Unplug – Disconnect to Connect

We are a society of voracious consumers of digital information. But are we consuming the right information and is the sheer volume of information good for us?

How Much Screen Time?

Few people are aware of how much time they spend looking at screens during a day or they may be vaguely aware and don’t want to admit how much time it actually is. Still others will become very agitated when I suggest their life might be better with less screen time.

Most often when discussing the topic, I am met with all kinds of rationalization, intellectualization, and minimization about why the person spends so much time, looking at a screen, particularly their phones.

Knowing this was a growing problem, back in 2017, I gave a talk on the subject. At the start of my talk, I asked everyone in the audience to hand their phones to the person on their left. Everyone laughed and nobody moved to actually pass their phone to the person beside them. I commented and asked again. This time the laughter had a different vibe. One of nervousness and discomfort. I eventually let them off the hook and asked them to take notice of their reactions.

As a therapist who spends time helping people with addictions, I knew the feelings the people were having were like the feelings alcoholics and addicts have when I tell them they can never drink or use again.

If you are uncomfortable with the word addiction, you can use the word dependence.  We have become dependent on our devices. And anytime we are dependent on something outside of ourselves to make us feel happy or complete, we are in danger. But that is a topic for another day.

What Else Could You Do Instead?

When doing research for my e-book, Live Your Daydream, I found some interesting and startling information. Keep in mind, this research is from 2019 and it has only gotten worse.

Studies show that North Americans watch an average of 27.5 hours of television per week.  That’s almost 4 hours every day. This study reported by the New York Post, indicated that the average person will watch 78,000 hours of television in their lifetime. That is a whopping 3,250 days or 8.9 years.

It is generally accepted that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of a craft, profession, or sport. This means that you could become a master of 7.8 such pursuits or interests if you eliminated television.

If education is what you have been wanting, it takes roughly 3,000 hours to complete a master’s degree when you factor in classes, research and writing papers. If you cut out just half of your television (39,000 hours) you could complete 13 master’s degrees in that amount of time.

You may not watch television or only rarely. What about social media? Similar to television, the average amount of time spent on social media each day is 2 hours and 42 minutes. That is the equivalent of two and a half workdays every week.

If you are the average North American, you are watching TV and social media 46.75 hours per week. And if you are in the work force, that is 6.75 hours more than you spend at work.

Even if you think you only consume half of what the research shows, it is over 23 hours per week – nearly a full day. None of this includes time spent texting and emailing.

The point is, most of us would never estimate it to be that high if we were asked. Also, interesting to note is that when asked, people are more accurate about the television watching than their social media use because it is easier to track mentally as television shows are usually in thirty-or sixty-minute increments. Social media use creeps up on us as it is often a few minutes here and a few minutes there with no hard starts and stops.

With our mind’s tendency to play tricks and underestimate the time we spend on certain activities it is critical to measure the use of our time if we want to make changes.

I believe that there is a seductive power that pulls us into the realm of complacency, and we need to guard against it so our dreams survive, and our goals can be met.

This seductive power is seen in television, social media, online gaming, substance abuse, and purposeless internet surfing.

When you are engaging in these types of activities, they take you out of being present and being mindful. Often, they are about “numbing” – numbing your reality and numbing your feelings. Sadly, when they keep you from being present, they prevent you from tapping into the single most important thing you need for personal growth and decision making: your feelings.

Don’t get me wrong. I am well aware that some screen time improves our lives, is how we make a living, keeps us connected and can be educational and otherwise healthy. There are definitely upsides but let’s not rationalize our behaviours to the point of ignoring or arguing that there are no downsides.

Try this experiment. Turn off, tune out and unplug for just one day when you are in your regular routine, and see how quickly you become bored.  Most of us know the frustration of having the power go out or our cable provider going offline for even a few minutes during our favorite show. Even when we know we can stream the episode as early as an hour after it is over.

How many of us check the news feeds multiple times per day as if knowing about one more hurricane, another war, another celebrity doing something wrong or another politician yelling about something, is going to make our life better. It isn’t and in fact, it is likely making things worse by increasing our stress, worry, anxiety, depression and impacting our sleep.

How many of us feel the need to add a comment to a controversial Facebook post or news story because it makes us feel better or however else we rationalize wasting our time writing a comment after already having wasted time reading a post or story that has no impact or bearing on our life.

Have you ever commented, had someone comment back and then got into a digital war of words with some stranger who may not even be real?

We argue that we use our screens so we can stay connected but we are probably the most disconnected from people that we have ever been. 

We have all seen it. People sitting in a restaurant, not talking, staring at their phones leaving us wondering if they are texting each other. Or one of my pet peeves – pun intended. People walking their dogs, their dogs looking up at them, crying for attention, unconditionally loving their owners, while their owners are texting or surfing the internet. Buy a goldfish instead of breaking your dog’s heart.

Why Is It Important to Consider?

