Kick out one of the most dangerous addictions of our times
Preface
This post is the sixth one in a series of 7 and is based on my pdf-guide ‘7 challenges to make almost everything a bit better’. You can download it from here. This guide is an attempt to show that living healthier, happier and caring about our future on this planet is not difficult. It does not call for fancy diets, prescription pills, hippie lifestyle or expensive ‘green’ gear.
There are a couple of rather basic but paramount things we can do that have a positive effect on several aspects of our lives. And in here, they are called challenges (because who doesn’t like a nice challenge?).
Challenge 6: Kick out one of the most dangerous addictions of our times.
“Humans are not wired to be constantly wired.” / Cal Newport
When it comes to questioning our defaults, we can also look at the digital behaviours we have recently acquired (TV, games, websites, social media, news, etc.). Some studies show that an adult checks his/her phone 85 times a day on average and spends 4 hours staring into a smartphone.
That is not a surprise, given that tech companies spend substantial amount of money on ‘attention engineering’. Why? They make money on your attention, on your time. Compulsive use sells and addictive properties are carefully engineered. As Seth Godin put it, ‘you are not a user, you are a product’.
Smartphones and social media are just tools. We started to use them for a good reason but lately we need a good reason not to use it. What used to bring us closer to our families, is now keeping us further away.
Obsessive phone checking and mindless consumption have severe effects on your brain and your life. It induces anxiety, reduces quality of all other daily experiences and social contacts, reduces productivity, creativity and ability to focus. The long-term effects of this constant connectivity and lack of boredom are yet to manifest themselves, but no doubt it ain’t gonna look pretty based on already observed trends.
Therefore, it is crucial to re-establish your relationship with the digital world if your aim is to have long, healthy and happy life. Cal Newport, author of the book and the concept Digital Minimalism proposes 3 key principles for redefining your relationship.
1. Remove the clutter. Clutter in this case are all the activities that do not bring value to you — checking social media, scrolling feeds, mindlessly TV watching, posting selfies, reading useless articles, checking news and swallowing one meme after another. It costs time and energy in exchange for a quick dopamine hit in the moment and severe problems in the future. Often, social media takes away much more than it provides.
2. Decide what value you can and want to extract from the apps, websites, games, TV and social media. Then, look for the ways to only extract that value and to skip the rest. Schedule your social media sessions and don’t touch it outside of that scheduled time. Turn notifications off. Delete social media apps from your phone. Put time usage time limits on your phone. Block websites. Ban any kind of screens from your bedroom and dinner table.
3. The satisfaction of being intentional with your time and use of technologies is far greater than small dopamine hits of unintentional impulsive consumption of information. Less but better.
Actions:
1. Open your phone and check how many hours a day you spend staring at it — is it more or less than a full workday? What else could you do with this time? How many hours can you reclaim?
2. Clean the clutter and silence the noise. Delete applications that take time and don’t bring much value, turn off all the notifications from all the apps.
3. Make a schedule for your digital activities to make sure to extract only the value and bypass the rest.
4. Set yourself up for success by creating access barriers — hide TV, have one spot for your phone and let it never leave that spot, for example.
Warning, the following is only for the most courageous ones:
5. Go on digital diet for 30 days.
All of the above is re-processed from the book ‘Digital Minimalism’ by Carl Newport
