making the virtual virtuous
mindfulness and technology
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
FRANK HERBERT, Dune
I was flying to a conference to speak about mindfulness with young people last spring when I looked down to my tray table. My Macbook formed the base of a neat pyramid of trendy technologies, with my iPad on top of the laptop, and my iPhone resting on the iPad. It took a moment before I realized the absurdity of the scene in front of me: I’m off to talk about the importance of staying in the moment and have no less than three gleaming Apple products sitting in front of me just to get through one cross-country flight? I was grateful to be able to see the humor, but my next impulse was to take a picture and share the irony of it with friends online!
There’s nothing inherently bad or good about technology. Technology just is. What we do with it and how we relate to it are what matters. A Zen adage says, “The thinking mind can be our most powerful servant or our most terrible master.” It’s an apt observation about the horrors our mind can create, but I often think of it in terms of the technology that surrounds us. It can seem like our communication devices are more often used to disconnect than to connect. Technology has made it easier to connect to information and to other people than at any time in human history. Our devices connect us more quickly, but not necessarily more deeply. And they disconnect us from ourselves as we become servants to them, rather than the other way around.
Technology has eased our lives in many ways, but it insulates us from human interaction. Instead of smiling at the checkout clerk (when we aren’t shopping online or in the self-checkout lane), we stare into our phone while music pumps into our ears. Instead of asking directions from a passing stranger, we check our smartphone. When was the last time you walked into a meeting room and everyone was chatting rather than looking down their nose into their phone?
Linda Stone, the technology writer who invented the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe the current state of our minds, has turned her research to email apnea—the phenomenon of our breathing becoming more stilted and shallow when we interact with our devices.1 The way the breath changes when we are using technology is another example of how the breath can give us insight into our mental state. Texting and driving is a recognized public health issue, but even walking and texting is a serious issue. Multiple university students in my area have been struck by cars while crossing the street with phone in hand.
Using technology is addictive, in a very literal sense. Our use of technology is stimulated on what is called in behavioral studies a “variable rate reinforcement schedule.” The term essentially means that our phone’s random buzzing throughout the day acts as a little reward for the brain, which is rewired to crave more. This explains why we see kids (or catch ourselves) mindlessly refreshing email and social media feeds. Video games, slot machines, and phones are often designed by psychologists to maximize their addictive qualities.
Philosopher Alan Watts said that the great lie of television is that it tells us there is something more interesting happening somewhere other than the here and now. The Internet has supplanted television, and while it can get us the now faster than ever, it certainly takes us out of the here. Our devices hold out the false promise that there is something more important, more urgent, more interesting than our present-moment experience. Granted, this statement is not going to hold much water with a nine-year-old clutching an iPad, but I think you get the idea.
We can tell kids that they need healthy boundaries around screen time, or we can show them with our own actions, which is far harder but far more effective. I’m as guilty as anyone else; I love my gadgets and my social media. Ask yourself, how long do you spend in the morning checking in with yourself and your loved ones in person before you tap the glowing screen of your iPhone? Where is your phone right now? How do you feel when you don’t know where it is? Do you usually keep it in your pocket, your bag, your desk, another room?
THE SEVENTY-NINTH ORGAN
At the 2013 Wisdom 2.0 conference, a presenter from Google gave a simple demonstration. I’ve adapted it into the following practice, called the Seventy-Ninth Organ. Try it with your kids, but also try it with your adult friends and colleagues.
The human body has seventy-eight organs. We need each of them to do its job to keep us alive and keep our physical system at equilibrium. If one were removed, we’d feel a sharp pain, and quickly our biological systems would be thrown out of balance.
These days, most of us also have a seventy-ninth organ, an external organ known as the smartphone. This is a good practice to use after a day without technology or to mark the end of a retreat period.
Take out your phone now, if you don’t have it in your hand already. Don’t turn it on. Just notice how it feels in your hand. Notice your emotions, your urges, your body’s response as you hold it—its familiar size, shape, and weight, suited to your hands.
Now find a partner near you. Turn on your phone and mindfully notice how you feel as the screen lights up.
Hand your phone to your partner.
