Hello everyone,
A very warm welcome to week 2 of our project to make your phone a happy place.
Apologies for delay, I had a bit of a fall and cracked some ribs, so had to take a few days out. Am totally ok 😊
There is so much I could say this week about all the reasons why we get hooked on our phones! The article I wrote is longer than usual and so it is available here in a recording in case you prefer to listen to it.
The first part of the recording is about how I got on with looking at my phone use and what I noticed.
The second part is looking at maybe the two leading theories about why we get hooked on our phones and some other ideas, such as how app creators trick us.
The full text version is below in case you prefer to read it. There are some extra thoughts I had on the recording that are not on the transcript.
I will start a week 2 chat thread as a discussion forum and I will also put in some links in over the week for further reading, in case you are interested to find out more.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts so far!
Next week, we will be looking at small things we can change, if we choose to.
Many thanks to my Podcast Producer and Voice Coach, Vladimir Uratarevic who you can reach here
With all kind wishes
Jane
Accredited Cognitive Psychotherapist
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), Compassion Focussed Therapy (CFT), Mindfulness & Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
➡️If you would like to work with me on a 1:1 basis you can contact me at: mail@janewatkinscbt.co.uk
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Transcript (my version, not AI!)
A very warm welcome to week 2 of our project to make your phone a happy place.
This is a bit longer than I would normally publish and so I have recorded it as well in case you prefer to listen.
The first part is my own personal experience of doing this kind of ‘audit’ of our phone use. I then go on to look at a couple of popular theories of why we can get into unhelpful habits with our phone. If we can understand what is involved in this very complex subject it can make it easier to make changes. Changes is next week 😊
Before we get into this week. How did you get over the last week? What have you noticed about the way you use your phone? What is helpful? What is less helpful? What do you want to work on?
Please do comment below or let me know on the chat. I found it so interesting when I did this myself. It was quite a shock at how much time I thought I spent on it versus how much time my phone told me I spent on it. It was way different! My estimate was way lower than the tally my phone kept.
The apps I spent the most time on were, firstly, WhatsApp. This was probably my biggest one but that is mostly because my daughter still lives in England and we chat to each other all day along with my friends there! My use of Rightmove is huge because we are moving home to England this year. Substack was also huge along with the internet. Realising how much I gave into the urge of needing to know something right now and looking it up immediately was a surprise. Substack, well I read a lot of other writers.
When I checked in with my mind I noticed it was racing a lot. Jumping from one thing to another. I was quite forgetful about things in my real life as my mind was jumping about so much. Losing the thread of conversations was noticeable. I was not paying attention to things I should quite a lot of the time. Then there was the spending a lot of time in my head rather than in the real present moment. A lot of my thought was about what would I do next on the phone. I am bad with this anyway, but I was putting things down and forgetting where they were way more than usual. Something that I found particularly interesting was the obsession with research about so many things, some of which, stop me actually doing things. For example, researching competitors in the wedding industry rather than focussing on developing our product range. This is also led me to unhelpful comparing and not feeling good enough, further getting in my way.
My conclusion. I was spending way too much time on my phone but some of it is understandable and context specific. Some of it is ok, but some not. Some I need to cut back on and actually be in my life more. I will come back to what I did about it next week!
In summary, we have spent the last week looking at how we use our phone. The helpful parts of our phone that we enjoy, that make us happy, that help us and what we can gain from it.
We have also started to become more aware of those less helpful aspects of our phone use. The way, what we consume, can make us feel less happy, make us feel anxious even, lower our self-esteem and get us into unhelpful behaviours. We might have noticed what we might lose out on from our phone use.
My other hope is that you are aware of how much time you spend on it (checking in with the app on your phone that has actually counted time to see if it matches!) and what leads you to pick up your phone in the first place (or trigger).
As I said last week, this is not about giving up your phone or deleting your favourite things, it is about giving you the ability to choose what you do with your phone. The ways your phone can enhance your life and avoid the less helpful stuff.
But I do choose, I hear you say. Kind of, maybe? Have you noticed how you just pick up your phone without really thinking, how a lot of time can pass without you noticing, how you cannot resist the phone urge, at least at times? To me this is not choice, not intentional choice. It is habit and us just being pleasure seeking humans! And humans that are on automatic pilot a lot of the time. By automatic pilot, I just mean not really thinking too much about what we are doing. I know, for me, my phone can ping and I just pick it up, no matter what I am doing (not in sessions of course, my phone is not in the same room as me when I am with a client). How we feel we must check to see if I have new subscriber or a WhatsApp message and so on.
This is what we are going to look at this week. The addiction and automatic response part of the phone!
