Off the hook—how to have a better relationship with your smart phone

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All In The Mind 32 min 3 speakers 6 chapters transcribed 4 days ago

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Why do we feel anxious when we think about our smartphones?

David Levy 0:05

The bumbles if you wanna call the

Natasha Mitchell 0:07

wall

David Levy 0:08

Natasha Mitchell 0:08

you don't answer, I'll just bring it on the wall. I know he's there, but I just try to call

Natasha Mitchell 0:22

Hanging

Lynn Malcolm 0:23

on the

Natasha Mitchell 0:24

chair.

Lynn Malcolm 0:27

Throw your mobile phone hard against a brick wall. Just imagine it. How does it feel for you? What emotions come up? In your mind and in your body. What about when you realise you've left your mobile device at home or in the taxi? Are you bereft? Do you crave it?

Judson Brewer 0:49

Craving is this urge something like I want. It's a need that that really has this edginess to it, this drive that says, do this now.

Lynn Malcolm 1:02

Dr. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studied addiction for 20 years. He's now the Director of Research at the Centre for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He's worked with people who are addicted to smoking and to food. Later you'll hear his theory about your craving mind. It applies just as strongly to your dependence on digital technologies. You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynn Malcolm. Today, your relationship with your smartphone. It may be one of the most important relationships in your life. Have you got it right? Can't control myself. I think it's for my cell And don't you get the feeling that the pace of life is getting faster and faster? David Levy is Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.

David Levy 2:02

It is extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, I've been talking about for almost twenty years about the acceleration of life and how everything seems to get faster. And as recently as fifteen years ago or so, when I would give a talk about that, people would say, Well, is it really true that things are speeding up? I mean, can you prove it? And I can tell you that for the last probably ten years, that nobody has ever asked that question because it's obvious to all of us. us the longer we live, that response times are faster, as our tools get faster, our digital tools, the expectation is that we're going to do more and that we're gonna do it faster. Although I think we've really come to recognize it over these past fifteen years or so.

David Levy 2:43

It's actually something that's been going on for at least a hundred years.

Lynn Malcolm 2:47

David Levy trained as a computer scientist. For many years he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre in Silicon Valley, where the network personal computer was invented. So he's been very much ensconced in the fast world of technology. At the same time though, he's developed a taste for quieter pursuits.

David Levy 3:10

If you look at my CV, you'll discover that after I finished my PhD in computer science at Stanford, I moved to London to study calligraphy and bookbinding. And at the time people thought that that was a kind of strange thing to do. But I was beginning to realize that I needed ways to center myself, to slow down, to be more in touch with my body, and calligraphy turned out to be the perfect place. place for me to start and then I basically went on and have maintained a a meditation practice for decades. And so basically I've been living the fast world life of the technologist and the slow world life of a contemplative and trying to figure out how the two of them fit together. That's sort of been the question that's been animating me for decades now.

Lynn Malcolm 3:58

David Levy, author of Mindful Tech, How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives.

David Levy 4:05

There's been plenty of research on the challenges that we face when we operate in haste and when we're distracted. Obviously the kind of distracted living that so many of us are engaged in today has a lot of effects. It has effects on our ability to learn, on our ability to remember, on our ability to be more deeply engaged with one another. I mean it's a very common experience, for example, that But when we're rushing around, we're not connecting all that well to people in the workplace or necessarily even at home. I mean the the examples we now know fairly well of people sitting around the dinner table, each of them on their phones, is a great example, a great and terrible example of the kind of failure to connect that I think we are increasingly engaged in.