Managing your exposure to external stimuli will increase the quality of your thinking, the quality of your judgment, and the quality of your life overall.
Most of us have had that moment when we’re sitting at lunch with a friend and find our fingers reaching for our smartphone or glancing over their shoulder at the baseball game on the TV screen over the bar. And most of us have come to hate these moments, which undermine our human connections and leave us feeling uneasy as a result, but we feel powerless to fight them. There’s just too much stuff competing for our attention, everywhere.
New York Times columnist David Brooks touched a nerve with a column on the constant distractions of everyday life. The line that really struck home with us:
I am losing the attention war.
Information overload is the collateral damage of an ongoing war for our attention. We have a whole range of devices and apps designed to be addictive. They, combined with ever-expanding data sources, can help us do our jobs better and enrich our leisure time. But increasingly, all they do is overwhelm us, robbing us of the agency necessary to do what we want to do or need to do.
Fortunately, it’s possible to build mental firewalls so that you can focus on what’s important, whether that means putting your phone in a drawer in the other room or gently removing yourself from a distracting situation until your immediate goal is achieved. Learning to control environmental stimuli is a great source of agency because it involves us taking an active role in determining what environment is best for us.
Think about what children are like when they’re overwhelmed by information. Throw too much at them and they will become hyperactive, explode into sudden silliness or crying, have tantrums, or shut down and emotionally check out. Some kids literally cover their ears and eyes or try to escape from places that overwhelm them.
Adults are generally better at sublimating their sensory overload—at least for a while. We don’t throw tantrums (most of the time), but we do show specific signs when we are losing the battle with stimuli. Sensory overload in adults looks like this: tension headaches, sleepless nights, sore and tired eyes, problems concentrating, irritability, anger, loss of temper. Many adults live with some collection of these symptoms every day, powering through with a combination of determination and resignation.
Do you know that little spinning wheel you sometimes see on computers and phones when they’re having trouble processing? Many call it the beach ball of death. It means the computer, overwhelmed by too much information, has stalled.
While the human brain seems to have unlimited capacity for information, it, too, has a tipping point. Information overload, which occurs when our brains are taking in too much sensory information at any one moment, is a real state, and one experienced with increasing frequency.
One common example of how we overload our brains with information is multitasking. While Ed prepares breakfast for his son each day, he often finds himself “checking in” to view work emails and (guiltily) social media, going between the toaster, his phone, and stealing glances at a second screen—the television—to get weather, news, and traffic updates before the two of them run out the door. On some mornings, it’s expanded to three screens, with Ed’s laptop open on the counter to scan a work spreadsheet or something else that he has to deal with at work later that day.
Is Ed’s situation unusual? Not as much as you might think. All of us are handing over our attention to devices, sometimes two and three at a time. Ed could put the agency principle of Control Stimuli to good use at the start of his day by being more aware of where he puts his attention, respecting the processing limits of his mind, and taking steps to exert more control over his behavior in the few precious minutes he has with his son during breakfast. The true cost of his habits each morning goes beyond what’s happening with the neurons inside Ed’s brain. There is the irretrievable cost to the experience of simply being present and enjoying the company of his ten-year-old son at the beginning of each day.
There are people who have learned to block unnecessary stimuli well before their own internal processor breaks down, who protect their memories from getting bogged down and distracted by random messages. They’re able to circumvent added stress and focus on what truly matters to them.
Monica is a woman in her late twenties holding down two jobs while trying to get her career off the ground. She told us that her work involves using social media to network several hours a day, and she relishes opportunities to take a break from electronics.
There are still some places that are free from digital noise. Monica told us that she has started visiting a church daily to grab some peace and quiet between shifts. “Quiet and calm are commodities,” Monica said. “I can go in there for a few minutes during my lunch break and recharge. The quiet allows me to think, to be alone with my own thoughts.”
Use Your Agency: Take yourself to quiet and screen-free spaces.
