Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (5 page)

My girlfriend eventually decided that neither of us was allowed to check our phones until fifteen minutes after getting out of bed, which was a great rule that I followed . . . for about six months. We just couldn’t help ourselves. I don’t know any two people who currently wait the fifteen
minutes. I’ve asked around. From when I started writing this book three years ago through today, there has been a marked acceleration of our addiction and thus a marked decrease in our free time. Fifteen minutes? I haven’t had fifteen minutes to just sit and enjoy something since 2007. It just doesn’t happen. That said, I still think it’s a good idea, if you can do it, because looking at a phone so intensely interrupts that afterglow and the bonding time two people should share. That is the cheesiest sentence you’ll find in this book, I promise. But it’s true! Far too often we surrender moments we should have together to check our phones. We simply can’t stop.

Some time ago, I took my now-ex-girlfriend Gina on a four-day trip to a spa for her thirtieth birthday. I figured that an escape to a far-off and deserted place replete with professional massage therapists, bottles of wine, and so-called Japanese soaking tubs would be a welcome and necessary respite.

After boarding the plane and suffering a momentary panic attack when I thought the in-flight Wi-Fi wasn’t working, I was relieved when I saw “Gogo Inflight” available in the wireless network list. I was finally ready to start relaxing, my iPad, iPhone, chargers, and USB cords in hand.

Forty minutes into a game of wireless Uno with someone named “ManOfTheMountain” from Pyongyang—how anyone managed to get an iPad or iPhone into North Korea and commence a game of wireless Uno I will never know—I felt someone tapping my shoulder. Apparently, Gina had been saying my name repeatedly for two minutes, but I had
been so focused on my game, and the music coming from my Pandora app was so loud, that I hadn’t heard her.

“I have an idea for this weekend,” she said.

“What?” I asked, expecting her to suggest activities like couple’s massages, dinner in town, or tennis—all acceptable options from my point of view.

“I think we should make this a technology-free trip. No iPhones, iPads, Gchatting, or e-mailing. Let’s just hang out and reconnect and forget the outside world.” Oh no . . . I felt a jolt of worry. This idea was
not
acceptable.

But after taking a deep breath, I had to admit that the idea was actually quite sweet, thoughtful, and definitely novel considering the world we lived in—and considering it was me she was talking to. This was her birthday trip, so I agreed to the plan. I hoped I could do it, but history and my gut told me otherwise. (I had done my cleanse a few months before but had quickly reverted to my junkie ways.) Almost immediately, a wave of unease swept over me. I looked down at my phone the way a fisherman might look at his wife (or husband) right before setting off on a three-week sail and stuttered what I knew was probably a lie: “Y-yeah. Sounds awesome, I’m down.” I then proceeded to do a mental run-through of our vacation schedule, looking for potential moments—massages, manicures, getting dressed—when Gina would be busy so I could quickly “reconnect” with my technological devices.

And over the next four days, reconnect I did. I pretended to be reading a book or the
New York Times
on my iPad when I was really using Gchat with friends I would be
seeing in two days. I tried to wear outfits with pockets so that I could sneakily bring my phone to the bathroom to get a few texts in during dinners and lunch by the pool. It turns out that 90 degree weather is not conducive to hiding digital devices. Perhaps most embarrassingly, I connected headphones to my iPhone and covered it so I could pretend I was just listening to music, turning my back and typing any moment I could. It was pathetic.

I felt bad that I wasn’t being honest with Gina, but I felt guilty so much of the time that I’d become almost immune to it. I’d given up trying to change. Part of me didn’t even care—I was just obsessing about when I could use my devices again. On the last day of the trip, Gina asked me if I could please at least stop plugging earphones into my iPhone as she was aware in the perfect silence of the spa that there was no music coming out of them. She had known the whole time. She had given up on me. But this was okay—I had given up on myself years ago. I was an addict. The least I could do was accept it.

Sure, it can make me feel depressed and anxious, and I live with a near-constant state of guilt because of it, but I will always go back to it, no matter what.

