fight-or-flight OR flight-mode: don’t let screens fry your system
painting: Joanna Kniaź-Hawrot
Technology is a double-edged sword
You must have heard by now that screen time can cause us anxiety, depression, devastate our sleep patterns. More often than not screens decimate our focus, attention, and creativity. They negatively affect child development and impede the maturation of the social brain. The list goes on and every day more and more scientific articles emerge with new worrying findings.
Why? Does it have to be like that? Isn’t technological development a good thing? Naturally, it’s not about the tech itself. Technological marvels like smartphones are a monument to human intellect. They wide-open doors of knowledge and can make our life easier and more enjoyable in every possible way. The trouble lays in their potential for abuse. To maintain a balanced relationship with our devices, it’s helpful to first understand why checking our phones is so hard to resist and how they affect our biology.
We are constantly running away from tigers
Let’s start with biology. Ever heard of the “fight-or-flight” response? In brief, the autonomic nervous system (regulating the body's unconscious actions) operates on two modes:
- Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) kicking in when the body is at rest (“rest-and-digest”) and
- Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS), powered by stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. And that’s the “fight-or-flight” stuff, a full-blown bodily response to fight with or run away from a wild beast.
This reaction had been instrumental to our survival for hundreds of thousands of years. That is, until we swapped hunting for agriculture some 10 thousand years ago and wild beasts gradually have become less of an issue. Nonetheless, when we stress, our brain still “thinks” that a tiger might be involved. And just in case, it prepares us physiologically to face it. This, as you can imagine, is a very costly predicament energy-wise.
The prolonged/chronic stress causes us to be in a constant degree of arousal from SNS, as if running away from a tiger all the time. Just one thought can be enough to activate a cascade of physiological reactions. For instance, SNS decreases (inhibits) the activity of certain organs to allocate more energy elsewhere. Sadly, this is a well-tested mechanism for developing depression – which can be also a disease of stress. When we chronically turn on SNS, our body doesn’t prioritize positive feelings and thoughts but an emergency mode. On a purely neuroanatomical level, depression can mean that your cortex (responsible for executive functions) is spending too much time thinking sad, depressive things. As a result, it is telling the hypothalamus (endocrine system regulator) about it and thus activating SNS. Or this is how we can develop stomach Ulcer. SNS re-routes blood flow to make us run faster. The blood is cut out from our stomachs too. If we happen to have bacteria there as well, repeat it over and over again and voila, you have got yourself a stress-related Ulcer.
A switch from material to virtual
The switch that took place thousands of years ago from a nomadic lifestyle (a hunter-gatherer) to an agricultural, sedentary way of living has been quite a bit of a change for our brains. They are still pretty much in the process of adapting. This century we are witnessing another major switch in the way we live: turning away from the material world to virtual reality on our screens. And this is part of a bigger shift: entering into the age of human history where a core motive is becoming a radically accelerated pace of change (you better embrace COVID-19 disruptions!).
But coming back to screens, our phones are literally becoming an extension of ourselves, something like a third arm. There are some interesting analogies here with phantom pain (when someone feels real pain in a limb that was amputated). Its physiological mechanisms are pretty much the same as experiencing pain in existing parts of the body. And guess what, the same principle is growingly transpiring with things like feeling your phone vibrating when in reality it doesn’t. And that’s just a tip of an iceberg! Smartphones integrate into neuromatrix of our body in all kinds of ways. They become like anatomic appendage. They change how we construe and relate to reality and experiences. From the usual sensual, embodied experience, the new, virtual mode has been catapulting us into abstraction and intellectualization. It’s the first and already very real stage of the human-AI merger. And with this, there also come all kinds of deep psychological and physiological effects that screens have on us.
Brain racing on the 5th gear
Before we even start considering the manipulative side of the online abyss, screens alone de-tune us from calm and focused energy. This is because of their electrical properties. Here’s what happens from a “neuro- physics” perspective. When we are in a deep sleep, our brain is on Delta waves frequency (less than 4 Hz). Up to 7.5 Hz are Theta waves associated with some phases of sleep, daydreaming and meditation. Children inhabit this sweet frequency a lot. When we are relaxed, focused, and self-controlled, we are somewhere in the region of 8 - 12 Hz (Alpha waves). Then, there are Beta waves (12 – 30 Hz) generated when we are alert, attentive, solving a problem or making decisions. Finally, above 30 Hz we have Gamma brainwaves, with the highest frequency. They relate to the simultaneous processing of information from different brain areas. It’s the 5th gear of our brain and it is rather energy-consuming. The trouble is that merely staring at a screen will pump up the frequency to anywhere between 25 – 70 Hz (depending on the duration and screen size). That is a heck of a lot and it’s creating a massive and consistent energetic leak. It makes our brain “tired and wired”. Does this feeling sound familiar to you? It certainly does to me. It is truly an ugly combination. And again, that’s just from the electrical energy, before we even engage with any content.
