My attempts to understand my phone addiction and how it both it is the cause and effect of my anxiety
I have found that one really effective to manage my old friend anxiety is through rituals. And so I’ve built many (seriously, many) daily practices, some of which have stayed unchanged for years, while others continue to evolve and change. My absolute favourite ritual, and one with the most power to bring peace into my day is what I think of as my Morning Timeblock. I wake up at 5 (or 5ish), make coffee, and sit down at my desk to write — first my morning pages, and then some other piece of writing, like this one. The house is quiet and my awareness of the present moment is the sharper than it ever is for the rest the day. Wherever it is in my brain where well-being gets stored, this is the time it happens.
The scratching of pen on paper, the smell of coffee, my fingers clicking on the keyboard, the slowly changing color of the sky — I’m sharply aware of each of these movements, and each one adds to my store of well-being. It’s a store I will dip into at multiple points in my day when events and human interactions wear me down.
One very important element of the Morning Timeblock is that I do not look at my phone. If I am writing on my laptop, I don’t connect to the internet. So at least until 8 AM, it’s just me and my solitude — no email, no text, nothing.
Sometimes, after I write, I also meditate. Sometimes I don’t. The writing itself is my contemplative practice. If the weather is nice, I head out for a run. Or I do some yoga. Only when I’m done experiencing all three grand essentials — solitude, writing, exercise — do I feel ready to pick up my phone and see what the world has to say to me. Through the day, if something happens to flusters me, all I have to do is remember the morning and instantly, magically, I feel a little bit better.
But sometimes I’m not able to build the store of well-being. There are days when I wake up late. The morning rituals are important for mind and body both, but so is sleep. If I go to bed late, or if I sleep badly, my body takes the decision to turn the alarm off and go off to sleep. I’m not a pretty sight when this happens.
Picture of a “not ideal” morning:
I wake up at 7.30 AM. The sky is a lovely bright blue, and I look at it with loathing because it’s an annoying sign than I’ve missed my morning timeblock, that I have to wait a full day before I will get to experience the greyish dawn that I love. There is activity around the house, other inmates of the house are awake, the coffee is already made, the newspaper has arrived. I say good morning cheerfully (I think) but I’m suppressing a rising irritation with everything in the world. With every passing minute, my distress is increasing.
I tell myself hey, it’s a good thing that you respected the body’s need to sleep. The body is wiser than the mind, remember? It decided that this particular morning, rest and recovery was more important than the ritual. But the mind, confused and anxious, does not get this — she likes predictability and patterns. Waking up past the magic timeblock is a serious loss of pattern and it frightens her.
When in the grip of anxiety, my mind is like a ninja warrior. She is armed and dangerous, and looking for demons to fight. That there are no visible demons around us — the humans in the house are kind and loving — is not reassuring at all. Nope, it’s actually worse because clearly something is lurking in the shadows and will show up soon. Deep breaths, chest tight, my mind is ready for a fight.
I have been working to build a contemplative practice, but I’m not very good at it yet. Up to a certain point, I can be the Observer who is aware of that her mind has turned into the ninja fighter. I know I’m supposed to continue to observe the anxiety, to ride the waves of worry. I know I’m supposed to use this discomfort as an opportunity to deepen my ability to observe my mind. But that’s hard. What I do instead is the easier solution — I try to distract her, to reassure her.
And where do I look for reassurance? I check my phone. Anyone who has ever recognized that we are addicted to our phones will know what happens next — the discomfort gets increased by a factor of ten thousand. Bam! Bam! Bam! The ninja gets hit by missiles of to-do lists launched by email. Gallons of cortisol were added to the buckets of cortisol she was already carrying.
Sheesh.
Phone addiction is real. And it’s frighteningly powerful.
I know something that I did not know five years ago — that discomfort is a default setting of life, that it’s an inseparable part of the human condition. The only definitive way to stop feeling uncomfortable and dissatisfied is to die. And because I am not keen to die any time soon, I am learning to open my heart to daily dissatisfaction, to make friend with it, to use it. It’s a new, fragile friendship and it’s constantly under threat from the demon device.
The demon whispers, “what is this nonsense about ‘paying attention to the discomfort’? I have a better idea — don’t pay attention to it! Distract yourself from it! Here, let’s browse reddit for a while, it’ll be a great way to ignore these unpleasant feelings, and maybe they will go away.” Spoiler alert — they do not go away. They wait patiently while I spend an hour reading AITA stories on Reddit, and then they come back with an increased intensity. What I am feeling now is no longer the plain and simple default discomfort; it is now discomfort magnified by the realisation that I’ve lost an hour; that I continue to lose dozens of hours in doing things that add nothing to my finite human experience.
Every day, I can see how my phone addiction adds spiralling, increasing layers of pain to the anguish that is a regular part of the human condition, the anguish that is supposed to be confronted head on as a first step of of learning Buddhist contemplative practice. Basically, Anguish→ leads to phone addiction → leads to more intense anguish→ and so on.
And to call it addiction is not a hyperbola. My attempts to tame the demon would be funny if they weren’t so sad. I uninstalled the Book of faces, got hooked on to what-is-up; uninstalled that, promptly discovered and got addicted to the Gram which; eliminated that, only to rediscover the joys of Yellow-dit and Birdsound.
All those philosophers and contemplatives who tell you to observe and ride your anxiety — did they even have to deal with email and twitter and reddit? I love Alan Watts so much, but can we please acknowledge that this is one problem he did not have? Can we please acknowledge that the buddhas in the pre-algorithm universe might have found it slightly easier to observe their mind when it was not under attack from addictive and frightening technology? It took our species so long to open our eyes to addictions to socially acceptable substances like sugar and tobacco, so it’s likely that it will be a while before there is any real recognition of the threat from our devices.
We’re in a war, our minds vs algorithms, and I’m prepared for a long fight.