I wanted to know if others felt the same way. I asked hundreds of people to describe their relationship with their smartphone. They used words like
addicted
,
love/hate
,
dependent
,
marriage
,
lifeline
,
wife
—and even
tortured
,
chained
, and
captive
. In fact, almost 80 percent of those who responded used these types of negative, obsessive words, compared to only 20 percent who used positive words like
practical
and
useful
. A few said that they had given up their iPhones and felt more free
without
them, only to buy them again later because they felt they were “missing out” on too much.

I found it heartening in a way to know I was far from the only one who got seriously stressed out when I heard the ping or buzz or triton (or the
Beverly Hills, 90210
ringtone) or any other alert that a message was waiting. Most people talked about the anxiety and frustration they feel because of their ever-present need to check. One person said, “I need to get rid of the message notification immediately,” while another described it as “incredibly frustrating, to the point of madness.” There were, of course, some extremes, such as the person who said, “[Text messages and Instagram notifications] make me feel really antsy, like when I’m the last person in a store before it closes. Also it kind of makes me feel like I need to pee.” Another said, “The waiting message makes me feel fanatical. It is gut-wrenching.” Overall, out of more than two hundred people in my informal poll, more than 60 percent used words like
anxiety
,
stress
, and
frustration
to describe their physical and mental reactions when they know a message is waiting for them. And yet we can’t even fathom giving up our phones.

• • •

Some people use specific time frames to discuss their child’s developmental stages; I use them to describe the trajectory of my smartphone addiction. When I switched from my PalmPilot to a BlackBerry, I felt like my life was finally going somewhere. When I finally switched from a BlackBerry to
an iPhone, it felt like the dawn of a new era. And every time I upgrade my iPhone, I feel as though I have a new lease on life. About 90 percent of my decision to switch from a BlackBerry to an iPhone a few years ago was based on my inability to function as a healthy and focused human being when the red light on my BlackBerry was blinking. I know that I could have simply turned off the notification function that many of us refer to as the “blinking red light”—in fact, I did that three times, only to turn the light
back on
less than a week later because I couldn’t stand not to know when messages came in, and without it I was checking my phone even more. A friend who also recently switched to the iPhone told me that getting rid of the blinking red light was also one of her main reasons for tossing her BlackBerry—because she had become like Pavlov’s dog. “I would see that blinking light out of the corner of my eye and it haunted me,” she said. “I saw the light blinking when it wasn’t even blinking at all.” We both thought switching to an iPhone would help. I fooled myself into thinking I would feel differently as long as there wasn’t a blinking red light. I soon learned that there is a very underused function on an iPhone that alerts you with three quick flashes (like lightning!) whenever you have a new message. (For those of you who want to further complicate and accentuate your addictions, go to Settings>General>Accessibility>LED Flash for Alerts. You’re welcome. I’m sorry.) It’s the brightest light I’ve ever seen. After having it on for a few months, I began feeling as though I was experiencing the beginning of a seizure every time I got an e-mail, text, or notification. For my own health and peace
of mind, I turned off the LED. Unfortunately, this did not stop me from still being tortured by the pop-up messages.

It’s no wonder we start twitching when we get any sort of electronic notification, because, like Pavlov’s dog, our brains have been rewired. When we experience something pleasurable, a neurotransmitter called dopamine is released in our system, giving us a euphoric feeling, which our brains will want to re-create. According to Gary Small, MD,
“the same neural pathways . . . that reinforce dependence on substances can reinforce compulsive technology behaviors that are just as addictive and potentially destructive.” We start to crave whatever made us feel that way, whether it’s an actual drug, like nicotine, or that someone “liked” our photo on Instagram, sent us a funny or loving text, liked our event on Facebook, or tweeted at us. In a
Psychology Today
article, Dr. Small explains that nonaddicts also feel the dopamine effect, because it is so powerful. In fact, too many of us have become compulsive enough that
some in the psychiatric community have started to wonder if Internet Compulsion Disorder—the name writer Bill Davidow has bestowed upon this national epidemic—should be included in the new
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM
). This new addiction is a worldwide phenomenon:
the tech giant Cisco surveyed members of Gen Y—that is, eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds—in eighteen countries and found that 60 percent check their phones compulsively, 90 percent before they get out of bed. I would argue this number is closer to 100 percent, as I haven’t seen someone get out of bed without first checking
their smartphone in at least seven years.
Keane Angle, a digital strategist at 360i, a digital marketing agency in New York, believes that the desire to check our smartphones has become “a basic human need—the need for acceptance and affirmation of personal worth. When you get an e-mail, a tweet, or a ‘like’ on one of your status updates, it’s like the crack version of a compliment—it’s bite-sized, its effects last only a few seconds, and it’s highly addictive.”

