Balance your ‘digital nutrition’
Should we consider online consumption the same way we do our physical health?
I miss my pre-iPhone brain. I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to get through an article, a film, even a conversation, without my attention flitting to the little supercomputer that lives at my fingertips. Now, with one thumb twitch, I scratch every itch that crosses my monkey mind.
During one particularly low week in January, my already-pretty-sickening Screen Time statistics showed I did so roughly 150 times a day — almost every eight waking minutes — for an average total of almost five hours. That’s around 40 per cent more than the average Brit. No wonder I felt fractious, with my brain constantly shifting focus between all the tabs it had open at once.
Talk of smartphone addiction is verging on cliché. Sales of oldschool Nokias have been steadily rising for years, as have the books detailing 30-day detoxes and phone “breakup” plans that fill Amazon’s bestseller charts. But there’s no point pretending I would ditch mine, even if I could. It’s not just essential for work — it’s life-enhancing in ways both prosaic and profound: how I manage my money, read my newspaper, discover new music and marvel at videos of my little niece’s latest bon mots. So in the true manner of an addict, I hesitate to call myself one — because don’t addicts have to quit?
Mercifully, Jocelyn Brewer, a psychologist with a specialty in technology who treats so-called screenagers (and their parents) struggling to maintain healthy tech habits, has no truck with the idea of going cold turkey. Instead, she encourages clients to embrace “digital nutrition” — a term she coined back in 2013 as a more constructive way to curb compulsive consumption, which might finally be gaining traction. A recent essay on Medium suggested digital nutrition should be seen as the sixth pillar of health, in addition to the five generally agreed-upon fundamentals of diet, exercise, sleep, purpose and relationships. The scope of the analogy is already endless: We “binge” on Netflix, scroll through social media “feeds,” are “served” news in daily “digests;” our inboxes “bulge” while we filter out “spam” ... and when it all gets too much, we take a “digital detox,” which is as pointless as doing a juice cleanse then going back to eating junk: Extreme diets are unsustainable, whether you’re talking food or phones. Brewer’s broader point is that it’s not our phones that are the problem (any more than the dieter’s enemy is the fork), but what we use them to consume — making screen time a meaningless barometer.
“Are you mindlessly munching on empty Candy Crush calories, or are you fuelling your body with meaningful brain food?” she asks. “Our body digests 400 calories from a slice of pepperoni pizza very differently to 400 calories’ worth of carrot sticks. Similarly, an hour of mindlessly scrolling through Instagram affects you differently compared to an hour of language-learning on Duolingo.” Whatever your poison, we’re all digital gluttons. The average thumb scrolls through 295 feet (90 metres) of mobile content every day — that’s the same height as the Statue of Liberty — according to Ari Kesisoglu, Facebook’s regional director in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa. And this constant grazing is damaging our cognitive fitness. “It’s a useful comparison,” agrees Soren Kenner, social media expert and co-author with Imran Rashid of Offline, a new book revealing the “mind hacks” Facebook, Instagram, Apple and Google use to hold our attention. “You have junk food and you have junk information — tabloids, clickbait, celebrity gossip. A glut of useless information where a little goes a very long way and too much is actually bad for you.”
He cites the side effects of excessive social media consumption: “Stress, sleep disturbance, anxiety, depression, problems focusing, lowered self-esteem, decision-fatigue.” According to Kesisoglu, between the beginning of time and 2003 (when the internet began to boom), humans had generated approximately five billion gigabytes of information. Now, we create that amount of information every 10 minutes. “But our ability to take in and sift through (it) remains as it was 70,000 years ago, at the outset of the cognitive revolution,” Kenner says.
Even once my thumb has stopped twitching for the phantom apps on my phone, I find my mind still wanders in search of brain snacks.
“This is entirely common,” says Kenner. “You have been roped in by addictive design that keeps you scrolling, browsing, clicking and responding by using the exact same techniques that casinos use to design slot machines. Once you turn off the applications that provide your dopamine fix, you simply try to get it through other applications.”
So-called “digital vegans” go as far as cutting the Big Five tech giants — Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple — from their lives altogether, setting up custom-built virtual private networks (VPNs) to block them from getting their money, data and attention. I’m happy to just have a more balanced digital diet. By the beginning of March, my screen time was down by an average of two hours a day. I don’t know that my mind is necessarily sharper, but it feels more my own, so the Instagram app can stay gone.
“The scariest thing about social media is it leads your body to believe you have got something you need, without actually delivering it,” Kenner says. “Humans are social animals, and we need social cues, interaction, balancing, dialogue and grouping to thrive.”