External stimulation takes many forms and isn’t inherently bad. In its best forms—great books, films, music, for example—it can inspire, teach, and motivate us. It can be the fuel that moves us closer to our desired goals. It can help us survive and adapt to change. It can come in forms that provide us better data to do our jobs more effectively, or find a good restaurant, or it can provide us with important downtime. When controlled and chosen selectively, it doesn’t tire us out—and, in fact, it can help us elevate and maintain a more positive mood.
But external stimulation has to be controlled, particularly at times when 1) you have to get something done or 2) you’re overwhelmed. And fortunately, even in this age when entire business plans are built around creating addictive stimuli, you can actually learn to control them.
You may have noticed some colleagues who are good at controlling stimuli. We know one such person, Deborah, a highly energetic Fortune 500 marketing executive with a particularly good reputation for her strategic thinking and her personal warmth. Both, in fact, result from a decision early in her career to actively shape the ways she receives and processes information.
Deborah told us that it took years of hard work and trial and error to figure out how to intentionally make best use of the volumes of data and stimuli coming her way. Her abilities in this regard have increased her productivity and, more importantly, made her work more meaningful and impactful and made her a particularly helpful colleague because she rarely seems overwhelmed or stressed.
Like most of us, Deborah has a large number of interactions with colleagues, clients, and stakeholders each day. They come in many forms. Emails. Texts. Voice mails. Skype. Slack.
Deborah has figured out something many of us have not—because there’s no way to respond effectively to every single request or query, or to process all the information we receive, or determine how much of it is actually useful, we have to take steps to reduce it.
Use Your Agency: Think about how you can get incoming information packaged and trimmed before it gets to you.
So how does she do it? She communicates to her team the importance of presenting information in digested form.
“I am not interested in receiving a raw data dump from others,” she told us. “This helps to keep my head uncluttered. I don’t allow information in unless it’s absolutely needed, and I let people know this.”
Her approach is surprisingly straightforward. “I enlist the support of others to help me,” she says. “I tell people up front what I need and what I don’t need.” This has made her a better leader. “I ask people to go out and learn a subject and to bring me the learnings they have distilled down. I want to know what they think—then I can ask them probing questions to help me learn as well. My approach keeps me from micromanaging, which would pile anxiety back onto my colleagues. And it gives them a chance to learn even more.”
Putting this strategy into practice is simple, to a degree, but Deborah says it requires her to be vigilant and disciplined in insisting that her team follow her communication style, because with so much information coming in, it’s easy for her colleagues to backslide. Deborah says that she provides reminders regularly, such as at the start of meetings.
Best of all, her method has begun to filter down to the way her team communicates with each other. “This method has caught on, though, and others are using it,” she adds. Now the whole team works to better package and trim information instead of just passing along unfiltered data.
One estimate showed that 34 gigabytes of data and one hundred thousand words of information reach the average person’s eyes and ears each waking day. By the time your head hits the pillow tonight, you will have been pitched five thousand ads. As outlandish as this may sound, exposure to data continues to climb every few months as technology advances.
Surprisingly, many people have become inured to the digital turbulence around them, unless you sit them down in a quiet moment, as we have, and ask in detail about their daily habits.
Lynn is a single mom with two young boys who felt that the start of the new school year was going pretty well. We asked her for details. Upon giving it further thought, her face changed. “The mornings are actually tough going,” she said. There wasn’t enough time to get herself and her family dressed and fed in time for work and school.
Lynn saw her hectic mornings as a time management problem, but as we heard more, it was evident that the problem had more to do with information management. Jason, her oldest at seven and a half, “just stares off into space most mornings and won’t eat breakfast—or sometimes he’ll just engage in nonstop chatter.” Oliver, her youngest, is six and is more focused and feels almost overly compliant and solicitous. Comparing them, Lynn wondered if Jason has an attention deficit problem.
But after some questioning, we learned an important bit of data: There is a small TV perched upon Lynn’s kitchen counter. Further, in the mornings, it is always on, tuned to one of those fast-paced morning shows, with their mix of cheery banter and disturbing news items. Further, she sometimes gives the kids her iPad as a reward for good table manners. Finally, Lynn, often stressed at the prospect of being late to work, not to mention the constant patter from the TV, will add to the stimuli by venting her stress or staring at the clock and sighing.
