About this episode
What do you spend most of your day looking at? Listening to? Thinking about? If you’re like most Americans, the answer is probably a screen. In fact, the average American spends between 4-6 hours a day staring at their phone, and that’s not counting our laptops and TVs. I’m certainly not exempt. As mindful as I try to be, phone addiction continually creeps up on me. It’s a “quick scroll” before I get out of bed because I am soooooooo tired and isn’t blue light supposed to help wake you up? Then it’s a “short break” when I’m stuck on a writing project, followed by a little screentime during lunch or while I’m cooking dinner.But my biggest chunk of phone usage is afterschool. Despite all my aspirations to model screen sense to my kids, between when they arrive home from school and the time I need to start cooking dinner, I spend MANY minutes absently scrolling. Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What else am I meant to do? Any task I undertake is liable to be interrupted by random kid questions. And if I actively try to spend time with these surly tweens, they’ll generally make themselves scarce (that is, until I try to pick up another task.)This may be the height of Potted Plant Parenting, but this sort of unpredictable, ill-defined time is ripe for the siren song of my cellphone. And there are a million justifications: Facebook hosts many community groups. And aren’t authors encouraged to be constantly self-promoting on social media? Doesn’t sharing a funny Tiktok with my tween count as “bonding”? I’m just logging on to check on one quick thing and suddenly 40 minutes have gone by!The thing with addiction is that you turn to a substance or behavior for a reason, but addiction rarely delivers. Studies have shown that intermittent positive reinforcement is actually the most addictive form of reinforcement, and there’s good evidence that social media was designed with this in mind. In most cases, the anticipation of pleasure/relief is actually greater than what that item delivers. When I’m able to bring mindfulness to scrolling, what I find is that I’m turning to social media typically because I feel stressed, sad, or bored. What
