I try not to think too much about how technology is ruining me but, off the top of my head, here’s one obvious way: the muscle behind my right shoulder blade has been lengthened and weakened from spending every day of my life at a laptop that it can barely keep my arm in place.
We’re always told that our desk posture will leave us looking like prawns in the longterm, which isn’t great news. But, rather than the physical aspect, I’m more concerned about the animalistic, hormonal bond I have with technology. When I come to a standstill at any point in my real life - like finding the right word for a sentence in this very piece - my hand reaches towards my phone without instruction from my brain. I open Instagram, my emails, WhatsApp, anything I think that will give me the juicy rush of satisfaction that I’m not able to give myself by completing the task in front of me. Sometimes it works: an email with an offer of work! A like on social media! A text from a friend saying something nice or comforting! An adrenaline rush that leaves me satisfied. Mostly there’s nothing waiting for me except a new piece of content designed to keep me inside the app until I realise how ridiculous my hunt for affirmation was, close it, then repeat at a later minute.
I’ve been uncomfortable about that reality for a while. I hate how easily distracted I have become and how that isn’t an accident but a side effect of successful design by billionaires. But I hate it even more that it leaves me unable to work out what I actually want and need. In the example above, what I need is to sit in the discomfort and feel the release of achievement after finishing the hard thing.
As another example, my fitness tracker constantly telling me how I feel stops me from working it out. Recently, the calibration on my watch went bananas, meaning it would tell me I was hitting my max heart rate during gentle runs. I would spiral into questioning my fitness and forcing myself to slow down. Really, the best way to tell if something is hard is to ask yourself if it feels hard.
Interrupted interoception
But that interoception is hard, if not impossible, with technology. My watch made me begin to believe that I was sprinting, even though I wasn’t. The link between my brain and my body was breaking.
Explaining that mind-to-body conversation, Dr Sahib Khalsa, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, told NPR’s Body Electric podcast: “If I asked you to tell me, are you breathing quickly? Or are you are you hungry, or are you having a stomach cramp or bloating? You could readily kind of tune into your body and tell me what you were feeling.” But, he continues, “Most the time you're not aware of most of the things that are happening inside of your body. Oftentimes, it's not until there's actually a meaningful change that happens, like your bladder fills and you notice, ‘Oh, my bladder is full. I need to pee otherwise I'm gonna be really uncomfortable’.” The talk goes the other way, too: our minds can sense threat and in turn dial up our heart rate ready to attack.
Yet how often have you ignored, or not even felt, the need to pee when sat scrolling? “We are increasingly being bombarded by sensory signals, whether it's what we're looking at on the Internet,” explains Dr Khalsa, and those signals override what our internal body is trying to alert our brain to. Research shows that we can both over- and under-eat when distracted by technology, completely unaware of how hungry we are and how filling our meals are. It also shows that we completely lose track of time when engaged with a screen. The way we register our level of tiredness can depend on both how distracted we are by our inbox or how our fitness trackers report our sleep.
“What's happening there is largely the power of suggestion,” Dr Rachael Kent, a scholar at King’s College London who’s research focuses on how digital technology influences everyday mental and physical health and author of The Digital Health Self, tells me over (ironically) Zoom. “There’s a widespread celebration of data as truth and that it therefore gives us some additional information about ourselves that we don't already instinctively know. I don’t agree with that - and my research doesn't agree with that. There is so much that your device doesn’t know. I didn't even run a mile this morning because I fell over [mid-run] and now my device is telling me that I didn't run far enough. My device doesn't know I've hurt my ankle."
The choice architecture of devices - the way our tech can push us to do something that we don’t want to do or feel something we don’t want to feel - can often leave us feeling as though there is no choice at all. “The nudge of WhatsApp to read a message or your running app telling you to go for a run - all these things are designed to keep us engaging with the tools,” Dr Kent explains.
And time and time again, they win. We feel guilty when we haven’t hit our technologically-prescribed step count and tiredly trudge the neighbourhood. Or our phone pings with an email that means we forget that afternoon snack we were going to eat.