The children are surrounded by stressful stimuli. One copes by zoning out, the other by becoming overly compliant. As Lynn adds to that stress herself, the whole environment becomes self-reinforcing. We suggested that she begin by turning off the TV and putting away the devices and allowing herself enough time to avoid stressing about being late.
Stimuli can be anything that is registered by your senses. For the purposes of bolstering agency, there are four primary sources you’ll need to recognize and pay attention to that cover most of the bases.
• Baseline stimulation. This is the everyday stimuli that comes from where you live and work, from interacting with your family and engaging in social relationships—the so-called tasks of daily living. You may not think of your daily interactions and activities as sources of stimulation, but to the brain they are. Much of it—such as interactions with people you love or respect—often invigorates and motivates you, but as in the case of Lynn’s effect on her children, baseline stimulation can turn toxic at times. For this reason, assess the amount of positive and negative stimulation you experience in your recurring day-to-day routines.
• Background stimuli. This includes all things like ambient noise, music, lighting, vibrations, and crowding. Sometimes background stimuli can be pleasant, like rain hitting a skylight. Positive sources can stimulate thinking and creativity; for example, some surgeons play classical music in the background of the operating theater. But negative background stimuli, especially when excessive, causes stress and fatigue; behind the scenes, the brain has been working nonstop to block out or adjust to the sensory assaults. Compared to baseline stimulation, background stimuli are less obvious and sometimes nearly invisible, but their cumulative effects are considerable and negative. You might think of them as a kind of sensory pollution. Homes and offices are bombarded by new technologies that bring with them a cacophony of simulated voices, beeps, pings, and alarms, while outdoor sources of noise range from your neighbors’ leaf blower to the beep-beep of a backing up trash truck.
High levels of noise, heat, and lighting can all negatively impact mental performance. And noise has been shown to release the stress hormone cortisol. Research indicates that excessive cortisol impairs the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that helps you regulate executive functions—your ability to plan, reason, and control impulses). These functions are essential to many of the practices that promote agency, as we will show you in later chapters.
Use Your Agency: Cut down background noise where you can in your environment.
• Complex systems. These are largely technology driven. Examples include such things as navigating the world of health-care plans, banking and insurance options, and even dealing with your cable TV remote control. Again, you may not think of such things as stimuli, but your brain does. Anyone who needs a phone number changed or wants to dispute a cable bill or address a health-care benefit has quickly learned that the process can be anything but straightforward. What might have taken five minutes and a single call to a live person twenty years ago now involves multiple calls, automated menus, and spreadsheet comparisons, all of which require time and mental focus.
You’ve probably noticed by now that frustration with complex systems can make you frustrated to the point of anger! Beneath the frustration, anger, and alienation one feels is a brain experiencing too much information and having a hard time processing and digesting it.
Carlos is a bank manager in South Carolina who knows all too well how complex systems are affecting his job and his customers. His bank has been growing, and it’s been developing more products and financial services that it promotes online. This has made it harder and more confusing to navigate the bank’s website. His customers are pushing back, wanting simple products and an easy-to-use interface without continually being marketed to. He said, “I get it. They want to do their banking and move on with their lives.”
• Digital stimuli. Digital stimulation is primarily carried into our brains visually via screens, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, TVs, and, very soon, virtual reality devices.
In children and teens, where screen exposure is likely to affect developing brains and sensory systems, researchers have reported alarming concerns. These include delayed language development and problems with executive functions, insomnia, poor posture, vision problems like myopia, obesity, cardiovascular disease, social aggression, depression, and anxiety.
Anthony’s Notes from the Office: The Accidental Cell Phone Vacation
A sixteen-year-old patient told me he dropped and broke his smartphone while getting off an airplane. He was en route to visit family in the Middle East.
His parents decided not to replace the phone until he got back to the States after the summer. Six weeks later, he was sitting in my office with his parents to talk about the start of his junior year. To the surprise of all, he hadn’t asked to have the phone replaced.
