Buried in Digital Sand: looking at digital distraction during hard times

I’ve written before about how social media and the attention economy have robbed us of our ability to stay focused and live our lives. It’s hard enough to contend with those forces when thing are going good, but what about when we’re not in a good place? If we’re in a bad mental place or have too little time on our hands, it can be especially hard to escape the pull of these platforms. They give us the illusion of being a respite from the stress of modern life. Opening Instagram feels like going to another dimension where you can forget about real life and get a break from whatever you're dealing with. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but this break from reality is not a break at all. It’s not the same as taking some time to stretch or breathe. Despite momentarily turning your brain off, once you return to reality you feel just as bad as you did before. We can’t deal with difficult emotions or recover from the chaos of our lives if we’re retreating to our phones. Sure spending a few minutes here and there is fine but I think we all have a real issue where we pull out our phones when trying to avoid our feelings or distract ourselves during precious moments of downtime. 

We all know too well what burnout feels like. Whether it’s school or work, we’re all working longer hours where we never truly unplug. Our work emails and assignments are always just a tap away. We spend all day on our computers and phones trying to stay on top of it all. Switching from one app or website to another for hours on end and most of us don’t get a real break from it all. Our brains don’t get a chance to recover from it all which makes us feel like shit. Then because we feel like shit, we look for anything to help us feel a little better about this digital dystopia we’re grinding through with hunched shoulders. That’s where social media and all of the apps longing for our attention come it. In the race for our attention these apps have become extremely addicting. They’re designers have expertly taken advantage of reward centers so we get dopamine rushes from using their products. So whenever we have a minute of downtime our immediate impulse is to open these apps. What’s worse is that the busier we are, the more we use our phones as a crutch. When you have an hour of downtime you’re more inclined to go for a walk or do something meaningful. If you only have 10 minutes though, the only thing you can think of is to sit on Instagram for 10 minutes because the thing about social media is that there is no minimum or maximum time you can use it. While these momentary distractions might seem innocuous, they just add to the burnout. Scrolling through social media occupies any mental space that would be used to recover from the constant screen time our lives demand from us. Despite taking a “break” it doesn’t feel like one, you’re just as tired as you were. There’s no intentional recovery going on. You’re just allowing your mental space to be taken up by an endless stream of posts that blend in with the endless stream of notifications coming in from work and school. While it’s nice to have a distraction from work, our mental health is taking a toll because our brains aren’t getting the breaks they need. 

It’s not just burnout that social media takes advantage of. The distraction of these attention-grabbing apps becomes even more addicting when we’re depressed. Again, using social media releases dopamine because of how

the apps are designed. It’s like a casino where you get a little reward so you keep coming back in hopes of getting a larger reward. We keep scrolling in a hunt for our next hit from a post that triggers something in us. This is extremely potent for people with depression. Depression saps your energy and motivation. You just want anything that can make you feel better or forget about how you feel. Dopamine does exactly like this. Now there are positive ways to get this dopamine like exercise or talking with friends, but unfortunately, social media does too. It’s more accessible too, it’s available and any time. It’s a lot easier to pull out your phone than go to the gym. There’s also no time limit, so you can just keep getting the dopamine you crave and put your brain on autopilot so you don’t have to feel anything. Positive things also take more effort than social media. When you’re happy you have more energy and motivation to do things that fill you up. You want to go out in the world and live your life. You want to have new experiences instead of sitting on your phone. This isn’t a shot at those who are depressed. I suffered from depression for most of my life and I empathize deeply with that feeling of wanting to just shut down and go on autopilot. The issue with that though is that you can’t get better that way. In order to get better we have to get in touch with our emotions and work through them. We have to truly understand what we’re feeling and why we feel the way we do. If we spend all our time with our heads in the sand of social media we can’t do that. By using our phones as a distraction from what’s going on we keep ourselves trapped in the cycle of depression. 

Depression isn’t the only time when being with your thoughts and emotions is important. In those moments is where we can actually rest and recover from the constant stream of information we’re subjected to. We can’t just constantly run from one thing to the next, and then fill the moments in between with mindless scrolling. If we do that, we’ll never truly be living. We’ll constantly just be chasing something that we can never get. We need moments of stillness to integrate all of our thoughts and emotions. Life is not meant to be avoided, especially when it gets tough. It’s those moments when we can truly get insight into who we are and what we need to do. Distractions are nice, at times we all need them, but what’s the cost of filling in every moment of free time with other people's thoughts and digital noise? What’s the cost of trying to feel better with cheap hits of dopamine that never get us any closer to actually moving forward? I know it’s rough out there right now, and we all want things that help us deal with that, but our phones aren’t doing it. Let’s try to take back our time especially during moments of chaos or depression so that we can rest, recover, and live our best lives.