart down a three-lane freeway.

This attachment to our devices isn’t entirely our own fault. It’s partly being driven by corporations whose bottom line depends on us always being plugged in. A fascinating investigation by news anchor Anderson Cooper on the US 60 Minutes program in 2017 found that Silicon Valley is using clever forms of ‘brain hacking’ to keep us addicted. Cooper spoke to a former Google product manager, Tristan Harris, who wrote a 144-page manifesto about the pitfalls of the technological age and shared it with his colleagues at the tech giant. Harris argued that the bombardment of digital distraction in the modern world was ‘weakening our relationships to each other’ and ‘destroying our kids’ ability to focus’. He told the program: ‘Never before in history have a handful of people at a handful of technology companies shaped how a billion people think and feel every day with the choices they make about these screens.’

Frustrated by a lack of change within Google, Harris quit after three years with the company. He said he didn’t believe there were ill intentions in the technology sector, but grabbing the consumer’s attention had become the sole focus, creating what he described as a ‘race to the bottom of the brainstem’, where products were being developed to drive behaviour that fuelled negative emotions, such as anxiety, loneliness, and fear. As an example, he cited Snapchat, which allows the user to send pictures, messages, and videos that disappear after a few seconds. The developers have invented a feature called ‘streaks’, showing the number of days in a row the user has exchanged a message with someone. Harris said the effect of this was to encourage young people to keep coming back to the app. ‘The problem is that kids feel like, “Well, now I don’t want to lose my streak,”’ Harris said. ‘And so you could ask, when these features are being designed, are they designed to most help people live their life? Or are they being designed because they’re best at hooking people into using the product?’

Cooper also spoke to Ramsay Brown, the founder of a tech start-up, Dopamine Labs, that writes computer code for apps. The programs are designed to provoke a neurological response by pinpointing the best moment to give the user a reward, triggering the brain to want more. Based on the user’s activity, likes or rewards are given at a time that is engineered to maximise their engagement with the app. I’ve often wondered why sometimes I’m on Instagram and I’ll get a flood of likes all at once. Brown said these algorithms were being used by technology companies to record data every time we react. ‘You’re part of a controlled set of experiments that are happening in real time across you and millions of other people,’ Brown said. ‘You are guinea pigs in the box pushing the button and sometimes getting the likes. And they’re doing this to keep you in there.’

One of the people interviewed on the program was Dr Larry Rosen, a Californian research psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of technology. I spoke with Rosen in 2012 for a story on digital overload, just after the publication of his book iDisorder — a term he coined to describe a modern affliction where our brains struggle to keep up with excessive use of technology. Diminished attention spans, impaired learning, sleep problems, and difficulties forming relationships in the real world were among the problems Rosen said he was seeing, particularly among young people, who tend to be heavier users of smartphones.

As I grappled with my anxiety and my own obsessive use of technology, I contacted him again to learn more. He had recently published, with a neuroscientist co-author, his latest book, The Distracted Mind: ancient brains in a high-tech world, which outlines why our brains are not built for multi-tasking and how the way we live is playing havoc with our ability to switch off. When I called him in his office at California State University Dominguez Hills, where he is a professor emeritus, I explained how my brain often feels overheated from the act of constantly checking and refreshing social media feeds. I didn’t tell him that sometimes it feels like I can’t physically stop myself from looking at my phone, or that I was actually checking my emails and Twitter mentions intermittently while we talked, but I suspect he knew.

‘We are pleasure-seeking animals, and that means you’re seeking the release of certain chemicals that we have identified with since we were little children as something that feels good,’ he told me. ‘Two of those chemicals are dopamine and serotonin — the good-mood, pleasure chemicals — and we strive to get those,’ he said. ‘So being able to watch a video might give us that pleasure, being able to see how our kids are doing on Facebook might give us that pleasure, so that drives our behaviour to go get more of that pleasure.’

