Donal Lynch turns off his smartphone

Want to improve your memory, concentration and productivity? Then try going offline, writes Donal Lynch

IS there a moment when you realise that you’ve become slightly brain damaged from social media? Or does the brain damage itself cloud the reality of the onset?

For years, I’ve had an inkling that I might be becoming an internet vegetable but the wake-up call came this past Christmas when I got a present of a book I had long wanted to read: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

Beside a cosy fire, I snuggled up and tried to get into it, but though I was turning the pages, I could hardly remember a word I had read.

I tried again but my mind, better accustomed to Wikipedia synopses, was unable to digest the gorgeous prose.

I added the book to the Jenga pile of unread literature beside my bed. It seemed to silently taunt me: “You used to have a brain.”

The truth was that I had long since become much too busy for real reading. My apartment had become an arrangement of screens — iPad, Macbook, iPhone and TV — and most days I gorged on them all simultaneously, watching one over the brim of the other. If I wasn’t falling down a YouTube rabbit hole until all hours of the morning, I was clicking on rubbish such as “20 film stars who ruined their careers”.

Along with food and work, the internet is the great sanctioned addiction of our time but like all addicts I had a complex denial mechanism. “Everyone does it,” I told myself and “Anyway you need to be a web zombie for professional reasons”. Half of the time I could tell myself that I was conducting some kind of research — I often write on pop culture and interview actors — but in reality the constant grazing on clickbait fed into desperate procrastination.

I wrote hypocritical pieces about how social media had turned today’s teenagers into attention-deficit zombies but, in truth, I was every bit as bad myself.

I checked my email hundreds of times a day. I was a secret Twitter junkie. That might sound like hyperbole but it did feel like there was a degree of real compulsivity to it.

We know now that the social media giants run us. We are their product and their slaves. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, the author Nicholas Carr writes that “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention.

“We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”

This constant peck of information has hypnotised most of us. According to a recent survey by Deloitte, Irish people on average check their phones 57 times each day, the first time within minutes of waking — to me that figure sounded quite restrained.

More than two-thirds of them would reportedly rather touch their phone than their other half, which also sounds about right. I can handle breakups but I cannot handle losing my phone.

In response to the insanity of this I decided just after Christmas that I would try a digital detox. It was part of an overall travel break, which also involved no drinking, no smoking, no crap food, no work and daily meditations and walks. I would live like a monk without religion and the plan was that I would return home with my mind replenished to the point where it could absorb something longer than a snapchat message.

What surprised me the most was that the drinking, smoking and Indian takeaways were fairly easy to forego — but putting down the smartphone induced baby walking backwards on the ceiling-level withdrawals.

At least a hundred times a day I found myself involuntarily groping my pockets to check the empty space where my phone should have been. I felt constantly bored and under-stimulated and still couldn’t concentrate.

I wondered what was the point in even having thoughts if I couldn’t WhatsApp them to friends. I was tortured by the idea that major news events were unfolding without me getting to digest them in real time.

The tricks the withdrawal played on my poor addled brain were astonishing. “Just have a quick peek in case there’s a work email,” it told me, but any time I tried this I was immediately sucked back into YouTube. I had left my home and my life behind — but the beauty of nature and the stillness of the dawn didn’t seem much of a match for the thousands of emails I knew were waiting for me. The endless internet gorging was making me miserable but I felt irresistibly drawn back into it.

In the end, on the advice of a friend, I resorted to the tried and trusted 12 steps. I accepted my powerlessness over the problem and its unmanageability and decided that a “higher power” might be able to restore me to sanity.

Higher powers are a little tricky when you’re not religious though. Dead relatives were suggested but I could only think of my poor deceased Nana asking “Explain again what’s the difference between email and the internet”. A childhood pet was another possibility — but I couldn’t face the sound of my cat mewing encouragement from the afterlife.

In the end, I decided that instead I would make my collection of unread authors my Higher Power. I gave over the day to Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy and a few others, and resolved to get more mindful about what I am consuming online.

This helped, but I also needed some concrete rules. When I eventually, tentatively switched my laptop back on I made a pact with myself: No Facebook — there just isn’t a life-enhancing reason to look at it. No looking at the internet before bed, my mind races too much when I do that and the glow of the screen keeps me awake. And most importantly of all: no stupefied grazing, I’ve wasted enough years of my life doing that.

I’ve already lapsed on Indian food and a glass of wine — but I’ve kept the new internet regime.

The benefits are huge. I can focus in a more sustained way. I can work more quickly. I can rip through a novel in a few days. I was finally able to read Freedom, and for these few weeks at least, I have felt free.

‘The internet is the great sanctioned addiction of our time’