Screen time report #2a
Another week in my attempt to lower my attachment to my phone. I’ve been at this for three weeks now, but at the end of the first week I joined Manuel, Thomas, Kevin and others. They’ve just now finished week 2, so I’m numbering this entry 2a so that I can get in sync with them.
I’m a little late posting this because last week was a bit different from the previous weeks. There are a couple of factors here. First, I had a busy week before leaving early Friday morning for a weekend in NYC. The traveling meant that I relied on phone mapping much more than I usually do. Second, over the course of the day Saturday the weather forecast for both NYC and Boston got more and more dire, culminating in a blizzard warning throughout much of the northeastern US. Late Saturday afternoon we spent a good bit of time on our phones working through the details of changing our train reservations. It didn’t help that many other people were doing the same — the Amtrak app responded very slowly, and available seats were disappearing. It all worked out — we arrived home at noon yesterday instead of 5:00p, leaving us plenty of time to restock the refrigerator and settle in for the storm. But there were some harried moments.
Despite the turmoil, my phone use was still slightly lower this past week than it was the week before.
That’s good, even though it doesn’t come close to matching the impressive drops in screen time recorded by others in this small-scale project. What became even clearer to me this week, though, is that the amount of time I spend on my phone is more a symptom of the problem I want to address than the problem itself. Yes, I want to spend less time on my phone. Even more, though, I want my time on my phone to be time that I’ve deliberately and explicitly chosen to spend there.
There’s no shortage of news reports these days about the impact of phones on our attention spans. I found this comparison of pigeons and humans to be rather interesting. Researchers found that if they put pigeons in a long box and used a flashing light at one end of the box to signal the availability of food at the other end, the pigeons would eventually be more interested in the light than they were in the food.
“The birds would spend so much time pecking at the light that they had no time to get the food.” Mr. Boakes [one of the scientists who did this research] called this behavior “sign tracking” because the animals chased after the sign of the reward. Peck, peck, peck.
Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of the forthcoming book Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods, suggests that the phone in my pocket is a lot like the light in that box.
Phones, tablets and apps provide a cornucopia of sights and sounds that signal the possibility of belonging, much as the light signaled food in the pigeon’s box. These signals include the colorful icons of apps, the red notification dots on top of them and the bells, chirps, buzzes and dings that accompany them all. Even the device itself morphs into a potent signal for people.
Neuroscientists have found that the brain chemical dopamine draws us to these signals. Dopamine was once believed to encode pleasure, but a vast amount of evidence accumulated over recent decades suggests that’s not quite right. Instead, it plays several roles. It triggers motivation for and wanting of fundamental needs. It makes you want the cake in front of you, says the neuroscientist Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan. But it doesn’t make you like the cake or feel satisfied afterward. Dopamine isn’t about gratification. Wanting and liking are, in a way, separable components in the brain, he adds.
I was put off by those paragraphs the first time I read them. But I’m struggling to come up with a better explanation for why I find myself reaching for my phone without thinking about it. As I think about my mindlessly reaching for my phone it seems I’m more like a pigeon pecking at a light instead of one who is eating the nourishing food at the other end of the box. Despite the fact that at some level I obviously want to look at my phone, I wouldn’t say that I usually find there is particularly pleasing. I’m beginning to see that what I’m gaining from this exercise is aligning my subconscious wants more closely with my conscious desires, with the things that I like to do. And that those likes are worth pursuing.
On with the project.