The problems start, Rosen said, when our brains begin to habituate to the pleasure injection and we need more of it to feel the same high. ‘Which means if we’re getting pleasure out of Facebook, we need to spend more and more time to feel the same as we did just a week or two ago. And that eventually leads to an addiction.’

It sounded familiar. It was almost exactly the same process of habituation a very clever professor of addiction medicine had outlined to me during my year of sobriety. Only he wasn’t talking about Facebook likes, he was talking about alcohol. Just as I had increased my tolerance to booze through repeated binge drinking, my compulsive online checking was becoming less satisfying the more I did it.

Rosen stressed that while it was a mistake to believe this is only a ‘young person’s problem’, studies he has conducted with people in their mid-twenties showed that on average they checked their phone 60 times a day, for a total of 220 minutes. He found that when people were separated from their phones it provoked the fight-or-flight response, where the brain releases a burst of cortisol. In one experiment, people were brought into a lab and hooked up to devices that monitor stress levels. They were told they should read some material on a computer screen and answer a series of questions; they could keep their phones next to them. A few minutes into the task, participants were informed that their mobiles were interfering with the electronics and would have to be moved to the back of the room. A minute or so later, the researchers sent texts to the participants’ phones. When participants heard their phones go off, immediately there were spikes in galvanic skin response, which measures the body’s arousal and level of anxiety. The stress of knowing they had a message but weren’t able to check it sent the body into overdrive. ‘We’ve got this brain and we’re constantly inundating it with chemicals that suggest that we are anxious or stressed, and it’s just not good for your body to be under that fight-or-flight situation all the time,’ Rosen said.

Essentially, our primitive brains are learning to view Facebook likes — or a lack of them — as a life-or-death situation. It’s not necessarily our minds that have changed, but the environment to which they are being subjected. ‘Cavemen didn’t have smartphones. Cavemen had a simpler life, so their brains were wired to deal with that simpler life,’ Rosen noted. ‘You’re taking a brain that was basically designed for food foraging and staying alive and making decisions about where your next meal was coming from, and now it’s dealing with constant messages and texts and things like that. The brain is just not equipped to handle that nonstop.’

And what’s driving our need to constantly check our phones? For Rosen, it all comes back to one thing: connection. ‘As human beings, we crave connection; it’s part of our humanness. But we live in a world where we have an ever-expanding number of people that we’re connected to and we can never quite keep up with it all.’ Rosen believes that the plethora of ways we now have to communicate means we’re always on alert to make sure we don’t miss those connections. More troubling, he maintains, is that the frenetic nature of those connections makes them briefer and less satisfying, and so we find ourselves in a spiral of diminishing returns, where the thing we seek slips further from grasp. ‘Fifteen, twenty years ago, you’d sit and talk with someone for half an hour, an hour, you’d go home feeling great. Now, our conversations are very short, many of them are electronic, and they’re even shorter because we use shortcuts and acronyms, so they’re not as satisfying because they’re not touching us as deeply,’ Rosen explained.

I can count on one hand the people I regularly chat to on the phone. In high school, my best friend Fiona and I would spend all day together, come home, and chat on the landline for the rest of the afternoon, much to Dad’s disbelief. These days, when my mobile rings I stare at it in horror, as though it’s a grenade with the pin pulled out. I often let it go to voicemail while thinking, Why can’t they just text me?

But while I agree with many of Rosen’s sentiments, I don’t believe that all online interactions can be dismissed as less nourishing than those that occur face to face. I’ve forged many strong connections on Twitter and Facebook with people in other states or even other countries whom I have never met but nonetheless I consider friends. Many interactions that began in cyberspace ended up with real-life meetings with people I would otherwise never have known. Powerful movements for social change have blossomed through social media — the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, the 2017 Women’s March, or the hashtag #MeToo, which ignited a worldwide discussion about sexual harassment and gendered violence. Marginalised communities find strength in their shared experiences online. I have learned so much by listening to the diverse voices on the podcasts that fill up my phone. Meditation apps have helped me stick to a daily practice. For many people, collating pictures on platforms such as Instagram or Pinterest is a type of visual diary, a form of artistic expression that can bring great joy.