How did it feel when you were asked to hand your phone to someone else? How did it feel to actually hand it to them? How do you feel when they are holding your phone?
After a moment, switch back.
Take a moment and reflect with your partner on this practice. What happened for you, and why do you think it did?
If you are doing this practice with a group, the pairs can come back to the larger group for a short discussion period.
Checking In and Checking Out
Don’t like how you feel in the present moment? (And you shouldn’t, if you believe most advertisements.) Are you even slightly bored? Check out something outside of yourself: watch a video, play a game, check your social media feeds. When we teach children to disconnect from their experience with digital distractions, it is no wonder they never learn basic emotional fluency and social cues, that emotions and urges arise and pass, and that human beings actually can tolerate discomfort. Even when we are happy, we are quick to remove ourselves from that experience and post a selfie of it. Kids and teens today have never lived without technology of instant distraction and instant gratification.
In our distracted world, the default setting is to check out. I was recently traveling through a small village in Burma, gazing around the dusty bus stop, drinking in the scene. Something felt different. It took me a moment, but then I realized that the passengers were looking up at the world around them, not down into their cell phones. How often in a moment of boredom do we automatically grab our device and see what is happening anywhere else in the world but where we are? Technology is only one distraction from how we feel in the present moment. Some people also turn to drugs, cutting, or other forms of acting out. We all have a host of distractions if we don’t like how we feel inside. With all the distractions at your fingertips, you never need to be present with yourself or even experience true solitude.
Many of us see the consequences of this loneliness firsthand—not just in the record rates of mental illness among children, but in the young adults who simply never developed the capacity to be with themselves and their experience, let alone interact with others without technological mediation. Many young adults I encounter become overwhelmed when they finally have the independence to figure out who they are and what they want, and make their own life decisions.
Explicitly and implicitly, the way we live and the media we consume are teaching all of us to be lonely, to be too busy to attend to our needs, and to deal with emotions through looking outside of ourselves, rather than looking inside at the first twinge of discomfort.
Running counter to all of the checking out, mindfulness teaches us how to be with ourselves, a capacity for being alone. Mindful curiosity reveals that the present moment is both important and interesting. Checking in with the pleasant, the unpleasant, and the neutral aspects of our experience and the world around us is profoundly worthwhile. With mindfulness, we look inward, get in touch with the internal experience, tolerate it, and maybe even learn from it. In this way, we become happier and healthier.
Mindfulness teaches us not only how to be alone, but how to be in authentic connection with others as well. A friend I met on retreat a few years back runs the information technology department at a prestigious boarding school. He described a weekend storm that knocked the power out, leaving the campus offline for a few days. With “nothing to do,” the students found fun and connection in other ways. Years later, many students recalled it as one of their favorite times at the school, and it was his as well (and he’s the IT guy).
We can be intentional about taking time off from technology, and though we may face resistance at first, appreciation may ultimately set in. One family I work with turns off the wireless router for much of the day, and if the kids want the Internet, they plug in the old-fashioned way, with a cable. Since there is only one room where the cable can be connected, this rule at least keeps family members in the same room, and it makes connecting to the Internet an intentional act, not something done merely due to boredom. Other families and institutions have set hours when the Internet is on or off, or they have virtual quiet rooms where the router blocks access to some sites. Others set specific days or hours to be “technology sabbaths” or “phone-free Fridays,” when we can truly be present for ourselves and those around us. Time away from technology has been shown to have significant benefits to social skills, as well as reducing stress.2 Kids often worry about FOMO, the fear of missing out, but increasingly talk about the relief of unplugging and JOMO—the joy of missing out.
IDEAS FOR SETTING LIMITS AROUND TECHNOLOGY USE
Establish tech-free times, such as the hour before bed or the first hour after waking up.
Designate tech-free places, such as the dinner table, the car, the family room, or staff meetings.
Try leaving your phone in the car or in your bag, rather than your pocket, while you run errands.
Establish wireless hours and wired hours within the home.
Lobby for virtual quiet rooms, where chat functions or social media are blocked, within schools, libraries, and other public venues.
Only check messages when you can actually respond to them.