I think it also goes without saying that app builders want us to stay on their apps, be it games or anything else. So apps are designed to keep us hooked. For me, as a therapist, it comes back to choice in relation to this. If we are on a game, for example, and we know we are on it for 4 hours a day (often more in my experience with my clients) and we feel this is ok, then it is unlikely you will make a choice to stop. However, if you feel you are spending too much time on this game then you may make the choice to reduce or stop. It is your mindset, that will determine your choice.
There are so many theories that attempt to explain why we are so hooked on our phones that come from psychology and also neuro-science.
I am just going to look at two here. Have a listen and see which resonate with you. It maybe that bits of each do.
The rationale for looking at this, this week is to help you understand the processes going on in your brain and body that sustain your phone use. I think understanding why we do things, really helps us to change things we would like to change.
Lets look at the dopamine theory first.
Our phones, especially social media, activate our dopamine reward system in the brain. Dopamine is a neuro-transmitter. Without getting too techy (tempting tho it is for me!), our brain is full of many different neuro-transmitters that are chemical messengers that helps your brain cells talk to each other, in simple terms.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that induces the feeling of pleasure. When we feel pleasure, have you noticed what it feels like in your body? What happens to your thoughts? You like it? Of course you do, we all do. It is part of being human and there is nothing wrong with it, at all. When we are having a bad day, getting a few likes on an Instagram post can help us feel a bit better. Feel connected to other humans. Feel liked, and that someone has given us some attention. That we have found another human who shares something in common with us. That has liked something we had to say or show.
Dopamine is involved in reinforcing particular behaviours as part of the reward pathway in our brains. It does this by activating the reward pathway in the brain, leading you to desire these activities more. So in this case, the use of, say Instagram on our phone. It is simply a natural human behaviour to seek out and return to things that give us pleasure. Your brain will remember and learn what gives us pleasure.
It is the same as training a puppy to sit. The puppy does as it is asked and receives a treat and the pleasure and praise of its human. Dopamine is released by the puppy’s brain reinforcing that behaviour and making the puppy more likely to repeat it in the future.
For our phone, every notification, like, or message triggers a small dopamine release, reinforcing the habit of checking our phones repeatedly to get that sense of pleasure. You might ask, so if I do not always get pleasure from my phone activities, this must be nonsense. The answer to this is because we have what we call a variable rewards system.
This is pretty complicated, but in very simple terms, as humans we predict pleasure, often from past experiences. For example, getting 1000 Instagram likes to our post. We have positive and negative prediction capacity. The positive part is when we receive more pleasure than we thought. For example, when we post and get 1000 likes more than we thought we would. It is pleasure overload! The negative is, of course, when we get less likes that we predicted and feel hacked off! Whichever we experience, we keep coming back because we love the suspense of how many likes we will get. We are basically, seeking the dopamine hit of the 1000 likes. So we think, hey, I can spend 30 seconds checking out Instagram, but then what happens? We stay more than 30 seconds.
Going back to dog training, dog trainers call this the ‘gambling effect’. Once the sit has been established, you then only offer a treat every other or every second command. The dog then will keep sitting, predicting a treat will come. I am pretty sure that a dog trainer can explain that much better, but you get the picture!
Social media is also instant. Instant gratification! Instant Dopamine (or not depending on the context of what we are doing or looking at). It also does not cost us anything financially and so we seek it out. You could say it is not your fault, it is being human in the modern age. However, we can recognise if there are unhelpful parts to anything we do and take responsibility for changing it, if we feel it will be of benefit (how to change things up, coming next week).
The next and probably most well know is the Fear of Missing out (FOMO)
I think this is pretty well known (a term introduced in 2004 related to social media) and has two main features. Firstly the perception of missing out (producing anxiety), followed by a compulsive behaviour to maintain social connections.
No-one likes feeling anxious. So we get into behaviours to try and avoid feeling anxious. Fear of fear, in essence. If we feel anxious about missing out on something, if we then check our phone the anxiety then goes away. So we buy into the checking to get rid of the anxiety. The more we try not to check, the more the anxiety rises and so checking become irresistible.
FOMO is not just limited to social media, but also social events, gatherings and the latest gossip or news, just as examples. It can cause intense anxiety and distress. I have treated many clients who have experienced this intense anxiety.
As humans we crave (most of us) social connection. It is hard wired into our genes. It is an evolutionary response. Early humans who were able collaborate with each other through connecting were the ones who survived and whose DNA we carry today. Sadly, many people are very lonely and isolated in current times, and so that social connection can feel very real through social media. Your phone can feel like a constant social presence. Social media, messaging apps, text messages, group chats and so on can create a sense of belonging that keeps us feeling connected to other human beings.
You can see how it makes it very difficult to ignore the ping of a WhatsApp message?
I will put some links in the chat, over the week, if you are interested in reading more about Dopamine, neuro-transmitters and phone addiction!
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