Digital Detox
From Mindless Scrolling to Mindfulness
We often indulge in mindless scrolling and binge watching. We lose track of time, and gain unproductive hours, poorer grades, lesser efficiency along with physical and mental health issues. Let’s explore the dynamics of digital usage, why we need a digital detox, and how to address the need for mindfulness.
By Sreemoyee Tarafder
A recent report published by the Times of India points out that six out of 10 students in the age bracket of 9-17 years spend over three hours daily on various social media or gaming sites. Seventeen percent of parents said their children were online for over six hours every day. The survey also highlighted how more than three hours of daily social media interactions increased mental health issues like depression and anxiety and physical health issues like headaches, backaches and fatigue among users.
Families overall spend longer hours over the phone and on the internet. As a collective we have resorted to isolating ourselves, to texting and reel watching more than communicating verbally and in real time.
At a live performance, onlookers/audiences feel compelled to record the event with their devices, without savoring it with their sense organs! So, more and more time is being spent glued to screens, addictively looking on, gathering information without assimilating it.
As a clinical psychologist, I work with children, adolescents and young adults that regularly use the internet and digital means of communication and socialization to a great extent. This article will explore the dynamics of digital usage and provide useful tips to navigate around this with mindfulness and self monitoring.
Internet addiction
Problematic internet addiction or excessive Internet use is characterized by excessive or poorly controlled preoccupations, urges, or behaviors regarding screen usage and internet access that lead to impairment. Internet addiction has three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, and excessive text messaging.
Shreya(name changed), a 16 year old female student, walked into my chamber with her parents. She was quite a cheerful and chirpy adolescent, and we started talking. She told me she did not know why her parents got her to talk to me, but probably it was because she did not like to study from her books and preferred to do it from the internet, from YouTube Videos. When I spoke to her parents, they told me that Shreya was constantly using her phone, was mostly active on social networking sites and majorly neglecting her studies. Her grades had dropped, she was scoring poorly and would not even eat or go to the washroom without her phone. When urged to study, she would do it from digital mediums and not from textbooks, often neglecting her school and tuitions. Several attempts at persuasion, cajoling her, threatening her, have failed to stop her from using her phone and other devices. She was continuously investing over 10 hours in a day towards them.
I meet several people who have developed a very unhealthy equation with their devices viz a viz the internet. Zayn(name changed) studies in Class VIII and cannot keep himself from using his laptop. He is not a “popular guy” and seeks solace in playing solitary video games online where he wins, resolves problems, and chases his dreams in virtual reality. In the virtual world his lack of social skills do not bother him. He is rewarded for accomplishing his mission. I was involved in a study of online gamers, Temperament and executive functions in videogamers: A case control study, comprising 30 children (ages ranging from 8 to 15 years) who played video games (computer games) at least 14 hours in a week. They were compared to a group of 30 non-gamers, who did not play video games. Interestingly, results showed that on attentional tasks - dealing with divided attention and sustained attention, gamers did better than the non gamers. Gamers were assessed to be better in planning and set-shifting as well with better skills of contingency management and flexibility. There is a lot of research evidence that is contrary to our findings, where video gaming and excessive internet usage has been associated with sleep deprivation leading to physical and psychological complications.
Chris(name changed) is a college freshman and boasts of how he maintains several virtual relationships with multiple partners over dating sites, giving them the impression that he is committed to each one. He uses social media skilfully so as to not mess up his “game”, using different profile pictures and names, even taking the trouble to create different virtual “personalities” to see what works best with the “girls”. A web-based survey of 257 respondents conducted in Israel found that about one-third reportedly engage in online deception. The researchers reported that frequent users deceive online more than infrequent users, young users more than old, and competent users more than the non-competent. According to the survey, some people deceived others to protect their privacy but the most common motivation to deceive online was to “play”. That gave respondents a sense of enjoyment while engaging in online deception.
Online deception
A study we conducted in my department on online deception consisted of two groups of undergraduate and postgraduate students, 68 male and 97 female, ranging from 18-24 years of age. The finding indicated that males who were more anxious were likely to deceive more and females who were more relaxed and stable, having low social desirability were more likely to deceive others on online platforms (Social desirability is the tendency for people to represent themselves in a favorable way).
When we looked into problematic internet use among 227 participants from high school, college, and university, results revealed significant differences in terms of impulsivity, depression, somatic symptoms, anxiety and insomnia, social dysfunction, psychiatric morbidity and conflict among frequent internet users among school students. Higher state anxiety, impulsivity, depression, and social dysfunction was seen among frequent internet users from college and university.
Real world disconnect
Significant association has been revealed between internet addiction and the hours a family spent together, highlighting how important family factors are when we are looking into internet addiction among students. Our study revealed that when the communication channels are direct and robust, family members feel more connected to each other and do not seek support virtually. However, when the family is not cohesive or synergized in their goals, the dependence on the internet and the virtual community grows. Conversely, adolescents often seek company of cohorts and may not respond favorably to parental attempts at communication and conversation. This results in a double bind causing isolation and alienation on both ends, with children and their parents growing apart.
It is definitely true that it is much easier now to remain connected to friends and family through the virtual medium, but often the warmth of that presence is missed. My clients often tell me “I do have friends, but on the phone”. Since the friends are not available in real time and space, the loneliness that ensues is more palpable, the isolation more painful. Simply being a click or a call away may not serve the purpose when a partner needs to be held, a friend needs to be hugged or a child needs to be comforted.