Deliberately interact with people: ask someone for directions, chat with the shop clerk, and say hello to someone next to you rather than immediately looking into your phone.
Using, Not Abusing, Technology
We adults may wring our hands about the dangers of technology, and those dangers are very real. But the reality is that technology is not going anywhere, and we are often just as addicted as kids are. Our society has learned to maximize distraction and maximize the economic benefits of technology, but has not yet maximized technology’s potential for health and happiness. This is the era in which we live, and most young people have no experience of the world without these devices. Rather than resisting, judging, and wringing our hands about the dangers of the wired world, we can challenge ourselves to find a way to meet our kids there, across the generational and cultural divide, rather than challenging them always to come to us. They inhabit this digital world as natives; we have to meet them in their world, or at least in the middle, if we want to connect with them.
So how can we make an ally of technology when we’re bringing mindfulness to young people, rather than fighting and resisting it?
First, consider those times you reach for your phone to check out as an opportunity for a short mindfulness practice to check in first. The beeps and buzzes of our devices can also be reminders to take a breath or check in with ourselves. Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and writer, suggests sometimes not shutting off the cell phone when you meditate. Instead, just sit in meditation and notice the body’s and the mind’s reactions to each beep and buzz of the phone, the stories and urges and emotions as they arise. The objects of attention become our emotional response to the silence (anticipation, relief), our emotional response to the beeps, chirps, songs, and buzzes as they arise (irritation, curiosity, anxiety), and whatever urges arise due to the sounds.
We can build subtle reminders into our devices, such as making the background wallpaper some kind of reminder to breathe or check in. How many times a day do we type a password into our devices? This too can be a reminder if we make our password breathe or something similar.
Plenty of free websites, apps, and podcasts offer guided meditations and discussion of meditation as well. Other software and hardware teach basic mind–body principles through biofeedback and neurofeedback. Plug-ins for browsers can block certain websites and distractions for chosen lengths of time. And given what we know about variable-rate conditioning effects, it is critical to shut off automatic passive alerts and push notifications, and instead make the active choice to check in with messages and updates.
Almost everyone has a portable recording device on their smartphone or tablet. In individual therapy and in groups, I use my device to record the guided meditations and then email the recordings to kids, post them on my website, or post them on a group blog where the kids can discuss them and interact. Kids often find something intimate and reassuring about a familiar voice guiding them through a practice, especially when the practice has been tailor-made for them. This way, they can carry us with them.
What other ways can you think of to meet kids in the digital world and engage them in mindfulness?
TIPS FOR HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR MINDFULNESS PRACTICE
Share practices with others in a social media group.
Set your phone or tablet background image, your notification tone, or your passwords to be a reminder to practice some aspect of mindfulness.
Record and listen to guided meditations on your devices.
Set clear limits around screen time for yourself and your kids.
Use your calendar and reminder functions to remind you to practice.
Text or message practice reminders to friends or family members.
Social Media and the Comparing Mind
A flower does not compare itself to the other flowers. It just blossoms.
ANONYMOUS
Any social encounter, but particularly an encounter on social media, exacerbates the comparing mind, which is the cause of much unhappiness in individualist societies. The perfectly curated images posted of people’s lives online means we are comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. Certainly, adolescents have compared themselves to peers for generations, spending hours in front of the mirror and picking outfits for school, and are actually hardwired for self-consciousness. But the constant comparing and curating of the self-image used to end with the final bell of the school day, when kids could go home and put on their sweatpants. Today, with social media, keeping up appearances is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job; socializing and social comparison begin first thing in the morning and end last thing at night. Meanwhile, gossip sites broadcast nasty scrawls, once relegated to the bathroom wall, to the whole world. Psychology research consistently shows that social media is making kids unhappier and more narcissistic. The sheer volume and instant nature of digital media also means that when we log in, we are drinking from a fire hose of emotional stimulus. Take Facebook, for example: we can log in from anywhere in the world and be met by friends’ posts that trigger joy, resentment, sadness, laughter, grief, jealousy, and more—all within moments. We can take ourselves on the same roller coaster by scanning news aggregators or other websites. Humans evolved in small social circles, and we are not wired to take in that much emotional content at once, much less to be triggered to go emotionally up and down and around, with no time to process and respond rather than react.
