In the past 30 years consumption of digital content and interactions with digital devices has becomes a central feature of the contemporary modern lifestyle. Many people spend more time during the day with their screens than with another person. Our screen life has expanded and expanded to the point where it has overtaken our entire lives. The average American now spends between an estimated 10 and 12 hours per day consuming consuming media of all kinds (including broadcast TV and radio). Now that may sound incredible, but reflect on your own media habits for a moment.
What do you do when you are at work?
People who work in an office spent most of their working day on a computer, which means that in addition to the screen time numbers listed above they spend an additional average of 6 hours a day in front of their computers screens.
What do you during your leisure time?
Again, for most people leisure time is spent watching Netflix or TV on some kind of digital screen or surfing social media apps on their phone or tablet.
What do you do during the times in-between being at work and being at home?
If you are like most people, it is engaging with your smartphone in one form or another. We are on our smartphones while driving, while riding the bus, while waiting in line at the super market, and even while we are eating.
Because we live in a pervasive state of digital informational content and media exposure, it is important for us to be intentional about managing the information we are exposed to and limiting the time we spend in these states.
Why is this important? Because our brains and our attention are constantly being bombarded by incoming short-term informational signals.
Processing all that information is cognitively taxing and physiologically stressful. It leaves us mentally depleted and in a state of perpetual information brain fog. And our bodies respond to this chronic over-stimulation with a chronic stress response. The chronic activation of our stress-response system is one of the “silent killers” of our day. It is implicated in everything from obesity to addiction, depression, anxiety, and heart disease.
And the short-term nature of this information leads our attention span to adjust to high-frequency short-term content. So our attention span shrinks and our ability to deeply think through complex ideas diminishes. Furthermore, the more we are engaged with this kind of content the harder it is to turn it off, in a cycle that often bears a striking resemblance to an addictive process.
Finally, much of the content we are being exposed to is negative in nature. It is primed to trigger strongly activating negative emotions, such as fear, anger, envy, outrage, or feelings of inferiority and superiority. Emotionally charged content hijacks our attention system, making it very hard to ignore. We are wired to care about emotionally charged things. These emotions also prime us for action, and importantly for advertisers, prime us to purchase and consume. And chronically stimulated negative emotions are stressful for our bodies and lead our bodies to chronically secrete low-levels of stress hormones day-in and day-out.
Emotionally charged content hijacks our attention system, making it very hard to ignore.
For all these reasons, we need to apply the model of hygiene to our digital lives. And we need to take our digital hygiene as seriously as we do our physical hygiene and self-care. Over-consuming media, spending too much time glued to screens, and consuming large amounts of negative content are detrimental to our wellbeing in very similar ways that poor nutrition, poor sleep hygiene, and sedentary lifestyles are. We need good digital hygiene practices that help us reclaim our attention and keep our minds and our bodies in a more balanced state.
Over-consuming media, spending too much time glued to screens, and consuming large amounts of negative content are detrimental to our wellbeing in very similar ways that poor nutrition, poor sleep hygiene, and sedentary lifestyles are
Most people living in the contemporary urbanized world cannot or will not live without digital content, so total abstinence is not a realistic solution for most people. However, a harm-reduction approach can minimize the negative effects of digital content while allowing us to get the benefits that our smartphones, computers, and the internet offer. Below are some basic principles for digital hygiene designed to address and reverse the adverse affects described above. I recommend it to many of my clients dealing with chronic stress and over-work.
BASIC PRINCIPLES FOR DIGITAL HYGIENE
Reduce Aggregate Screen Time
Start by tracking how much time you are spending in front of all screens over the course of a day. Screens include the television, the computer, the smartphone, the tablet, and video-gaming consoles. The goal is to get a realistic assessment of your total screen time and to change how you view and think about your media consumption from one based on a notion of discreet devices and individual activities into a global viewpoint that looks at all digital media in aggregate. Thinking about your aggregate screen time will help keep you from cutting-out one type of content only to replace it with another (i.e. cutting back on TV but spending more time on Youtube on your phone instead). People who do this exercise are often amazed at how much time they spent in front of a screen during the day. Once you’ve assessed your total screen time, cut back in areas that are optional. The goal of this process is to reduce the total amount of time you spend in front of any electronic screen consuming any digital media.
Remove Addictive Gaming and Social Media Apps From Smartphone
One of the simplest ways to cut back on screen time is to eliminate the highly addictive applications that travel with you everywhere you go and prove an irresistible temptation. This is like having a sweet tooth and stuffing your backpack full of donuts, candies, and chocolates when you leave the house. Of course you’re going to over-indulge! The highly addictive apps mainly consist of social media apps, gaming apps, and some endless scrolling news apps. Delete them from your smart-phone and access them only via computer. This alone can dramatically cut down on your screen time.