He admitted he really didn’t miss having it. That led to a discussion about the pressures of social media—Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and the constant volley of texts he normally received. He said it stressed him out because it was hard keeping up with everyone and everything. He also recognized that this upcoming academic year would be a challenge and he’d need to stay focused on school if he was going to have a shot at a decent college. He looked relieved not to have the burden of the technology. In time, he’d get another phone, but he was experiencing a different life without it. He joked that it must have been fate or divine intervention that made him drop the phone because he doubted he would have made the decision to forgo the phone on his own.
Many screens—and the stimuli they bring to us—are ones we own, but more are showing up in places where it’s more difficult to control our exposure. Out in the world, no matter where your eyes land, there is likely to be a screen nearby competing for your limited attention.
Erin is a mom of three who recently told us about the assaultive digital screens she encountered at a gas station. “I jumped,” she said. “A woman’s voice started barking loudly at me. I thought someone had snuck up behind me and was angry.” Turns out, the screen was advertising junk food and pitching credit cards. Erin felt momentarily off-kilter and couldn’t escape because she was tethered to the gas pump purchasing gasoline for several minutes.
Erin registered a growing sense of irritation building up inside her. She told us the loud and visually frenetic ads had also captured the attention of her kids, who were peering through the backseat window. She rolled her eyes, adding, “As soon as I got back in the car—you guessed it—they started begging me for a soda and snack from the convenience mart.” Erin is considering going to another gas station farther away that—for now, anyway—doesn’t have screens.
Use Your Agency: Pay attention to the various venues and businesses you frequent. Do they surround you with noise, harsh or excessive lighting, heat or cold?
Brock, a quiet analyst who travels frequently for work, told us about the screens he encounters in taxicabs. These screens are positioned only inches from riders’ faces. He’s figured out how to mute the volume as soon as he gets inside the cab, but it angers him. Cab rides used to be downtime for him, he explained, and he feels resentful having almost every free moment of his day invaded by what he calls “mindless chatter and consumerism.”
Screens are now appearing in quiet places once devoid of such technology, like museums and libraries. Even outdoors is being intruded upon, with the sides of some city buildings being wrapped in eye-arresting digital screens.
Two facts are indisputable. First, we live most of our lives indoors. Secondly, these spaces impact our levels of concentration, the quality of our thinking, our emotions, and our biological well-being. With this in mind, be more aware of the spaces in which you live and work, and when feasible, have a hand in designing those spaces to improve your cognitive functioning and health to enhance agency.
Will changing your living space impact you in any measurable way? There’s ample scientific evidence that it will. Nancy Wells is a professor of human ecology at Cornell and holds a joint Ph.D. in psychology and architecture. Along with colleagues, she has studied a wide range of environments and their influences on behavior and coping skills, such as how the design of schools encourages kids to move or not move and how open kitchen plans influence how we eat. One of her research studies showed that living closer to natural settings served as a stress buffer for children.
You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to gain a meaningful impact from changing your living space. Start small. Clutter has a negative impact on your thinking and productivity, so consider uncluttering your spaces first to lower distractibility and improve organization. Screens and devices should not be in bedrooms or places you want to encourage relaxation and meditative calm states. Their presence alone, even when turned off, sends a signal to your brain to desire high stimulation. Ideally, screens should also not be present in rooms where you take meals. Lastly, it is helpful to designate a space specifically for deeper thought and self-reflection, like a reading room. The general operating principle here is that creating quieter, calmer spaces in your living environment will enhance your ability to put your attention where you want it, which improves your level of agency.
Make Changes to Your Living Space to Best Appeal to Your Senses
• Your eyes: Lighting matters. Is it too harsh, too bright, too dim? Create sitting areas close to windows or beneath skylights to expose yourself to natural light and to outdoor settings. It will help set your biological clock and circadian rhythms and fend off feelings of depression, especially in the shorter, darker days of winter.
• Your ears: Music can motivate or soothe, energize or distract, so think about what you listen to. When trying to focus, background music should be instrumental, although there is room for your own individual preferences here. Natural sounds have been found in some research studies to lower blood pressure, perhaps in part because they block out extraneous noise. If you live in a busy urban setting, you can download nature sounds free from many sites. And quietness in your living space is always healthy.