James E. Katz, the director of emerging media studies at Boston University, explained that the fact that we
don’t know
what news we may receive is what aggravates this compulsive need to check. And yet, he considers
“the constant checking [to be] an exercise in optimism . . . Eternal hope delivered in tiny bits.” I like Katz’s positive spin on this addiction. I know the message could be anything—and despite my anxiety, I often think my buzzing phone will deliver great news. Unless you have a job where every text or e-mail makes you miserable, I think many people feel this sense of expectation. It’s always exciting to know that something is waiting for you, that there is a flutter of possibility.

We need to satisfy this craving so much, some experts are saying, that in doing so we are acquiring a new type of attention deficit disorder—one combined with an Internet addiction—and many in the field are worried. In an interview with the
New York Times
, Dr. John Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, used the term
acquired attention deficit disorder
to describe those whose brains are
“accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it.” The digital stimulation could
be from anything: television, Internet, social media, or smartphones. And Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, who helped lead a study on problematic Internet use, argues that there is a marked link between Internet addiction and attention deficit disorder. He says,
“The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets, the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information.”
In his comprehensive and entertaining book
Virtually You
, Aboujaoude describes a study that was conducted in 2008 among 752 school-age children in South Korea, where a third of the students who had been diagnosed with ADHD were considered “addicted” to the Internet. Just as striking,
Aboujaoude notes a 2004 study of college students in Taiwan found that 32 percent of Internet addicts had ADHD, whereas only 8 percent of non-Internet addicts had ADHD. While it’s outside of the realm of my authority to untangle the causal relationship between Internet addiction and ADHD, it’s true that psychologists and studiers of the
DSM
would argue that Internet addiction cannot cause ADHD and that an “acquired” attention deficit disorder is not a real possibility. I’m inclined to agree with them though I do think that ADHD-like traits seem to be increasingly present in Internet and smartphone addicts. I certainly experience them.

Experts’ concerns have only grown in recent years, particularly with the advent of smartphones—so much so that Larry D. Rosen, PhD, an international expert in what he calls the “psychology of technology,” believes we are
all
headed for what he calls an iDisorder. In an article for
Lifehack.org
about his book
iDisorder: Understanding Our
Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us
, he writes that we will all
“exhibit signs and symptoms of a psychiatric disorder such as OCD, narcissism, addiction or even ADHD, which are manifested through [our] use—or overuse—of technology.” Harvard’s Ratey explains that our brains are consistently “hijacked” by all this media—and that when we absentmindedly reach for our phones or can’t resist the urge to grab our devices, we are like drug addicts.
“Drug addicts don’t think; they just start moving. Like moving for your BlackBerry” or your iPhone.

My friend Dr. Amy Wicker told me about a simple self-test that has proven accurate in identifying problems with alcohol known as the CAGE questionnaire, utilized by health care professionals to see if a patient may be addicted to alcohol.
CAGE
stands for
cut
,
annoy
,
guilty
, and
eye-opener
, each of which is represented in the questionnaire. Dr. Wicker told me that if you answer yes to at least two of these questions, the possibility of alcoholism should be investigated further. I began to wonder if the CAGE questionnaire could be used to determine usage patterns that reflect problems with excessive smartphone use with similar levels of accuracy.