The below is an excerpt from a longer piece posted on LinkedIn.

The nature of addiction is something I have grappled with for some time on both a personal and intellectual level. Like many, I have a direct experience of being addicted to various behaviours and substances and know many others afflicted by this common facet of human experience. Addiction has many connotations and can be looked at through a variety of lenses. Theoretically, it is impossible to begin to understand addiction without acknowledging the interwoven spheres of the individual, group, society and ecosystem and any considered dialogue must draw from fields including psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and anthropology. In future I aim to tie together some of my reflections and reading on addiction.

Here I will narrow my scope to focus on the decision to embark on a ‘Digital detox’. A decision that has been a long time coming.

The last year or so have led many to feel trapped and overwhelmed – to varying degrees people have been separated from loved ones and disconnected from the world. Patterns and cycles of news have permeated our lives and how we think about the world. I have found myself losing a degree of meta-awareness around tech use, i.e., my ability to step back and look at patterns of how I use technology have eroded. A quick refresh of news apps, social media and snippets of podcasts and YouTube videos have wriggled their way into those numerous snatches of unoccupied time; between meetings at work, going to the bathroom, taking a tea break…

On some level the prevailing situation is to blame for fuelling anxiety, fear, stress. Perhaps then technology is merely a salve: a way to treat the unpleasant consequences of facing reality head on? What horrors would I have to face in the absence of distraction?

Of course, the situation is more complex and our relationship with technology more insidious. For the wonders that the modern world and digital technology provide us, most are now aware of the somewhat parasitic relationship we have with tech. Apps and services are designed to pull our attention in their direction, players in the ‘attention economy’ compete in an ‘uneven arms race’, employing knowledge from neuroscience and behavioural psychology to maximise our time on screen in an attempt to condition us to use their services continually and habitually…to become addicted.

Although my relationship with technology has perhaps been one-sided for some time, this last year has loaded the scales in the direction of mindless consumption, or addiction.

Enter a timely book and podcast, the need to improve a relationship and a friend (Neal) on a similar mission and September will be Digital detox month…

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism lays out a comprehensive philosophy / way of thinking about digital technology consumption, in large part driven by the observation that:

Pg. 6 “We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life“

This sense of having lost control over the technologies we use and the idea that they are instead using us is a common theme and one I recognise in myself and others.

He goes on to suggest a set of core principles:

– Clutter is costly: we lose the benefit of each app / service when swamped with many
– Optimisation is important: how we use tech is important, it should support something we value
– Intentionality is satisfying: exercising free will over how we engage with technology feels good

This is then followed by a detailed outline of a 30-day declutter and reintegration process driven by the need to take a step back and declutter life, embrace worldly interactions and pursuits, embark on periods of solitude and move towards a relationship with technology where it serves something that you deeply value.

In a wonderful deep dive into the nature and mechanism of addiction, during the excellent Huberman Lab podcast (episode #33), Dr Anna Lembke suggests:

“The first message I would want to get across about social media is that it really is a drug. And it’s engineered to be a drug.”

When our relationship with digital technology becomes addictive, like with any other drug or behaviour, one of the primary mechanisms implicated is the dopaminergic system. Dopamine is associated with both reward and movement (e.g., deficits associated with Parkinson’s disease) and has entered common parlance in relation to the modern world, i.e. ‘I am going on a dopamine detox’, ‘dopamine fasting’, ‘hacking the dopamine system’.

Although our baseline levels of dopamine depend on complex gene-environment interactions, we are all subject to the mechanics of homeostatic regulation in relation to dopamine levels. A tip to one side, i.e., a movement in the direction of pleasure, will result in an equal and opposite tip in the other direction – towards pain. Lembke explains how pain and pleasure are co-located and how this uneasy balance can help to explain the nature of addiction.

Withdrawal and cravings can be understood as the pain associated with the compensatory dip in dopamine and our actions in the direction of the addictive substances to relieve this pain. In fact, addiction can perhaps be seen as the seeking out of pleasure to escape pain or suffering. Chronic exposure to pleasure can also lower our dopamine baseline through our brain’s downregulation of dopamine to compensate for such high levels. This can lead to anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure.

Returning to a section on dopamine in Robert Sapolsky’s momentous Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, I’m struck by the parallels with how chronic stress and anxiety deplete dopamine levels (and dopaminergic system functioning) leading to problems with motivation and anhedonia. Taken together could these principles (1) down regulation through too much pleasure and (2) depletion due to chronic stress, at least in theory, go some way to explain why I am embarking on this digital detox? Perhaps too there is a timely reflection here on the impact of the COVID pandemic and our relationship with technology.

As is the case for many, my stress and anxiety levels have been massively elevated during stages of the pandemic. Simultaneously, my screen time is up; I’m working from home, moving screen to screen between work and leisure. Often, it feels as though I’m either attempting to distract myself from the stress of the situation, or actively tumbling through cycles of news and content as though the stress is propelling me through the technological ether. Knowing how digital tech companies are harnessing the power of reward and reward anticipation when designing their services, I can’t help but reflect on this self-propagating system of stress > tech use > dopamine depletion.

So, what can be done? Echoing the recommended period for ‘Digital declutter’ in Digital Minimalism, Lembke goes into detail about the importance of a 30-day abstinence period to reset our relationship with a substance or behaviour. The 30-day period is a benchmark for how long our brain usually needs to reset the dopamine system and break addictive cycles. There are a number of complex individual and genetic factors that mean this period may differ from person to person, but many years of experience point towards this being a sensible target. She explains the difficulty of the first 14 days where ‘you’ll feel worse before you feel better’, before the clouds begin to lift, and the pleasures of day-to-day life start to re-emerge.

As somebody who appeared in the film The Social Dilemma, Lembke has much to say on social media addiction and how to build a positive relationship with digital technology. A number of these suggestions marry up nicely with those from Digital Minimalism and are ones I will keep in mind in September when I embark on a Digital Detox:

– We should be mindful of potency, quantity, and variety of social media interactions

– We should act with intention and plan use (use tools in a way that bring us value, avoid being used or getting lost in use)

– We can’t turn back time, digital technology is here to stay and serves us well in many respects. We should instead ask how do we make the tools work for us?

– We should be conscious of divesting attention and pleasure from real world interactions. Look to create spaces and times for genuine interactions

– Establish physical and metacognitive barriers around tech use

– Try to orientate around worldly questions such as ‘what could I do today to be of service?’

For the full overview of technology (what’s in and what’s out during the detox) see here.