I was speaking with a young woman recently who was devastated by what someone wrote about her online. Naively, I asked, “Why don’t you just not read that website?” She gave me one look and I knew the idea was an absolute nonstarter. So much socializing is happening online, and the fear of missing out, both online and in the real world, dominates the adolescent mind.
So, can we teach ourselves and the young people around us to approach social media feeds with mindfulness, even occasionally?
WHAT SCIENCE CAN TELL US ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA
The science of social media is actually more complex than you might think. For example, research shows that the more we look at others’ carefully curated Facebook status, the worse we tend to feel. But, the opposite is also true: if we look back at our own updates, we often see the positive aspects of our life presented and tend to feel better. So consider scrolling through your own updates sometimes, as you look at everyone else’s.
Research also proves that social rewards and punishments are the same online and off. If someone interacts with us in a positive way, we get the same neurochemical rewards in the brain. When we (or our children) are rejected or ignored online, we get the same feeling of rejection as we would in person. More interestingly, the sense of emotional attack activates the same part of the brain as physical attack does. Emotional pain is just as painful, just as real, as physical pain.3
Mindful Social Media
Yes, social media is contributing to a new era of adolescent social stress, but when we accept that it is here to stay, we can also see it as a new opportunity for connection and mindfulness, if we build it. Mindfulness tells us there is insight to be found in anything when we approach it with mindfulness, and that even includes social media.
We can capture some of the power of community through social media. We can create mindfulness practice groups, and connect people to meditation teachers, mindfulness resources, and one another. Free blogging software makes uploading content and facilitating conversations in the hours of the week outside mindfulness group meeetings incredibly simple.
I am part of gratitude group on Facebook that began years ago with a dozen local friends. Many of us have moved away to other states and even continents, but we still check in with short lists of what we are grateful for a few times a week. Twitter, Instagram, and other sites make use of various meditation-related hashtags, such as #wannasit, or you can send compassion with a #mettabomb hashtag. Tumblr and other blogging sites allow us to share our experiences, favorite quotes, videos, and more. We can plan virtual sitting meditation sessions with friends across the country or around the world on days we can’t plan a sit with a local friend. One of the simplest uses of technology is a group text message thread that I’m on with friends from my Sunday sitting meditation group. We just text an update when we’ve sat during the rest of the week, reply with happy emojis, and are inspired (or guilt-tripped) by one another’s dedication. Young people might do something similar with a Snapchat list or via some other app that I don’t understand.
Finally, here’s a social media mindfulness practice to try yourself and then introduce to the kids you work with.
Find a comfortable, alert, and ready posture. Shrug your shoulders, take a few breaths, and bring awareness to your physical and emotional state in this particular moment.
Now open your computer or click on your phone.
Before you open up your favorite social media site, consider your intentions and expectations. As you focus on the icon, notice what experiences you have in your mind and body.
Why are you about to check this site? What are you hoping to see or not see? How are you going to respond to different kinds of updates you encounter? By checking your social media, are you interested in connecting or in disconnecting and distracting?
Close your eyes and focus on your emotional state for three breaths as you wait for the homepage or the app to open.
Opening your eyes now, look at the first status update or photo, and then sit back and close your eyes again.
Notice your response—your emotion. Is it excitement? Boredom? Jealousy? Regret? Fear? How do you experience this emotion in the mind and body? What’s the urge—to read on, to click a response, to share yourself, or something else?
Wait a breath or two for the sensations and emotions to fade, or focus on your breath, body, or surrounding sounds, perhaps with a mindful moment practice.
Try this practice with one social media update, or for three or five minutes, depending on your time and your practice.
Technology does not define us, despite social media trying to put us into categories and reduce us to a series of likes and interests. A Zen koan asks, “What did your face look like before you were born?” Today we might ask, “What did your Facebook page look like before you signed up?” It’s the deep question of who you really are, beyond a series of quantifiable interests and algorithms. Examining and changing our own relationship to technology opens the door for us to teach through example and to practice new ways of making technology spiritual. We can even consider ways to make spiritual technology for the young people who are growing up natives in the connected world.