• Your nose and mouth: Candles and room diffusers scented with pleasing herbal fragrances help people feel attached to nature and invoke a calm state, but keep in mind many people react to strong artificial odors, as they can be distracting or overwhelming. Food smells can be distracting, too, but residual food smells can also stimulate our appetite in a healthy way—and many of us hold deeply fond memories of what was cooked in the kitchens of our youth (cookies, anyone?). A bowl of healthy fruit on a counter or a basket of assorted teas suggests to the mind more healthy eating habits and the value in pausing to take breaks and refresh oneself during the day.
• Your skin: Textiles and fabrics that come in contact with your body can signal a range of body and mind associations, such as feelings of warmth, coolness, and security. If you live in a large, open space, simply hanging a fabric can divide spaces and can give you a sense of greater privacy and security and eliminate visual distractions from other rooms. Pillows or textile hangings also can lower extraneous noise.
For some people, controlling stimuli is a conscious, daily task because their jobs or lives depend upon it. Surgeons and pilots, for example, take measured steps to control stimuli in surgical suites and cockpits, respectively, to lower distraction, increase focus, and minimize potentially fatal errors. People with photosensitive epilepsy think about where their eyes go and avoid triggers, such as averting their gaze from flickering lights and avoiding certain theater or theme park experiences.
Milking a Snake Requires an Empty Mind
Jim Harrison does one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and it requires a special kind of focus. Surrounded by almost two thousand poisonous snakes at the Kentucky Reptile Zoo, Harrison extracts venom for medical use. According to reports in Business Insider and The New York Times, he faces these life-threatening reptiles daily.
Harrison says he practices maintaining an “empty mind” during his work, controlling the stimuli of his own thoughts. Any thought can break his focus. He’s been bitten ten times in forty-one years, has had one of his fingers amputated, and his heart has stopped four times. With remarkable calmness, he says in a video for the zoo’s YouTube channel: “I died, and I came back and it hurt.”
Other people go through life experiences that force them to become more acutely aware of stimuli in their surroundings. This happened when Zach returned from his second tour of duty in Afghanistan and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. His symptoms are not as bad as those of some of his troop mates, he told us, and since serving in the military, he’s become acutely attuned to the stimuli around him. He practices healthy hyperawareness, consciously considering where he is and the stimuli his brain is likely to absorb. Managing stimuli in this way, he’s able to keep symptoms of combat-related stress at bay.
Another veteran we spoke with learned to practice healthy hyperawareness, too. Rico is a retired barber who worked in a busy city salon. Fumes from buses crept in when the door to the salon was propped open during warmer months, and the smell was similar to the diesel fumes from helicopters back in Vietnam, and that could ignite PTSD symptoms. Rico said he realized that it was best for him to work at the back of the salon and take cigarette breaks a block or so away in a small park where there were no buses and trucks.
We have something to learn from the extreme vetters. When you’re doing something critically important, you need to be fully aware of the level of baseline and background stimulation around you. It can ruin your concentration and sabotage your performance. And if you’re in an emotionally vulnerable place, seriously consider the amount and type of stimulation you’re exposing yourself to. This will help you to keep your mind calm and your feelings under better control.
Distraction is only part of the resulting problem caused by information overload. Most of what comes at you—and much of what gets inside—may not be helpful or needed and in many cases could be harmful. Unwanted stimulation is constantly crossing critical neurological thresholds, getting past biological brain filters that help separate noise and unwanted messages from the meaningful information people are trying to seek and pass along to live their lives effectively.
In essence, too much noise is getting through and creating confusion, loss of self-direction, and stress. Sound engineers call this a bad signal-to-noise ratio. Businesspeople talk about the law of diminishing returns. Studies show that as distraction increases, performance is watered down, more errors are made, biological energy gets drained, and our emotions become overstimulated.
The cumulative result of all these events is that we lose the power to make good decisions for ourselves and for those we love. We’re no longer in the lead. We’re simply continually reacting to all the information coming at us.
Your remarkable sensory system is the pathway into your brain, particularly through your eyes, but there are other routes—ears, nose, mouth, nearly every centimeter of skin, as well as the muscles and joints beneath the surface. All these pathways are eagerly and constantly pulling stimuli in. That’s the job they’re designed to do. Your brain must deal with all that stimulation and accept, sort, prioritize, filter, process, and then react to all those stimuli constantly in real time.