The quantified self
There are some clear reasons that we obsess over our ‘quantified self’, as Dr Kent calls it, rather than the self that exists in the real world. “The prioritisation and increasing celebration of data that stems from it being seen as the new oil in terms of its value and asset. This is the pedestal that we hold data on,” she says.
We may not be walking Metas mining for our bodies stats, but the weightiness of data for the individual is huge. “Data shows evidence of our productivity, or how we perceive productivity. I think this really accelerated during COVID where we were all forced inside our homes. For those of us that could work from home, data acquisition became increasingly important because our lives [and sense of productivity] changed so much, so if you went on a run or did exercise you could capture that and showcase it and that really did signify productivity of your day. And I think that that has now translated into so many different life domains. Whether it's the way in which we curate lifestyle on Instagram or TikTok, the amount of emails that we send (or think we need to send) to the way in which we track our health and want to hit that golden 10k steps, go to the gym X amount of times a week or reduce calorie intake by certain amount,” says Dr Kent.
How we track other people breaks your internal link between brain and body, too, she says: “I think that we all live within that paradox - well those of us that are on social media - of knowing simultaneously that it's not depicting someone's whole life, but yet feeling comparative and beating ourselves up and giving ourselves a really hard time that our day isn’t presented in the same way. Regardless of us knowing that that's not reality, when you see a saturation and a repetition of those images, it's incredibly hard to maintain that level of criticism. We believe what we see - we're quite simple beings psychologically - and we start to believe that's how people are living their lives. Over time - and not over a huge period of time - we see an upward comparison where you always feel that you’re in some kind of a deficit. In more extreme cases, you start to try and model behaviours around those of an influencer or other people's lives you see online.”
Read: we force ourselves into being an “overnight oats in the morning, beautifully dressed in your amazing office type person” to signal that we have a “nourished, healthy, active, super productive lifestyle, living your best life and feeling your best self,” says Dr Kent. Alone, those behaviours are fine: I eat overnight oats basically every day (and divvy out my recipe to anyone who comes round - who wants it?). But when they’re done as a “presentation of self”, as Dr Kent calls it, chosen over the fried egg or bowl of Kellog’s that our body is asking for, we have a problem. There’s a digital kink in the chain between body and mind, the expectation about what our perfect online selves would do stops the real world needs from circulating.
Smooth the link
How do we stop, though? How do I end my impulsive scroll as a source of short-lasting endorphin? How do we give up the belief that our data is omniscient?
“If you find yourself leaning into the device’s advice even when you don't feel physically able to respond to wherever it's telling you to do, it’s a sign you might need a break,” says Dr Kent. Her advice is as follows:
Three things
“I recommend that my clients have three things they need to do on their device before they pick it up. So if it’s your phone, it might be: I need to do an Instagram post for work, I need to get some inspiration for dinner and I need to reply back to my friends on WhatsApp,” says Dr Kent. I find this advice… revolutionary? It’s much harder to convince myself that three things are urgent than one. “It's about ultimately trying to have some kind of agency with devices so that you're empowered to consider when you want and if you do need to pick up the device,” explains Dr Kent.
Don’t anticipate
“Research is coming out now about the anticipatory anxiety of being contacted - and then that that FOMO to feel like you have to respond - which I think we all have to a certain degree. I think it's really important to try and create that separation and I’m in the privileged position to be to tell my loved ones and my family that I'm not available to contact after eight o'clock. My phone is off. And that is a big boundary for me to stop [thinking that someone might be trying to contact me].”
Non-judgement
“Understand that tech is designed to keep our attention. I can give everybody all this guidance and advice, and I try and stick to it myself, but I think you've also got cut off that slack. They are designed to sustain our attention. There is an infrastructure which is about monetising our attention and our data and I think that we need to remember that.”
Thanks for reading Gray’s Anatomy - even if you did read this one on your phone in lieu of whatever else it is that you were meant to be doing. Tell me in the comments: do you notice technology impacts your relationship with your body?