I recently took part in a day-long event over video call. It was similar to the meetings and sessions I would have during a normal work day, but it continued for the whole day with no respite, and by the end of it, I was absolutely exhausted. This is normal for many people working from home, with hours of back to back videocalls day after day leading to ‘Zoom fatigue’, a well-established phenomenon by now.
I tried to limit the effects of this as best I could, including turning the video of my call off whenever possible and positioning my screen so I was looking at it at an angle rather than directly. It did not surprise me however that by the end of the day I was completed burned out. What did surprise me were my actions after the call had finished. Although I was tired and my eyes ached, during my evening of rest I found myself again staring at screens, from my phone to my laptop to the TV.
It reminded me of some thoughts I noted down months ago about the idea of ‘stopping cues’ popularised by Australian psychologist Adam Alter. He addresses the question of why we all seem unable to tear ourselves away from the screens in our lives, and I found his ideas compelling. I put them on hold for a little while as during the height of lockdown I didn’t think anyone’s first priority was trying to achieve less screen time. We were all overwhelmed by our new situation, and if Zoom calls with family and endless TV programmes eased the upheaval a little then it was worth it.
But now we are so many months into lockdown, into long-distance relationships with friends and family, and for many into working from home, that it’s worth thinking about how to make our relationships with those screens more sustainable.
Adam Alter argues that in the past, almost every activity we took part in had a ‘stopping cue’, to let people know when it was time to stop and move on to something else. For example, you would finish a newspaper or magazine, get to the end of a chapter in a book, or reach the end of a television programme and have to wait until next week to watch the next one.
Nowadays there are no stopping cues – we are encouraged to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling with no end on social media, games continue from level to level and videos and television programmes continue on autoplay. There is no end to the web pages we can search through, no end to the online shopping catalogues we can browse.
One solution Alter offers to this is to create artificial ‘stopping cues’, limiting use of screens in a certain location or situation. Alter, for example, does not use his phone at dinner time. Many people recommend the tactic of not using your phone in your bedroom, although for some this is too ambitious. Set times of day also help – for example not looking at any screens in the first half hour after you wake up, or the last hour before you go to bed, or simply using a stopwatch function to show yourself how much time you have spent in one screen-time sitting.
Part of the problem with this in the context of lockdown is finding other things to do in that time. I have found audiobooks a lifeline, as they provide entertainment without me having to look at the screen, and being read to is much easier than reading after a long day. I like to listen to them on loudspeaker, as I find earphones to be almost as wearing as looking at a screen, which opens up opportunities to share audiobooks with others.
The Center for Humane Technology suggests making a few alterations to your phone settings to make social media less addictive. These include turning off all notifications which are not comments or messages, so that the only nudge you get to use the app is when it involves interacting with other people, or changing your apps from colour to greyscale to make them less appealing. It also suggests not choosing the ‘stay signed in’ option on any sites so that there is one extra step to make you think about whether or not you want to be there. The Google chrome extension Inbox When Ready is another useful tool, which delivers your email in regular batches so you are not distracted by every one that arrives.
Alter cites research that divides phone use into two groups; functions that make us feel good, and those that make us feel bad. Among the bad group are unsurprisingly social networking, gaming, entertainment, news and web browsing. In contrast, relaxation, exercise, reading and education were all uses that made people feel good. Now more than ever as we are leaning so heavily on technology to help us through the crisis, it is vital we free more time up for those positive uses and cut down on the negative ones.