It’s Designed Like That
Your Phone Is Designed To Hack Your Nervous System, Here’s What That Means
You set down your phone after twenty minutes of scrolling something you didn't intend to watch, and you feel a little worse than you did before you picked it up. Or a little more agitated, more scattered, less able to settle back into what you were doing. You might chalk it up to something you saw, or just to spending too much time on it. What you probably don't think is that this is working exactly as designed.
I should start by saying, I'm not anti-tech. I tend to be an early adopter and explorer. I was on Instagram less than six months after it was released. I love to try new things, and apps. I also discard things that don't work for me after I try them out.
When I talk about conscious tech use, one of the things running in the background is the design. To a large degree, a lot of what we need to practice in the way of conscious tech is because of how it was designed. It's systemic.
We often blame ourselves for these phone habits we have developed, and sure we have agency, AND it's also how it's designed. The strength of the psychological twister we are put through each time we grab our phones cannot be discounted when we think of our phone habits. Give yourself some grace and compassion. We have choice AND we need to be aware of how it is designed and how strong that is in directing and shifting our psyche and behavior.
At the base level, phones are designed like slot machines. When they first came out, it was a little bit less so, but only because the technology had not advanced enough to provide for that possibility.
As soon as it was, we ended up with designs that were designed to hack our brains. Further though, and I don't think this gets talked about enough, is that this also leads to hacking our nervous systems.
The intermittent reward system in the brain is the part of us that gets activated with slot machine design and our phones. Notifications are designed the way they are to harness this part of our brains. Will I get a reward or won't I when I click? Will I get food when I climb that tree, or won't I?
This is where some of my yoga, meditation, yoga therapy, and nervous system training comes in and crosses over with the tech. These practices are generally speaking, in support of nervous system regulation. (The caveat being some of the more activating practices, like intense breath work, hot yoga, and certain postures. )
Phone, app, and website design, to me, is designed to dysregulate us. In a dysregulated state, we are more likely to be impulsive, distracted, and disconnected from our "higher mind" functions, like, sound decision making, compassion, empathy, and kindness.
The sad part to me is that, this is generally done for business and financial reasons. To stay on sites longer, to buy more, to engage more and in certain ways. This could easily be designed a different way that would be more supportive to humans, but it's simply not.
It's designed to distract us, keep us engaged for longer, buy more, stress us out more, and even more unfortunately, radicalize us.
The tricky thing is, when we are dysregulated, we tend to reach for our phones as a distraction or as a numbing agent. Then on the phone we get more dysregulated and distracted. What a cycle!
Even the constant updates on our phones or feature changes that we have to relearn over and over again, serve as small pockets of dysregulation and reaction.
Do you see and FEEL this in your own life?
So when I say that a lot of what we are doing in conscious tech is to mitigate this systemic design, this is what I mean.
We are developing digital boundaries, and practicing different ways of changing our phones and devices because they are designed to dysregulate us. We are making an effort to regulate and become conscious of these hacks and how they effect us in our every day life.
On a final note, I cannot overstate how subtle these hacks and changes in our behavior can be. It is so often below the level of our conscious awareness.
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