Replace Digital Content With Non-Digital Content
Read physical books rather than reading books on a smartphone or tablet. E-book readers with e-ink lie somewhere in-between, they are definitely preferable to reading on a smartphone but a physical book would be better. Other examples are playing physical games (board games, puzzles, etc.) instead of computer games and reading physical magazines and newspapers instead of digital ones.
Severely Limit Negative Content
Negative content is content that is designed to stimulate emotions such as anger, outrage, fear, shame, disgust, and inferiority and/or superiority in relation to others. Negative content is much worse for our mental and emotional health than more neutral forms of media and digital content. Unfortunately due to our current political and economic landscape, negative content is found everywhere. Negative content includes fear-mongering news that emphasizes war, catastrophe, violent crime, and political fighting; articles and videos that highlight outrageous but trivial events to capture your attention (i.e. click-bait, gotcha journalism, social diatribes, etc.); shows or programming that highlight or emphasize human violence, people treating others inhumanely, or any kind of content that portrays one group of people as inferior or despicable. This also includes social media call-outs and shaming and exposure to so-called online “flame-wars,” comment-section fights, and all forms of trolling. This kind of content is a dead-weight loss for your wellbeing.
Prioritize Outputs Over Inputs
Time spent creating content is preferable to time spent consuming content. When you are creating content it is like you are turning your brain from receive mode to transmit mode. The brain and the mind operates very differently when they are trying to express, create or formulate something than when they are receiving or consuming an incoming signal. By putting something out in the world you are switching from passive recipient to active participant. The brain and the body feel the difference because they no longer feel helpless and instead feel empowered by expressing will into the world. This helps to counter the chronic stress from being bombarded by negative content. And if you can, create analogue content (playing an instrument, singing, painting, writing by hand) as it involves less screen time as well.
Avoid Devices Upon Waking And When Going To Bed
The best times to cut-back on digital screen time are upon waking and when going to bed. If you can cut digital media out of the first 60 minutes of your day, you are much more likely to be judicious about it the rest of the day and many people feel the difference right away. Cutting digital media out during the last 60 minutes of the day will help your mind to relax and give you a much better chance of getting a restful night’s sleep. And poor sleep quality is one of the major effects of night-time screen usage.
Stop Distracting On Your Phone During “In Between” Times
Many people have become habituated to using their phones as a time-killer when they are doing boring tasks, errands, or chores. For example, people waiting in line alone are very likely to be using their phones to distract or be productive rather than face the tedium of waiting. Make it a habit of using these times to simply be present. Look around, look at the people around you, see what’s going on. Keep your attention focused on the physical world around you. This is the essence of Mindfulness, which makes a great ally in good digital hygiene.
Avoid Digital Multitasking
Much of digital media consumption these days is spent multi-tasking. This is cognitively taxing and has been shown to reduce focus, memory recall and attention span and to increase distractibility. It is literally the opposite of being Mindful. If you are going to consume digital media, focus solely on one at a time and avoid things like mindlessly scrolling through your phone when watching a movie.
Spend More Time Outside and In Nature
One the hallmarks of digital screen time is that it often occurs indoors. This means that by definition it reduces time spent outside. Time spent outside is associated with many beneficial health outcomes, especially time spent in nature. Reduce your screen time and replace it with time spent in nature, in parks, or walking around outside.
Spend More Time Physically Active
In the vast majority of cases digital media consumption is a physically sedentary activity. We sit and watch or interact with a screen. Replace some of your screen time with physical activity, such as walking, running, hiking, biking, anything that gets your body moving. Physical exercise has obvious and well known health benefits and it provides an excellent antidote to the physical passivity of digital media consumption.
Spend More Time With People
Screen time often, but not always, is time spent alone. This is one of the problems with a digital-first lifestyle; it tends to displace things most people need to be happy. Replace some amount of time spent on a screen with a non-screen social activity with a friend or a group. Communicating via txt-message does not count in this approach. A phone call is highly preferable to messaging in terms of creating human or social connection and also helps to displace screen time. But in-person human experiences are best. Take a class, start a new hobby, or volunteer in something interesting or meaningful to you. These are all ways of creating a non-screen-time structure in your life.
Do a Digital Detox
Take a 1-day break from all digital content and see how you feel as a result. This is obviously best done on a weekend when you don’t have work demands. More and more yoga and wellness retreat are offering digital detox as part of their retreat experience and there are even dedicated digital detox retreats now being offered whose primary purpose is to create a digital-free space. One easy way to do a 1-day detox and put many of these habits into practice is to organize an all-day hike with a friend or group of friends. By doing this, you will be spending an entire day outside, in nature, moving your body, and socializing. Notice how you feel afterwards and how it differs from a typical day spent in front of screens.