Телефон ворует не время. Он ворует кое-что дороже. Разбор психолога — Transcript

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1. 0:01Oh, hi. I'm Vyacheslav Antonov, a psychologist.
2. 0:06Let's start with a typical evening of yours.
3. 0:09You come home from work, lie down for ten minutes to rest with your phone,
4. 0:12and wake up an hour and a half later, exhausted, irritated,
5. 0:16with zero energy to do anything.
6. 0:18But you were resting, right?
7. 0:21Here's the fact that explains it.
8. 0:23When you switch from one task to another,
9. 0:26your attention doesn't transfer completely.
10. 0:28A part of it remains on the previous task.
11. 0:31Researchers call this attention residue.
12. 0:34You're already watching the next video, but a piece of your brain is still
13. 0:38digesting the previous one. So now do the math.
14. 0:41An hour and a half in the feed means several hundred separate clips.
15. 0:44War, kittens, a recipe, somebody's opinion, a car crash, some joke.
16. 0:50Several hundred switches and several hundred little bits of residue
17. 0:54that you go on dragging along behind you.
18. 0:56So no, you weren't resting at all.
19. 0:58You put in a full second shift.
20. 1:00You simply didn't notice it, because that shift had been sliced up
21. 1:04into 15-second pieces. But that is only half of the trouble.
22. 1:08You think that your phone is stealing your time?
23. 1:11No. It is taking away something far more expensive than that.
24. 1:15It steals your minute of silence.
25. 1:19Here is the story behind it.
26. 1:20Back in the late 90s, scientists were scanning the brains of people
27. 1:23who were lying inside a scanner and waiting for an experiment to begin.
28. 1:27They were simply doing nothing, and they saw something they had not expected
29. 1:31at all. Several regions of the brain were more active in that nothing
30. 1:35than they were during tasks.
31. 1:36At first, they decided it was interference.
32. 1:39For years, they cut it out of the data, and then they took a closer look.
33. 1:44It turned out to be a separate mode of the brain, one that only switches on
34. 1:48when you are not occupied with anything.
35. 1:51And they named it the default mode network.
36. 1:54So what is it actually doing?
37. 1:56It stitches your memories together.
38. 1:58It files away yesterday's conversation.
39. 2:01It builds the picture of yourself and of your future. This is not idleness.
40. 2:05This is the shop floor where your life is being processed, and it only runs
41. 2:09when the engine is idling.
42. 2:12That is exactly why the best thoughts come to you in the shower, behind the wheel,
43. 2:16or standing in line. This has been tested.
44. 2:18People were given a task, then some of them were sent off to do something simple
45. 2:22and boring, and the others were told to keep on thinking.
46. 2:25The first group solved it noticeably better.
47. 2:28Boredom had worked as an incubator.
48. 2:31So now ask yourself, what we do in those pauses today?
49. 2:35In the elevator, phone. In line, phone.
50. 2:3930 seconds at the kettle, phone in hand.
51. 2:42The shop floor is shut down.
52. 2:44Grown, successful men keep coming to me and saying this.
53. 2:48I can't concentrate anymore.
54. 2:50My head feels like it is completely full of fog.
55. 2:52And when we start going through the whole day together, it turns out there isn't one
56. 2:56single minute in it when the man is not consuming something.
57. 3:00Not one. People live for weeks on end without a single thought of their own.
58. 3:05Not because we have gotten dumber, but because there is no time left over
59. 3:09to think. And there is a separate, hardest case of this.
60. 3:14When the feed is filled up not with kittens, but with anxiety.
61. 3:18And here a mechanism works that was discovered almost a hundred years ago.
62. 3:21A young psychologist was sitting in a Berlin café and noticed something strange.
63. 3:25The waiters held the orders of every table in their heads right up
64. 3:29to the moment they were paid.
65. 3:31The second a table settled up, the order vanished from memory instantly.
66. 3:36The brain holds on to the unfinished.
67. 3:38It lets go of the finished.
68. 3:41It was even named after her.
69. 3:43The Zeigarnik effect. Now take a look at a piece of anxious news.
70. 3:48It is unfinished. What is going to happen next?
71. 3:51How is it going to end? The brain keeps it open and it demands an ending.
72. 3:56So you scroll on looking for a period.
73. 3:59And instead of a period, you get the next open story.
74. 4:02A hundred unclosed tables in a single evening.
75. 4:05Not one single bill is paid.
76. 4:08And the logic here is this.
77. 4:10If I am watching the threat, then I am in control of it.
78. 4:15An illusion, but a very convincing one.
79. 4:18Anxiety drives you into the feed.