The challenge is straightforward: You need to control stimuli prior to the point of entry.
Each of us needs to be more like Deborah, the executive who learned to create filters around what information came to her and what she worked to keep out. We need to consider our daily exposure to information in similar ways if we’re to build and maintain personal agency.
Truth or Fiction? Slow the Pace and Volume of Information to Know the Difference
Daniel Gilbert is a psychologist at Harvard University who knows how not to be gullible. Through his research efforts, he’s discovered why we end up believing falsehoods. Turns out, when someone tells you something—anything—your brain must first accept it as “real” or “true” to begin to evaluate its accuracy.
One possibility is that you quickly hold on to a piece of information as “truth” while you check your memory for what you may already know and then do a quick logical comparison. Does it add up? Does it jibe with known facts or what you have already experienced? If not, you doubt the information before placing it into the “untrue” information storage box of your mind.
Sounds fine, right? The problem, according to Gilbert, is that we tend to assume all information is true until otherwise noted. And because information is coming at us so fast from so many directions, we quite often don’t have time to do a proper evaluation. Our brains get taxed. Lies, for example, if heard over and over, are frequently accepted as truths.
To guard against this, slow things down. Don’t let people interrupt you or talk over you. Don’t passively expose yourself to information from fast commercial media, such as advertising and opinion-based news programs that pander to your emotions and beliefs. Seek out quality information sources, such as newspapers and public radio and television. They may seem slower, denser, and not as easy or fun, but your mind will be processing better information at a slower pace. The bottom line is to limit your exposure to fast talkers and suspect information.
As entertainment has become more portable, it has become possible to avoid any moments of boredom. Most of us resist boredom—we count on Hulu or Netflix to get us through doing the dishes or watch sports highlights as we eat our breakfast. But an emptier mind is freer to move in the direction of intentional, deeper, and more creative thought. Developing the capacity to be alone with yourself facilitates reflection, which is a building block of agency.
In today’s highly stimulating world, ironically, many of us become agitated when we don’t have anything distracting us. We don’t like having our phones out of reach. In a series of eleven studies, reported in 2014 in the journal Science, subjects left alone in a quiet room with their own thoughts didn’t report it as an enjoyable experience. When given the opportunity, subjects actually preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of “being left alone with their thoughts” for periods of only six to fifteen minutes. This is madness!
Every few months, new digital devices come to the market. Our exposure to digital stimulation is increasing. It fills more of the space we used to have available between thoughts, between social encounters, between activities. These opportunities to experience downtime, moments of quiet, peace—really any type of restorative mental break—may be diminishing.
Make boredom a habit. Consider the advantages of allowing yourself to have occasional states of monotony. You’re not distracted, you’re not overstimulated, you have increased access to your fuller attention, and you have better powers of concentration and focus. The blankness of time and task provides more cognitive space for what comes next. The stage is set to marshal your thinking skills and satisfy the (temporary) void with something potentially very meaningful and deep. When you relabel “boredom” as a part of a calm mindfulness experience, it can become incredibly satisfying. A suggestion to get started is to set aside brief periods of time for this and then make them longer as you can tolerate more.
Might our clever digital companions be taking ownership of a piece of our mental capacity—some of our attentional bandwidth? We constantly touch and interact with them, we cradle them in our hands, we have them accompany us wherever we go, we rely on them, we get nervous when separated from them, and we panic when we believe they’re lost. Many of us sleep beside our phones and wake up to them. For many of us, they’re the first thing we reach for and touch each morning.
In a 2012 TED Talk, psychologist Sherry Turkle, founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, warned, “Those little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are.” Dr. Turkle is a pioneer in exploring how people relate to technology and its effects on those around them. We urge the reader to take nineteen minutes and watch this TED Talk to more fully appreciate why Control Stimuli is our first principle and why it’s essential in developing and maintaining human agency in the twenty-first century.