But hey, we don’t even need to look at our smartphones to promote stress response, with its hormonal cocktail steadily sailing through our veins. The in-between time is just as bad for our body. When the phone is on and nearby, our system is constantly wired and attuned to it. This means that with every extra minute when we have not looked at the screen, psychological tension and anxiety are building up to check it (a basic feature of addiction). It’s like adenosine – a chemical that our body breaks down while we sleep. Then, it builds up in our blood as the time when we are awake increases. An accumulation of adenosine will make you very sleepy. An accumulation of the time when we are not looking at our phone will make us increasingly anxious and restless.
In this way, we cause the “fight-or-flight” state to steadily simmer in the background of our minds and bodies like cosmic radiation from the Big Bang (perhaps you heard that a small part of the static of the analog television that you get when you are in-between channels is an afterglow of the Big Bang, it’s called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation).
Welcome to the jungle: a race to the bottom of the brain stem
Now we are ready for the next step: add to the mix engaging with the online content. Behind our compulsive use of phones and computers lays a more fundamental issue. Our behaviours are at the mercy of the ecosystem that those new technologies are operating within. Let’s look at some of its key features. It’s a manipulation and addiction based market. It’s a “surveillance capitalism” (described so well by Shoshana Zuboff) that ignores our integrity as humans and treats us as a source of raw data. It’s hijacking our habits by analysing, shaping, modifying, and tuning our behaviours towards economic or political gains. Finally, it’s a business model with corrupted incentives that maximize extraction rather than value-creation. It has a handful of simple guiding principles that can be summarized as follows: optimize engagement to increase profit, which is a goal in itself.
In this attention economy, our engagement is fuelled by algorithms. They readily harvest our most primitive instincts like fear, hate, and tribalism. This, in turn, is a downward spiral towards more and more polarization that we increasingly experience in and around us. These models are oriented at feeding users with increasingly extreme viewpoint. Any attempt to repair them would mean taking a hit on engagement, and thus on profit. That’s why any signs from big tech behemoths that they are taking measures to counteract it usually are a PR stunt and cosmetic changes. This is because approaching these issues seriously would run against the deepest motive of this corrupted ecology: a never-ending mantra of more, more, and more profit.
All this is inflicting real harm by design, “racing to the bottom of our brain stems”, to borrow from Tristan Harris. It is made possible because its underlying principles and design are based on psychological and informational manipulation. This is to bypass our awareness and consent. Because most of us would never consciously agree to be completely stripped of privacy, dignity, subjectivity, and free choice in this utterly unsymmetrical relationship. It’s a very uneven battle indeed, where we also lose one of our most precious and sacred resources – our attention. Day by day we are manoeuvred by the army of human behaviour and tech experts to be constantly checking our phones for emails, social media, news etc. This wreaks havoc with us beyond any imagination – taking a toll on individuals, society, and democracy as we know it.
Therefore, in addition to operating on “rest-and-digest” or “fight-or-flight” states, a new psychological and physiological distinction is emerging:
“FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT MODE” OR “FLIGHT-MODE*”.
*Feel free to replace “flight-mode” with airplane/offline mode or just by switching the damn device off.
Unsurprisingly, this unfortunate relationship that we have been developing with a growing array of technological marvels, which don’t just surround us, but become part of us, proves to be a breeding ground for CNS constant arousal.
And here we come full circle. With its Sympathetic Nervous System overstimulation, technology ceases to assist us to live better lives. Rather, it throws us into addiction, stress, self-depreciation, confusion, fear, and constant distraction. All this is contributing to skyrocketing number of people really struggling with anxiety and depression.
DISCONNECT. GO TRULY OFFLINE.
Now, imagine days filled with purposeful, calm focus. Imagine ending your day with an energetic reserve rather than mental and bodily exhaustion. Imagine a good night of sleep and waking up more rested. Can we cultivate and stabilize these states? Is there any way out of this madness? Well, you know the answer, don’t you?
For a start, we can tweak our phone settings to decrease the number of notifications. We can make them less attractive (e.g. black-white), maybe uninstall some apps, curb the time we spend on social media. But to really unburden ourselves from this constant tech-radiation piercing through our minds and bodies, the “flight-mode” might be our best bet. We need to fully unplug by scheduling a real offline time. At the very least in the evenings and mornings, or when being out/in nature, dining with family/friends etc. No nearby-smartphone-just-in-case, this will not work. And, better still, if we can arrange it in our lives, every now and then it can be so beneficial to have tech-detox for a day or even a week or more. Not because our smartphones or laptops are inherently harmful. Rather, to restore a healthy balance, and come back to the idea of us using them and not the other way around.
This post flows with Grandbrothers - Bloodflow
