Week 413 (brendan@brendanbarca.com)

Here's your weekly dose of Fuel Your Mind Friday where I share business building ideas, lifestyle design hacks, and inspirational content to help you thrive in your work and find purpose in your life.

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THE MODERN DAY PAVLOV'S DOGS - COMBATTING TECHNOLOGY-BASED ADDICTION

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Ivan Pavlov was a 19th-century Russian physiologist known for his experiment on classical conditioning, which we now refer to simply as "Pavlov's Dogs." In this experiment, which you may remember from your high school education, Pavlov showed that dogs could be conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell if that sound was repeatedly presented at the same time that they were given food. What was remarkable about the study, however, was that the dogs still salivated at the sound of the bell even when the food had been removed.

Today, in the 21st century, Pavlov and his dogs may be long gone, but the laws he discovered are not. Just as the dogs associated the sound of the bell with a piece of food, we humans have our own associations that we cannot control. We associate the vibration of our phone with a text message we need to read. We associate the beep of an incoming email as a task that must be accomplished. We associate our social media notifications as an opportunity to momentarily escape from an otherwise grueling day.

And while it may seem normal to drop everything to check our texts, notifications, and emails, is it healthy? How many times a day do you check your phone to see if you've missed any texts? Do you refresh your email waiting for the next task to fall into your lap? How often do you fire up Instagram to see the latest content?

Just like Pavlov's dogs who salivated even when the food was absent, we too salivate even when we're not getting pinged or beeped. A 2019 survey found that, on average, Americans pick up their phones 96 times per day, meaning once every 10 minutes. What this means is that we're spending our day multitasking. We hop from email to text to social media and back again. All while trying to squeeze some actual work in.

One research study found that multitasking reduces productivity by as much as 40%. In fact, technology-heavy multitasking can mess up your brain. Switching from one screen to another can reduce your brain's capacity to store information, disrupt your thought process, and possibly even lower IQ.

So, we know that salivating over our phones like Pavlov's dogs salivated over a piece of kibble is bad for us, but what do we do about it? As someone who also struggles with technology addiction, I can only provide you with a few technology-restrictive rules that are currently working for me.
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Here is a list of the technology addictions I have and what I'm doing to curb them:

1. Phone/ Texts
   • Phones are not allowed in the bedroom before 8:30 AM or after 7:00 PM at night
   • Hide phone while working (face down, out of sight, and out of reach)
   • Turn off all vibrate and beeping notifications
2. Social Media
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   • Deleted all social media apps from my phone (including LinkedIn which is my favorite...weird I know)
   • Relegate any social media time to before 7:00 PM (no social media at night)
3. Email:
   • Deleted the GMail app from my phone so I can only check it on my laptop
   • Set strict hours where I am not allowed to look at email (before 8:30 AM EST & after 5:30 PM EST)
   • Schedule designated times to check & reply to email (once in the morning, once right before lunch, and one last time at 5:00)

Note: Sometimes I break my own rules. But just having these rules makes me good MOST of the time

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While some of these rules may seem drastic, remember that it is a drastic addiction we are trying to fight against. By allowing technology to constantly consume our attention, we are blocking our ability to problem solve, think deeper, and be present. While technology-heavy multitasking may feel good in the moment, it's doing damage to our brains that we are a society are still trying to understand.
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If you feel like one of Pavlov's dogs every time your phone buzzes, ask yourself, which of the above technology-restrictive rules do you want to put in place for yourself?

Better productivity, deeper thinking, and creativity all lie on the other side of busting these technology-based addictions.

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- Brendan

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​brendanbarca.com​

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