How to Balance Your Digital Life During Your Vacation
This article was originally published in Forbes.
It’s time for vacation. Vacation means time with loved ones and for doing meaningful things. But there is a challenge; Our digital life may keep us busy and ruin the experience of togetherness and peace.
It is hard to achieve an optimal balance between our digital and non-digital lives. Although numbers vary according to research studies and personal interests, whether it’s glancing at our mailbox, checking our social media of choice, watching the moment’s news, or spending time on YouTube/Netflix, most of us can identify with having an intense digital life. And intense can easily turn into exhausting.
The costs of being always on are high
The relationship with our devices has been transformed into one of profound intimacy. If we just take a look around (almost anytime and anywhere in the world), we’ll see people on their phones while walking, bicycling, driving, walking their dogs or even playing with their children. If we glance at any situation in which we have to wait for something, when we have a small break, or even just on a trip to the bathroom, most likely than not, we’re going to see a fellow human being on a digital device. The question worth asking is at what cost.
Almost all of us know by first-person experience, how draining it can be to be connected to technologies for a long period. We know we become less focused and present, due to a constant flow of interruptions. It’s also harder to engage in deep thinking and consequently deep work, paradoxically, the kind of work that is truly valuable in today’s economy. We’re also familiar with the type of background anxiety that seems to never abandon us, due to the hyperstimulation of our central nervous system coming from being constantly connected (ever heard of phantom notifications, when you think your phone has ringed or vibrated… but when you checked it, it actually didn’t?).
Our sleep is also getting increasingly deregulated, challenging our overall sleep/rest cycle. Even our identity is being affected by our relationship with tech, leading the acronym FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to be an integral part of our vocabulary, especially among younger generations. There’s also a toll on our emotional life, as we’re spending less time paying attention to ourselves and others, making it harder to process emotions effectively. Lastly (and ironically), although we’re more connected than ever, we’re spending less time in moments of true human connection, and therefore end up feeling more disconnected (think liking a friend’s holiday’s photos vs. actually meeting that friend to share stories about it).
So red flags about our overuse of technology are so abundant, that we can wonder: is this simply the result of our lack of self-control and restraint? Well, if you think that’s the case…think again.
Social media are engineered to keep us hooked
If you’ve tried to optimize your relationship with your phone, social media or email before, and have failed to do so (and most of us have), your experience is more common than what you might think. The main reason? We’re playing a rigged game. In the words of Tristan Harris, a former Googler turned ‘design ethicist’ that has been named “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”[1], the problem isn’t our lack of willpower, but rather that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”[2]
And this is the real reason for our extensive use of technology: not lack of willpower, but a confrontation with products that have been engineered in addictive ways, in a full-fledged war among giant tech and media companies, for our attention. As an example, we know that many of the engineers at the forefront of some of the most addictive features of social media, come from Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab. Run by psychologist B. J. Fogg, the lab has earned a significant reputation among entrepreneurs for Fogg’s principles of ‘behavior design’ – work that revolves around building software that nudges users’ behaviors in a certain way. The Lab’s name is quite clear: persuasion is the end game.
One of the most effective ways to nudge our behavior relies on using what psychologists call ‘intermittent variable rewards’. Because messages, ‘likes’ and retweets don’t happen on a given schedule, but rather randomly, we can easily become hard wired to check back for them compulsively, never really sure when that next dopamine kick will come. This is what explains the longevity of features like Facebook’s original refresh button, that has now spread to other apps. At a time of push notifications, apps could easily automatically update content without users intervention, but as Loren Brichter, the creator of the pull-to-refresh mechanism has explained, although his innovation “could easily retire, instead it appears to serve a psychological function: after all, slot machines would be far less addictive if gamblers didn’t get to pull the lever themselves.”[3]
This degree of compulsiveness may happen due to an instantaneously repeated, and often mindless action, like reaching for a device to quell feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration or sadness. Unfortunately, the availability of these mechanisms often comes with downsides. It’s one thing to spend a few hours inside a casino, but it’s another thing to bring the slot machine home with us, and pull that handle all day long.