Of her many observations, Turkle warns that screens are interfering with children learning how to be alone and quiet, an essential skill for them to develop self-reflection and deeper thinking. At this point, many of us fear, or even loathe being bored or simply alone with ourselves. These natural and healthy moments of downtime have been redefined as something to be avoided, “a problem to be solved” in Dr. Turkle’s language. As soon as quiet, stimulation-free moments appear, we reach for technology to eliminate them.
Thaasophobia is an obscure term that might show up on the popular TV game show Jeopardy!, but it’s becoming a more common feature in the families we work with. It’s the fear of boredom and idleness.
Anthony’s Notes from the Office: The Need to Be Constantly Plugged In
The “twins,” as their parents efficiently refer to them, are identical, energetic seven-year-olds with matching summer buzz cuts. When they are asked to step out of my office for a few minutes so their parents can talk more privately, a row ensues. They protest and flat-out refuse unless they get a device. “I’ll be bored!” one of them screams, while the other starts crying.
To be fair, they’re entering an unfamiliar place, a barren cold spot—my wireless sitting room with only books, small toys, and magazines. Fear emerges on their faces. Eyes like saucers, mouths agape, clenched hands near their mouths, and yes, some of it is exaggerated, but their dad reflexively hands over his phone while their mother digs in her bag for the “travel iPad.” As if supplied with pacifiers, the boys calm once they have screens, and they leave. Ten short minutes later, I step out to get them. They’re at opposite sides of the room, their faces close to glowing screens, and they don’t look up. I could have been a stranger entering the room, and they didn’t notice. It takes some energy to unglue them from their screens, and this time, they’re protesting for another reason: Now, they want to stay put.
While Turkle is “still excited by technology,” she believes “we’re letting it take us places that we don’t want to go.”
Cigarettes, alcohol, and commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals like Adderall and Prozac all come with warning labels. Has the time come for warnings to accompany the use of media, particularly social media? Is there unhealthy or unsafe exposure or dangerous doses, so to speak? On the surface, this may sound preposterous, but as you read these brief research findings below, ask yourself if you might rethink your exposure to media and start controlling it for yourself.
• A study in The Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that the closer you are to your (turned off) smartphone, the more it acts like mental kryptonite. Simply keeping it anywhere near you distracts you and can lessen your capacity to think.
• The more time people spent on Facebook, the worse they felt and the less satisfied they were with their lives, according to University of Michigan researchers in a 2013 article for PLOS ONE.
• People watching news coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing reported higher acute stress two to four weeks after the tragedy than people who had direct exposure to the events at or near the bombings, wrote researchers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) journal.
Because of studies like these and our clients’ own awareness that enslavement to their phones is not good for them, we’ve found that many of our clients are starting to rethink exposure to their electronic devices. They’re managing how much time they’re “on,” much like they monitor how much time they spend in the sun without sunblock, or how they space out x-rays at the dentist’s office, or how much fish they eat that may have higher levels of mercury.
There’s one more serious risk to consider. Social media, gaming, pornography, even seemingly innocent YouTube exploration, many now believe, can become addictive. While researchers are working hard to determine how addictive digitally delivered media is—or even if these forms of media are addictive—those of us who work with people to improve their daily performance and manage struggles are seeing this problem of addiction grow. Why is digitally delivered media hard to quit?
In terms of social media, the attention and validation you get from others is among the most powerful, potentially addictive social rewards you can experience. It may sound like a stretch to think of those innocent jolts of pleasure from Facebook likes, Instagram comments, contact requests on LinkedIn, or seeing your Reddit posts move up in popularity as mini shots of a euphoria-inducing drug, but studies are suggesting that we should be taking a serious look at how our brains respond when we’re on social media. A groundbreaking study using functional MRI scans, conducted at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center and published in 2016, found that when teens viewed photos on Instagram that had more likes, it stimulated a region of the brain that also responds to highly rewarding things like chocolate and winning money.
Stopping these socially charged rewards coming at us is very hard, and for some, it’s nearly impossible. They often come at you intermittently, and when that happens, you are getting dosed with rewards much like a gambler does sitting in front of a slot machine for hours, pulling levels or tapping screens. You are in a rigged, algorithmic system that’s designed to keep you engaged for as long as possible.
