Human Pollution

HUMAN POLLUTION How many of you consume drugs at various intervals in the day? If you said no to yourself, think again. Electronic devices are none less than the drugs addicts consume. Addiction then is a relentless pull towards substance or an activity that actually limits your day to day life. I can almost be certain that each of us is addicted in some measure. I am a psychologist and over the last 16 years I have enabled 16,000 people overcome their limitations so that they are more productive in life and in business. I decided to study this. How limited we are. And a recent survey says that an individual spends 6 to 8 hours a day checking emails, browsing, online shopping and social media. The brain needs instant gratification. It is like compulsion. The minute we get off our phones, our electronic devices we get back to it. We feel a compulsion. All of this excess information floods our working memory and our ability to convert information from long term to short term is affected. Our brain is an evolved computer which has multiple windows open and has a tendency to slow down and drain battery. A famous Zen parable then says, ‘you can’t fill a cup which is full. You have to empty it.’ I derived inspiration when my daughter once asked me, as I was frantically trying to reply back to an email, whether I love her or my phone. Apart from becoming a victim I decided to research this. And the research said that an individual checks his email within 6 seconds of having received it. It’s not 6 minutes or 1 minute. Its 6 seconds. And just when these numbers dawned on me, I had what I like to call a deciding moment in my life. I made a decision. Each of us needs to take responsibility of the victims we have become and so I wrote this article to be a catalyst in your deciding moment too. Because eventually, it is our whole brain that controls the way we think, the way we act, our relationships and our businesses. The first step is awareness. The awareness that these screens fool our memory, they fool our mind by literally by releasing a chemical called ‘dopamine’. And dopamine is a chemical of reward and pleasure. So when secreted in normal amounts, you repeat behaviour. And when secreted in excess, you get this hyper, excitable rush. Our ability to focus is decreased. It acts like sugar-rush. Our bodies are intelligently devised, with a dopamine high you don’t get serotonin and oxytocin from a human real face-to-face connection. In front of the screen for so many hours, our brain actually believes that it’s in an emergency room of a hospital acting as if it’s in this crisis mode of fight or flight. No time for responsiveness and even reflection. Ironically technology is an enabler to enhance our productivity but there is enough research which states that individuals who go online, that are in front of the screen, have poor study habits and are angry, hostile and even depressive. The time we spend creating a mask on the social media is what we want the world to see as an image of ours. And that mask that we create enables us to act like undercover agents. To imagine a world where we are so virtual and not real, what would our lives be a few years from now? Human beings do what they do for 3 things- love, self-esteem and security. When we are on this social media we just want acceptance which we get from likes. And these likes we mistake as love. And when we come back to the real world, it’s not so accepting. Like a fish out of water you jump back in the social media world. And this phenomenon continues. Creating within us a void. An emptiness inside us. And this void gives rise to more and more infidelity then. What is infidelity? The definitions are blurred, the lines are hazy. Does it matter you are chatting with a former flame perhaps through an online video? Does it matter that you are sexting someone? Or does it matter that you have a profile on tinder but you are not very active on it? Infidelity is the breaking of trust that occurs when you keep meaningful information from your romantic partner. I believe in a world of screen addicts, we are creating infidelity addicts too. We are growing to abuse technology. It’s not that technology is bad, internet is bad or social media is bad or the screens are bad. It is our response to them that needs Mindfulness. Whenever a new technology emerged there is a tendency to misuse it. When cars were invented, there were no speed limits or driver rules and over time, we developed speed limits, good driver education. And that’s what we all need. Good driver education. It’s that simple. I like to call these mindful screen practices. 1) The first mindful screen practice is to know how are brains work. It is the brain cycle. Just like machines have production capacity our brain has productivity cycles. And these cycles are for 90 minutes. It takes 90 minutes for the brain to gear up to be in a zone of productivity. And post 90 minutes it is recommended that you take a break for 20 minutes. In 20 minutes it is recommended that you breathe, listen to some music, and walk about, drink water. And perhaps in those 20 minutes you can check your phone or your social media. But if you keep going back to your phone within the 90 minutes, your ability to be in a zone of productivity will only diminish. 2) Our brain is so complex; the researchers are still researching this, discovering new aspects of our brain. Our brain has a default network. Which basically means, when it has nothing else to do, it thinks about itself, it thinks about relationships which gets the brain to reach out to social media. If we focus on what needs our focus, for an active process, we are in a zone. When we focus on face to face relationships, these default networks reduce. If we focus on human connection the pathways reduce. The opposite of addiction then is human connection. 3) Our brain has this pathway of seeking and a pathway of liking. And this gets triggered on online and it would resonate with the reader. My question to the reader then is, why not seek ourselves first so that we can like ourselves more? We must control our brains like we control our waistlines. Instead of feeding our brain with food that has high calorific value but no nutrition, feed your brain with food for thought. Seek your selves every morning. Every morning, ask yourself why do I even step out of bed. Why do I do what I do? This is a valuable question. Find your passion. 4) Give yourself time to be bored. It is at the peak of your boredom that will your creativity will emerge. Your ability to see things differently. 5) 30 minutes gadget free in the morning. 30 minutes gadget free in the evening to enable the quality of your life to change. And as you spend time gadget free, ask yourself how do I want my day to be today? We invest close to 14 hours living a day and we don’t even put an intent as to how we want to it. 6) Ask yourself, what is the kind of person I want to evolve into? What is the kind of person I want to grow into? What are the human experiences that I want to enjoy? And most importantly, ask yourself, what is the kind of relationships I want. Relationships are like a pivot, around which we all revolve. If our relationships are great everything in our lives works better like our businesses, our education is good, our jobs. So you have to crave out your relationships like an artist who carves out a beautiful mural. 7) Look at people in their eyes and tell them you understand them. Instead of texting them, move to the space of earned security. Ask them how they feel. Make this a part of your spiritual understanding to tell one person each day that you understand them. You have to carve out your screen free time. And as you carve out that time, you will be anxious. So when you feel anxious, this is what I recommend. Breathe in and breathe out with a sound to reset a part of our brain called the amygdale which is important for fear and anxiety mechanisms which will happen when you go off the screen. But the fact remains, human beings needs human relationships. Studies as early as 1950s showed that when children were given safe nurturing care giving in childhood adjusted well with security and trust. And those children that did not receive safe nurturing care giving in childhood found it a challenge to adjust into security and had trust issues in adulthood. They could not adjust into the human rat race. Humans and rats are very similar. That’s why it’s called the rat race for the humans as well. So they are similar because like humans rats like to have fun, they are social animals they like to eat and sleep, and mate and have loads of fun. As per a famous experiment conducted by Bruce Alexander, and it was called as the Rat Park Experiment, concluded that need for social stimulants reduce when we have social connection. When we have social connection, when we talk face to face, human to human, we have what we call as our earned security. At the time of a crisis, it is not your twitter followers and it is not your facebook followers that will be there but your earned security. The ones that you have deep connections with will be there, for you. We are at a tipping point in our journeys where we have governments across the world wake up to air pollution, water pollution. Even the food, the fruits and vegetables that we eat are getting polluted. I think the time has come that we wake up to one more pollution, Human Pollution. Our need to be omnipresent, but yet not have connections. It is polluting the way we think, our brains, our relations, our lives. It’s spreading over. We have moved from human beings to human doings. And the question you have to ask yourself and I have to ask myself is ‘are we going to just sit back or are we going to move forward and reclaim our journey of being humans, reclaim our journey of having these human connections?’ One reader can make a difference and collectively may we create a butterfly effect upon the world. So that, together we can move from Human Pollution to Human Evolution.