I offer this information as part of my greater goal of having my listeners evaluating their lives and circumstances and finding resources and a path to their most fulfilling life. The thread connecting all of this is time. When I am trying to help people build lives of purpose that make a difference and energize them, the most frequent stumbling block or objection I hear is “I don’t have time.” It comes in many forms and can even masquerade as “I don’t have enough money.” Time can be traded for money.

Remember, if you are only at half the consumption of the average person, it is 23 hours per week. If you argue that half of that is critical or essential, you are wasting eleven- and one-half hours per week on something that is getting you nothing, nowhere.

How Did We Get Here?

The intent of the social media companies is never about making the world better. The intent is to make money. Remember when we watched YouTube because there were no ads? How long did that last? 

I will pick on Facebook for a bit because, well big company, big target. But make no mistake, social platforms are all the same or want to be.

When Facebook came on the scene, it was billed as a community, where we could come together in a global village of sorts. The fact of the matter is we were misled. It was never about that. Cofounder Sean Parker said it was always about “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” He went on to add at a conference in 2017; “it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other, God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Facebook’s former vice president of user growth had harsh words for Facebook also in 2017 when he told an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that he felt “tremendous guilt” over Facebook. He went on to say: “I think in the back, deep, deep recess of our minds we kind of knew something bad could happen, I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

What Should We Do?

Unplug. At least to an extent. Ask yourself these questions and answer honestly. What do you consume? How much do you consume? How much of your texting and emailing is one hundred percent necessary? Are you using your devices for numbing out? What would your friends, partner, spouse, or other family members say about your screen time if you asked them?

If you are unsure about how much time you are spending on your phone, unless you have a very old phone, you can track it.

I have suggested that to a number of my clients, particularly ones who are stressed, anxious or not sleeping well and I get pushback. “I don’t use it that much, I don’t mindlessly surf or look at social media, or I only use it for important things”, they will say. Must be a lot of important things happening in your life while you are waiting at the doctor’s office, riding public transit, between periods at a sporting event, in the intermission at a concert, during commercials while you are watching TV, while your date goes to the bathroom when you are out for dinner, or when you are walking your dog. You get the idea.  We are hooked.

How Bad Is It?

Well, over 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video are shared on the internet every day.

I’m going to get my geek on here. I love research and I love statistics. But before I do, I want to share an ironic story that flowed from my research for this episode.

I read an article in a highly regarded magazine, probably one of the most reputable magazines you can think of. The name is omitted to protect the guilty. 

This article was about how surfing the net, looking at social media and getting trapped in this black hole of endless information is damaging to our physical and mental health.

This article was about fourteen hundred words which is about half the words in the transcript of this episode. In the body of the article alone, there were seven display ads. Each of them a carousel ad, meaning they changed every few seconds to a new ad. There were twenty-eight links to other websites within the body of the article and there were continuous ads running on the right sidebar. Remember, this was an article denouncing our overuse of the internet. It would be impossible to calculate the number of images I saw in a ten-minute read from just the ads alone.

Here is some interesting research from a different article.

A team of neuroscientists from MIT found that the human brain can process an entire image in as little as thirteen milliseconds. How long is a millisecond? One one thousandth of a second. To get this in perspective, it takes between 100 and 400 milliseconds for you to blink. In the time it takes you to blink, you can see and register between 7 and 28 images.

This is why commercials are getting shorter and are jam packed with images, some you may not think you have seen and registered, but you have.

And you can bet digital marketers know this.

Back in the 70’s we saw between 500 and 1600 ads per day. That’s a lot you might think. And it is. But fast forward some 30 years to 2007 and that number had increased to around 5000 per day and half of over 4000 people surveyed at that time said advertising was out of control. Just 14 years later the number of ads the average person sees is between 7000 and 10,000 per day.

How did these figures increase so much? It isn’t too hard to figure out. All the social media companies and tech giants pushed us to be on our devices, dependent. And then executed their plans which we thought were about building communities and searching for important information but were really about increasing our dependence exponentially and of course, money.

In 2000 that friendly purveyor of knowledge called Google who we used to think was the evolution of hard covered encyclopedias, launched Google AdWords. From zero dollars in advertising revenue in 2000, it grew to $134 billion by 2019. Facebook, remember the company who brough us communities so we could stay in touch with Aunt Martha who can’t get out of her house, entered the advertising arena in 2007 and topped $69 billion in advertising revenue in 2019.

It might not be so bad if it was just advertising and the thousands and thousands of images we are bombarded with each day.  Afterall, we can make choices as to what we buy. But unfortunately, we can’t make choices about what we see, especially given that we can see and register as many as 76 images in one second. Yes, that is how many we can see and process in one second if we can see and process one every 13 milliseconds. Do we really have control?

And what about misinformation and disinformation? Disinformation is when you intentionally share incorrect information and misinformation is when you accidentally share incorrect information.