This is what happens when we apply the idea of ‘variable rewards’ to technologies that explore our fundamental drive for social approval. For good evolutionary reasons, it’s extremely difficult to ignore what others think of us, and we tend to have very strong feelings towards being accepted, rejected or ignored, which helps explain simple phenomena, like why it might be hard for us not to check a text message. After all, for our deep brain, this is the same as ignoring an ancient tribe member which is trying to get our attention, and that’s a dangerous thing we’ve evolved to learn not to do.
It’s also worth noting that, as author Cal Newport details in his recent book Digital Minimalism[4], discussions like these aren’t meant to say technology or social media can’t be useful, because they obviously can. The point is rather to consider if our relationship with them is enhancing our lives on what matters most to us. It’s also about knowing if, even in the situations in which we do find technological tools to be of value, we’re able to keep our autonomy from these same tools.
6 tips to support you optimizing your daily digital life
#1 Kill all notifications. Rather than constantly checking devices for messages, consolidate all your replies to chats and texts into specific periods of the day. Explain ahead of time to friends and colleagues what you’re doing, and although it might take a few days to adjust, you’ll soon experience a freedom and continuity of daily focus, that will be well worth the adjustment efforts.
#2 Set up “phone free” zones/times. Make a few areas of your home (ex.: bedroom, place for meals) phone free, simply by developing the habit to come home and park your phone in a designated place, ideally outside your field of vision (think inside a drawer). At work, it might be easier to have designated periods of the day in which you’re disconnected from technologies (like the first hour of the day or last hour of the morning), so that you can engage in deep work.
#3 Use mobile apps intentionally. To support you bringing more intentionality to your relationship with your phone here are three ideas: (1) simplify your home screen by having only 1-function apps (ex.: Phone, Calendar, Notes, Maps) available, while everything else goes into folders in secondary screens. (2) Delete all social media apps, and start using them only through your desktop. As you do so, brace yourself for spending significantly less time on social media (remember c. 90% of Facebook’s revenues come from mobile). (3) Finally, be aware of boredom as a reason to use your phone, and consider alternative options (go for a walk outside, interact with a friend (live!), stretch your body for a few moments, or simply prepare yourself a hot tea or fresh drink).
#4 No “Breaking news!” If you’re prone to checking the news often (whether to be updated on business, politics or your favorite sport’s team results), abandon these frequent check-ins, and focus instead on thoughtful articles, read on pre-determined periods. Consider using apps like Pocket or EmailThis.me to help you managing your media intake, preventing you from consuming news/media in unplanned ways.
#5 Weekly Digital Sabbath. Every week have a full day where you are totally disconnected from your phone. Probably an easier experiment to do on weekends, try for a full day to simply store away your phone at an inconvenient place (e.g.: your car’s glove box or your home’s storage room), and see how that simple decision affects your wellbeing, focus and presence with those around you.
#6 Embrace solitude. If just having periods for full disconnection from tech seems challenging, solitude may seem even further away. But there are simple ways to add more time of solitude to our days. One is to go for daily walks, like while going/returning to work, whether that’s the full journey or just a part of it. Another is to spend more time in nature, allowing your body to sync back to the naturally slower rhythm of nature (ideally while in nature, you wouldn’t be able to tell which year you’re in). Lastly, as you experiment with these and start experiencing some benefits, you might decide to deepen your experience at a meditation retreat, allowing a few days each year to be dedicated to cultivating your mind. The best thing about such an experience, is that not only yourself, but also all those around you, will benefit from your mind manifesting more qualities like calm, clarity and kindness.
[1] Bianka Bosker, “The Binge Breaker: Tristan Harris believes Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones”, The Atlantic, November 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/
[2] Paul Lewis, “Our minds can be ‘hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia”, Oct 6, 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
[3] Paul Lewis, “Our minds can be ‘hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia”, Oct 6, 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
[4] C. Newport, “Digital Minimalism: On Living Better With Less Technology”, Penguin Books, 2019