80. 4:19The feed feeds the anxiety.
81. 4:22So here is the check that settles this bill in a second. Ask yourself this.
82. 4:26Does what I have just read change anything at all in my day tomorrow?
83. 4:31If not, then that was not information.
84. 4:34That was anxiety pretending to be information.
85. 4:37And if you have recognized somebody close to you in this,
86. 4:40somebody who lies down for ten minutes and disappears for the evening,
87. 4:44send them this talk. Not as a reproach, but as an explanation.
88. 4:49And now about the main thing.
89. 4:51You have surely heard plenty about the dopamine loop.
90. 4:54About the evil engineers at social networks who arranged it all
91. 4:58so cleverly in order to hold your attention.
92. 5:01That is true, but only in part.
93. 5:04Here are the details that these breakdowns usually skip over.
94. 5:09Dopamine is released not when you have got the reward, but
95. 5:12when you are waiting for it.
96. 5:14And the strongest release is not when the reward is guaranteed,
97. 5:18but when the odds are somewhere around 50/50.
98. 5:21This has been measured on neurons.
99. 5:24Guaranteed is boring. Impossible is boring.
100. 5:27But maybe that is what sets it off.
101. 5:29The feed runs on exactly that frequency.
102. 5:32The next video might turn out to be brilliant, or it might turn out empty.
103. 5:36But the main question isn't the mechanics of the feed.
104. 5:40It is the reasons why this mechanism works on us at all.
105. 5:43At one university they ran a very simple experiment.
106. 5:47People were asked to sit in an empty room for 15 minutes alone with their thoughts.
107. 5:53No phone, no book, nothing at all.
108. 5:55There was one single button in the room.
109. 5:57It delivered a weak, but distinctly unpleasant electric shock.
110. 6:01Everyone was warned and given a try beforehand. And here is the result.
111. 6:06Two thirds of the men, in those 15 minutes, shocked themselves at least once.
112. 6:10Voluntarily. Two thirds.
113. 6:12Anything, rather than sit alone with their thoughts.
114. 6:16So the hand reaches for the phone for a reason.
115. 6:19You are getting away from something.
116. 6:21Away from heavy thoughts.
117. 6:22Away from tasks that have to be solved.
118. 6:25Away from the need to look at your own situation from another side.
119. 6:28Because all of that costs you effort, and it is very often simply unpleasant.
120. 6:33The phone is that very same button, only without the electric current.
121. 6:37And from here it is clear why weekend detoxes do not work.
122. 6:41Taking the phone away for a day is taking away the painkiller without ever touching
123. 6:45the cause of the pain.
124. 6:46Monday comes, the cause is still there, and the hand reaches out again.
125. 6:50The right question isn't how much am I scrolling, but which minute
126. 6:55of my own life am I running from.
127. 6:58So what you need is not heroics, but three simple and boring things.
128. 7:03First, bring back three idle runs a day.
129. 7:06The drive home, or the kettle, without a screen.
130. 7:09The first few days will be physically hard.
131. 7:11And that is the sign that the shop floor is starting up.
132. 7:15Second, one thing at a time.
133. 7:16Food without a show. A conversation without a smartphone on the table.
134. 7:20You are training your attention to hold on to one storyline.
135. 7:23The very skill that the feed breaks up into 15-second pieces.
136. 7:28And third, and this is very important, all of next week,
137. 7:32catch the moment when your hand reaches for the phone by itself,
138. 7:35and write down what happened a second before that.
139. 7:38What did you feel, and why exactly did you do it?
140. 7:40After a week you will have a list in front of you.
141. 7:43Most likely three or four repeating points on it, and not one of them
142. 7:48about the phone. It is a list of what you are running from.
143. 7:52One client of mine had the very same word written on it 14 times over,
144. 7:57and he had thought that he had a problem with concentration.
145. 8:01The general mechanics of escape are the same for everybody.
146. 8:04I have just described them.
147. 8:06But what stands on your own list is absolutely unique.
148. 8:10And a video cannot show you that.
149. 8:14What's more, people usually look at their list and say, but these are only thoughts.
150. 8:18That is how we are built.
151. 8:20What we run from cannot be seen from the inside.
152. 8:23So, if you are ready to take an honest look at your list,
153. 8:26and to work out how to stop running from your own life,
154. 8:30then we can meet and talk it through.
155. 8:33The first 15 minutes are just an introduction, so that we can see whether I
156. 8:39can be of help to you. Boredom is not emptiness.
157. 8:41It is the silence in which your attention gathers itself back into one.
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160. 8:54Breakdowns like this one come out every week, here and on Instagram.
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