Unlock the US Election Countdown newsletter for free
The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The smartphone, once hailed as a tool of great progress and prosperity, has been getting a bad rap of late. It emerged this week that when new students at Eton start the school year in September, their devices must not come with them. Instead, they will each be given a “dumb” Nokia phone that is unable to access the internet and only allows calls and texts.
Deprived teens might feel the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who popularised the idea that we should blame smartphones for rising rates of mental health problems among young people, has a lot to answer for. Teachers at nearly two-thirds of secondary schools now say they have rules that prevent students from using their phones during the day.
But once you’re a consenting adult, is there really anything wrong with spending a bit of hard-earned downtime watching videos of golden retrievers being adorable on social media? Or taking your phone out while you’re in the supermarket queue to see which world leader’s name President Joe Biden has got wrong this time? Or, er, allowing the marvellous algorithms of social media to guide you into the kitchen and personal life of some woman in Leeds who wants to show you what she’s cooking her husband for dinner when you can’t sleep at two in the morning?
We might need meaning and purpose and psychological richness in our lives, but surely we need a bit of pleasure and hedonism too? Don’t we deserve an escape from the relentless daily grind and doom and gloom of the news?
Relaxation is necessary for a variety of reasons. It keeps our hearts and bodies healthy as well as our minds, helping to alleviate depression and anxiety and all sorts of other psychological ills. If you are still hesitating about booking that holiday, bear in mind a longitudinal study published in 2018 by the European Society of Cardiology of more than 600 male executives, which found that those who took three weeks or less of annual leave had a 37 per cent greater chance of dying over a 30-year period (between middle age and old age) than those who took more than three weeks.
What we get wrong is thinking that just because scrolling mindlessly through social media is unproductive and feels like “time out” we are therefore properly relaxing when we engage in it. There is a qualitative difference between doing things like being with our loved ones, spending time in nature, or reading a great book — and emotional numbing. We shouldn’t conflate them.
Social media is not the only way that we numb our negative feelings and try to flee discomfort. There are all sorts of other vices — like excessive alcohol use, drugs, porn, gambling — that are far more destructive than spending a bit too much time on your smartphone. But while we tend to know for sure that these are bad for us, we think we are giving ourselves a break when we lie on the sofa looking online.
Sometimes we are — a study published in April in PLoS One found that, despite the bad press, spending 20 minutes on social media or watching videos on YouTube not only elicited no negative physiological stress response, but was associated with a decrease in both heart rate and cortisol.
But not all social media platforms are equal. A recent survey by Verily, a digital reputation management company, found that Elon Musk’s X was — rather unsurprisingly — the platform that triggered the most rage among users: just over a quarter of those surveyed said they experienced feelings of anger while using the platform. LinkedIn, meanwhile, was the platform that triggered the most stress — also understandable given that it is used primarily for work (and that it’s just so ghastly).
For Instagram, almost 60 per cent of those surveyed said they had feelings of happiness or joy when they were using the platform. What’s wrong with that? Well, for a start, as the psychiatrist Anna Lembke argues in her book Dopamine Nation, by endlessly seeking pleasure and stimulation from our smartphone — which she describes as the “modern-day hypodermic needle” — we become addicted to such stimulation, and find it harder to find joy in other less immediate things.
But also, by never putting our phones down and never giving ourselves a break from endless stimulation, we are not able to go into the kind of quiet brain state that allows mind-wandering, creativity and deep reflection.
As we all know, if you are not paying for it then you are the product, and merchants in the marketplace of attention are constantly fine-tuning the ways in which they capture our brain space. We must learn to get more creative and intentional about the ways we choose to relax and perhaps, even, to lean into some good-old fashioned boredom.
Read the full article here