Consequences of digital overload
I teach a postgraduate course on cognitive psychology which has a module on memory. Do you know how memory is encoded? It starts with the sensory register where the brain obtains information from the environment. Within a few seconds, the brain gathers information passively through visual and auditory cues. When one attends to the plethora of information that is received through the sensory register, it gets passed on to the short term memory store.
Short-term memory formation can only begin by paying attention to the information received from the world around us. The question is: are we looking up from our devices to give our cognitive faculties a chance to absorb, select, fully process and decode that information? Perhaps not. A very recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, where they studied more than 7000 mother and child pairs, found that children’s screen time was significantly associated with a higher risk of developmental delays in infants and toddlers in terms of communication, fine motor, problem-solving, personal and social skills domains.
An Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study conducted in 2016-2018 in the USA reported children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests, and some children with more than seven hours a day of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning.
We are increasingly being programmed to not attend mindfully, to not be “present” in the present moment. Scrolling robs us of our ability to fully cognize our environment, process the flow of information around us into meaningful bits and make memories. Easy access to tablets, cell phones, and the internet is being provided, which is discouraging children and adolescents to explore their environment to its fullest potential.
Age no bar
The entertainment being provided by the multiple sources of infotainment has us hooked to our screens. Young or old alike, we are mindlessly sucked into the vortex of the digital web with our cognitive senses having to fight a veritable battle to resist these temptations. Our dependence on our devices is making us lose our ability to retain information, our ability to wait and savor delayed gratification.
Is there no way out of this incessant need to stay online? To constantly check our phones for updates - to post, to click, to tag, to share? Through digital detox - we learn to go from being addicted to using the virtual space responsibly and manage our times better, and I have seen it working well with children, adolescents and adults alike. Internet addiction and digital distraction can be handled skilfully if we know how to use the super skill of mindfulness.
Digital detox
What is mindfulness, you may wonder? Mindfulness is our ability to immerse ourselves in the present. To be wholly attentive to the “here and now”, to be attentive to one's moment -to-moment existence. Although people are talking about it around the world, the roots of mindfulness are embedded in Buddhist philosophy and meditative practices. A famous definition of mindfulness by Kabat-Zinn states that one is paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. The goal of attending to a singular object or event at a given time with all our senses is at the heart of mindfulness practices. It is also important to understand why we are practicing mindfulness, i.e. the intention behind the practice and the attitude with which we are embracing the practice is also very important. The coming together of intention, attention and attitude of mindfulness can bring about the change that we are looking for.
Research on mindful meditators has shown that self regulation leads to self exploration and thereafter to self-liberation. Although the quest for self liberation may not be aspired by all, mindfulness practices can bring about steady improvements in self regulation and self monitoring. Only when we attend to our senses fully do we realize the enormity of our capacities to perceive and cognize. Our inner mechanisms are activated if we give our faculties a chance to halt; to pay attention and realize the spectacle our senses are producing for us on a daily basis.
Mindfulness begins with observing the operations of one’s internal and external experience with 100% attention. This requires a great degree of alertness that is not possible if we are multi-tasking or are cued to our devices. The cuing has to be internal, so as to be deeply aware of the contents of one’s consciousness.
This practice will take time to develop but can be started with simple steps like being acutely attentive to climbing stairs, taking a shower, chewing and eating food slowly, writing with a pen on a piece of paper - and noticing it.
For example, brushing one's teeth can be converted to a mindful activity by attending to movements of the fist while we brush, noticing how the toothpaste froths, how we cleanse our mouth, how the water feels in the oral orifice, when we are brushing our molars, premolars, incisors or canines. A task which we often do in a state of half-slumber can be transformed to a mindful activity, where we are completely focused on the mechanism, with intention, attention and attitude.
How to practice mindfulness
The following techniques may be helpful if you want to replace mindless scrolling and emptiness with mindfulness and intention.
- Don't reel it, just feel it: Choose to not join the bandwagon where purpose or intent is lost very easily.
- Be present, in the here and now: Being mindful of the time, the place, the smell, the feel of the moment will add meaningfully to your wellbeing.
- Do not record it, receive it: Believe it or not, it is interesting to receive sensory signals without filters/lenses and instead with your own senses.
- Avoid multitasking: Choosing mindfulness over multitasking will result in optimal utilization of the day and produce better efficiency as the brain functions better when it attends to one task at a time.
- Remove distractions: De-clutter by removing time wasters through the use of parental controls, zen mode or digital wellbeing options on your cell phones and devices.
- Set time limits: Ration time being spent online or with digital devices. Set a particular time for social media or replying to texts and emails to help time management and better work-life control.
- Enhance self-care: Make sure you follow the 8+8+8 Rule for self-care. Allocate 8 hours of the day to work, 8 hours to rest & sleep, and the remainder of 8 hours for all other activities like leisure, healthcare, spiritual practices, self care activities and household chores.
- Jog your brain: Do not dull your brain with endless scrolling. Add jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, sudoku, or vocabulary builders to your routine. Activities like dancing, aerobic exercise, Zumba, playing an instrument, listening to music, taking a new route to get somewhere, or learning a new skill or a language will help your brain to retain its sharpness and agility.
- Physical Exercise: If there is one thing that you can do to improve your physical and mental wellbeing, it is to take out time to move your body on a regular basis. It keeps health concerns at bay and improves your mood by generating endorphins, the feel good chemicals in our brains that promote sleep and boost self confidence.
- Self-Presentation and Authenticity: Focus on intention and attitude mindfully to help understand how you wish to project yourself on social media and digital platforms. Foster a positive self and body image, but most importantly a positive philosophy of life!