Here is a great example of disinformation leading to misinformation. During the 2020 US election, Joe Biden, said “Hello Minnesota” at the start of a rally. A twitter post suggested he had messed up and wasn’t aware that he was actually in Florida because a sign in the tweet prominently displayed Tampa, Florida on the stage. By the time Twitter removed the post after discovering the sign had been digitally manipulated and Biden was in fact, in Minnesota, the post had been re-tweeted over one million times. One piece of disinformation exploded into over one million pieces of misinformation in a matter of minutes.

In the face of such a glut of information, how are we to know what is real and what isn’t. Obviously, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter aren’t the best choices for credible information, but it is increasingly difficult to know what news sources to trust. According to the International Center for Journalists, only 11-25% of journalists globally use social media content verification tools.

How Does It Impact Us?

As this is a relatively new and rapidly increasing phenomenon, the research is developing and most of it has been targeted at youth.

Research does show that screen time contributes to poor sleep, eye strain and worsened mental health in adults. There has been lots written about the negative impact of the blue light our screens emit. Our eyes do not do a good job of blocking blue light. Exposure to blue light can influence when our bodies produce melatonin which impacts our circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms are the natural physical, mental and behavioural changes our bodies go through in a 24 hour period. Interruption of circadian rhythms play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, sleep disorders, and cognitive function.

That alone should be enough to make you consider how much time you spend on your screens, but we haven’t even talked about damage to your eyes. Constant exposure to blue light can cause damage to retinal cells and contribute to macular degeneration. Children tend to be more at risk for eye problems because their eyes absorb more blue light than adults. Be careful what behaviour you are modelling for your children.  Research also shows that we blink about 30% less when looking at a screen than when we are not. This contributes to dry eyes and eye fatigue.

Of course, screen time can also contribute to back, neck and muscle problems due to strain from too much sitting and poor posture.

Some of the other effects are increased stress due to information overload and disproportionately high amounts of negative or worrisome content as well as reduced human contact and interaction. The amount of negative content is a significant contributor to depression and anxiety.

We are also developing ever-increasing need for rapid fire, constant stimulation. This, in and of itself, significantly decreases time for quiet introspection, personal growth and mindfulness.

There is another, far more dangerous effect of too much screen time. That is the erosion of critical thinking. Not only do we not have the time for critical thinking and healthy debate because we are spending most of our free time on devices, but we have also lost the ability to think critically because we just Google any question we have and accept the answer we find at face value. We don’t want to exert any mental effort considering what the answer might be because we might miss a funny cat video on TikTok.

When we lose the ability as a society to think critically and discuss a topic and consider opposing viewpoints, we are open to being further lead to outcomes marketers and governments want for us.

And when we do search for information, we tend to believe information that confirms the belief we already hold. This is called confirmation bias. We even watch the news feeds that most closely align with the beliefs we have rather than expend the energy to think “maybe that isn’t true” or could be there be another viewpoint that is worth considering.

And this isn’t just in North America.  All over the world, people are becoming more and more polarized, reading only information that aligns with opinions they already hold. It is increasingly becoming us against them, instead of we.

Politicians don’t debate. They hurl insults and divide, hoping they can conquer. And the populace follows suit doing exactly what their leaders do.  We buy into this new norm because we are bombarded with it until it appears normal, and worse, acceptable.  It isn’t.

What is the Solution?

I wish I knew but I do have some ideas that may help. One of the articles I read preparing for this episode said that the question isn’t how much time is too much for adults, but what are adults looking at. I agree to an extent, but not completely.

Here are a couple of things to consider rather than just what you consume. It is hard enough being a parent these days and even harder if you are not modelling appropriate behaviour for your children. One of my mother’s favorite sayings was “Do as I say, not as I do.” This is just a seemingly wise way to say, I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. It never worked on me, and neither will telling your kids you are cutting back on their screen time while you keep doing what you have been doing – spending 2- 3 hours per day on your phone. Your kids will rebel, question you and if you don’t change, they will resent you for your hypocrisy.

The author of this study’s suggestion about it being entirely about what you watch also doesn’t consider the mental and physical health risks. These are closely related to how much you watch not just what you watch.

I think a balanced approach is best.  First, know, not just think you know, how much screen time you spend in a day or week.  I suggest monitoring it for at least a week because it can go up and down significantly depending on the day and your need to numb.

Once you know that, be brutally honest about how much of it is needed.  Then look at the platforms and sites you are frequenting. Are they healthy, educational, and reliable sources of information?

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes we need some entertainment and a few laughs or distractions. But hours of cat videos, internet challenges, or people behaving badly at Walmart probably aren’t the best use of time.

Your diet is not only what you eat. It is what you watch, what you listen to and what you read. Be mindful.

My last recommendation is to consider a digital detox. My wife, Barbara and I did our first digital detox last summer. We went into the mountains and stayed where there was no cell service or internet. It was heaven. Hiking, enjoying the beauty of nature, conversations, and all without the daily distractions of being constantly connected to everyone and everything.  We were present. And already planning our digital detox for this summer.  Give it a try and if you feel anxious doing it, that means you need to do it more often.

Trust me, everything will keep running without you checking on it every two minutes.