Beware. Unpredictable (and frankly unearned or not terribly meaningful) bursts of good feelings and excitable digital moments are the most difficult to step away from—or, as behavioral scientists say in studies on rewards systems in lab rats, the most resistant to extinction.
Tips to Balance Your Use of Social Media
Here are some of the tips that we give to our clients to protect themselves from too much social media distraction:
• Don’t have your social media feeds open all day. If you conclude that they’re important to you, set a specific time or times during the day when you will use them and a time limit (and no more than two hours a day total). There are tools provided by Facebook and Instagram, as well as in the settings of many phones, to set your own time limits and monitor your daily use. When you are on, use them intentionally or with a specific goal—I will catch up on my friends or the media people I follow—and limit your use to accomplishing that goal.
• Weed out and eliminate social media apps you don’t use or really need.
• Say “no” more frequently and decline more invites or participation on sites, and opt out of irrelevant webinars, group lists, email lists, and unnecessary updates.
• Balance your social life. For every two hours you spend on Facebook, have two hours of real face-to-face time with real friends.
• Kill the screens when socializing. Cell phones draw our brains away from quality human contact and interactions.
• If you’ve recently moved—as students do when they first move to college or as adults do when relocating for a new job—remember that this is an especially important time to significantly reduce your use of social media. Staying virtually tethered to the people you already know won’t get you face-to-face with your new community. Get off screens and start developing a real network of new friends.
The American Psychological Association (APA) goes further. The APA recommends regular digital detoxes. The APA’s 2017 Stress in America survey found a startling 86 percent of adults report being constantly or often connected to their electronic devices. To detox, the APA recommends finding regular times to completely unplug and stay away from all devices. Doing so, the organization says, will lower stress, maintain better mental health, and help break the chronic compulsive behavior many of us have to constantly check in with our electronic devices—reaching for digital stimulation to fill every free moment of downtime.
Where we choose to put our attention is a momentous decision. Our attention is a precious commodity that defines our ability to be effective agents for ourselves.
Ask yourself right now how many interruptions you’ve experienced in the past twenty minutes, either from a text, screen, another electronic device, or an interruption from inside your mind, such as a nagging feeling of impatience to jump onto something else.
You may not have total control of where your eyes go or roam, but you ultimately have conscious control over where they stay. Spend an hour, or a day, or a week really paying attention to where your attention is going. Where does it get hijacked? Those screens that draw your eyes in don’t play fair. Places that are noisy will also steal your attention. Determine the settings and people most likely to scatter or disrupt your attention.
Meanwhile, consider what you lose by not beingb more in charge of your attention. What have you been missing? What aren’t you thinking about? Imagine the places your mind could go if you created the space for it to happen.
YOUR AGENCY TOOL KIT
REMOVE YOURSELF: Seek a quiet space by yourself when you need to reflect and concentrate.
FOCUS: Place your conscious attention onto what is of most importance now.
FILTER: Seek only the information you need for the current task. Ask for help from coworkers, family, and friends to prefilter raw information whenever possible.
AVOID THE JUNK: Minimize your exposure to distracting and misleading “junk” information.
MONO-TASK: Ditch multitasking except when it’s absolutely necessary.
LOSE THE PHONE: Turn the ringer off and leave the phone in another room except when using it. If you are somewhere where you can’t do this, put it away, turn it facedown, and generally keep it out of sight as much as possible.
TAKE NOTES BY HAND: Go analog with pen and paper.
LIMIT SOCIAL MEDIA: Just as you should never eat potato chips from a large bag without doling out a small portion, you are best off setting prescribed limits to social media use before starting.
EMBRACE BOREDOM: Know that time devoid of stimuli is a precursor to more intentional, deeper, and more creative thought.
GET OUTSIDE: Take a walk at least once per day for twenty to thirty minutes in all seasons, preferably in nature and without your phone.
BE HERE NOW: Close your eyes, relax, or meditate at least once per day for twenty to thirty minutes to be more present in the moment.
BE ON GUARD: Identify disinformation early to defuse it.