In his book The Art of Belonging, social researcher Hugh Mackay notes that online communities have provided an important emotional connection for some people, but he argues that the crucial difference between online and offline contact is the extent to which we make ourselves vulnerable to one another. ‘As long as our contact is via a screen and keypad, we are able to maintain a certain distance. We have more control over the way we express ourselves and the amount of information we are prepared to reveal,’ he writes. ‘That ability to control the dataflow may be welcome in many circumstances — including online flirtations or other relationships that are never intended to move offline — but it is a radically different experience of “relationship” and “community” from the complexity and unpredictability of a personal encounter.’

When we go for speed and efficiency over face-to-face contact, Mackay says, we lose the nuanced messages that help us decode what is really being said. Without facial expressions, gestures, body language, and tone of voice, that sense of connection is diminished. ‘Ever experienced relief when you’ve rung someone and encountered their voicemail service, where you can leave a simple message and not have to go to all the trouble of exchanging pleasantries? Then you already know how a revved-up life can actually begin to dehumanise us,’ he wrote.

When my mental health was deteriorating, refreshing the page again and again wasn’t just a hunt for that zap of dopamine; I think there was an underlying need to find something that would fill the chasm that had opened inside me. Yet the more time I spent online, the less fulfilled I felt. The interactions were always so fleeting and empty — one disposable, meaningless crumb of human contact before scrolling on to the next. At a time when we’ve never had more ways to connect, we are often profoundly disconnected.

I decided to take Larry Rosen’s advice and attempt to break free from my captor. He said we have to stop behaving like ‘Pavlov’s dogs’ and salivating every time our phone beeps. His instructions to turn off that automatic brain response start with switching the phone to silent or flight mode and setting an alarm to go off every 15 minutes. When the alarm sounds, you have exactly one minute to check any form of communication on any of your devices — emails, social media, texts, instant messages. Then, after that minute is up, close all the windows and turn your phone face-down in front of you. Repeat this process every 15 minutes. ‘You’ll know that your brain’s getting it down when the alarm goes off and you say to yourself, “Just a minute, just a minute, I need to finish what I’m working on.” Now you can jump it to 20 minutes, and then 25, and then 30,’ he told me. ‘Optimally, if you can get to 30 minutes, where you check in for a minute, go 30 minutes focusing and attending to whatever you’re focusing on — this could be work in an office, studying, dinner with your family, watching a movie, talking to your spouse; anything where you can focus and attend for 30 minutes without getting distracted — that’s a major miracle.’

I tried it, using 30-minute intervals for a few days, and it really did make a difference. At first, I found myself reaching for the phone instinctively and having to snatch my hand back like a child caught stealing from a cookie jar. Over time, that urge to check grew less intense and my work rate improved. The more time I spent away from social media, the calmer I became. Rosen explained that these exercises, if repeated often enough, change the way the brain handles its chemistry. ‘It teaches your brain not to release chemicals that aren’t good for you. So it literally gives you time to calm your brain down while you’re working and not feel like you have to be constantly on edge and check in.’

I also tried to follow Rosen’s advice to avoid looking at any screens for at least an hour before going to bed — the blue light from phones, laptops, and tablets can suppress the secretion of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, playing havoc with the body’s circadian rhythms.

These days, I’m trying to be less reliant on my devices, even without setting reminders. I’ve already started to make inroads. Snapchat is gone forever, and I’ve deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone, which doesn’t come with me to the toilet anymore. And I almost never check it when dining with friends. Yet, the urge to pick up that screen remains strong. These little computers in our hands are so much a part of our lives it’s hard to go back to a simpler way. But I know that when I find myself in a spiral of obsessive checking, it’s a red flag that things in my life are starting to unravel. I have to treat my overstimulated brain like a misbehaving child who needs boundaries. That little flush of pleasure when I click on that screen might feel good for a split second, but it’s not what I need. What I need is to breathe, back away from the phone, and switch my brain to ‘do not disturb’.