The Stress Solution Read online

  One of the reasons this kind of tech creates an abnormal level of MSDs is because human attention is naturally drawn to the negative. Our brains want to keep us alive, and it’s much more important that they notice and process signals of potential threat than those of reward. But we’re simply not built to deal with such constant interpersonal stressors. Humans have evolved to live in tribes of up to 150 people, yet the average number of Facebook ‘friends’ is 338. Over on Twitter, the average number of followers is 707. Our social networks are already too big for us to sensibly cope with. Adding weight to this problem is the fact that when people are online they become disinhibited. In a human tribe, interactions would have been face to face, and the ramifications of being disrespectful would often be serious. But now, anyone who’s had a bad day can get home and offload their aggression by becoming a brave keyboard warrior, virtue-signalling to the hundreds of people they’re connected to.

  Put these two phenomena together and you get a very familiar yet entirely toxic situation. When you put a baby picture up on Facebook and receive twenty-three lovely messages telling you what a beautiful child you have, you feel great. But all too often you’ll get a snippy comment telling you you’re holding your child wrong. Your attention will go straight to that one comment, and that’s where it will stay. You’ll ruminate on it (see here) and process it for a long time, because signals that something is wrong in your social world are naturally alarming to the brain. It has to make absolutely sure there’s no danger in the information. Rumination is another form of stress that’s great in short doses but damaging over the longer term. Psychologists know that chronic rumination is a predictor of a whole array of mental health issues, up to and including suicide.

  We’re never going to be able to eradicate this kind of stress. If you go on the internet, you’ll be hit by MSDs. And it’s not just from keyboard warriors. There’ll always be someone achieving more than you, someone who looks like they’re happier, smarter and in a sunnier location than you. Even if you’ve just been on the holiday of a lifetime, when you come back to work somebody on your feed will be on their own dream holiday, maybe by a pool or on the beach, looking amazing with a pina colada in their hand. Even though you’ve just experienced something similar, in that moment you’ll experience it as an MSD because you’re looking out of your office window watching a pigeon drink out of a dirty puddle of water on the roof of a vandalized bus stop. And these MSDs don’t simply vanish. They go into you. You absorb them. They change your mood. They change your biology.

  FACEBOOK BRAIN

  Lots of patients these days are coming into my surgery complaining of increased stress and mental health problems such as anxiety. I’ve noticed that a high proportion of them are spending a lot of time on their smartphones. I’m convinced this is not a coincidence. Recent studies which examine the effect Facebook has on its adolescent users found it makes them more depressed. Constant exposure to social media seems to be making their emotional brains overactive (see here). I call this state Facebook Brain. Too much time on social media sites starts to change your view of the world. If you feel that everyone around you is having the best time of their lives and you’re not, it’s going to make you feel as if you’re failing, which gives your brain information that it’s in a place of threat. If you have Facebook Brain, your brain starts to sense danger even when there’s no danger present.

  And it’s not just Facebook. In 2017 a study conducted by the Royal Society of Public Health surveyed fourteen- to twenty-four-year-olds and found Instagram to be the ‘worst social media platform’ for mental health. I wasn’t surprised to read this. Seeing beautiful, curated images that may well have been photoshopped changes your brain’s perception of what’s normal and skews its view of reality. We feel we just don’t measure up and, again, this gives the brain information that we’re failing. I worry about the impact this will have on the current teenage generation. I’m also grateful that social media didn’t exist when I was at school. But, even as an adult, Facebook Brain affects me. Last year, I’d just come back from a trip to America and was back at work at the surgery. There happened to be another conference going on that I would’ve loved to have attended, but I simply didn’t have the time. Loads of my friends were posting photos – out for coffee, running on the beach in the sunshine, eating delicious-looking breakfasts. Did I have FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)? You bet I did. Was I stressed by seeing those pictures? Absolutely.

  TAKE A DIGITAL HOLIDAY

  I’m so convinced of the downsides of being constantly ‘connected’ that I routinely take digital holidays. Last February I was feeling pretty worn out. I’d been travelling up and down the country speaking about The 4 Pillar Plan and spreading the word about progressive medicine. The irony was that, in the process, I was slowly eroding away my own health. In the midst of all the madness I found a few days to take my family on a last-minute break. We went completely off grid. When we got to the hotel, phones, laptops and devices went into the hotel safe and stayed there for the entire duration of the trip. I cannot even begin to tell you how good it felt. Holidays can recharge you, that’s for sure, but this was on another level. By the time I got home I felt as if I’d been away for two weeks. It made me realize just how much mental energy is taken up by being chronically connected.

  Why not see if you can take a phone-free break next time you are on holiday. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be while you’re on holiday. A weekend break, a half-day excursion or simply an evening out provides an opportunity for this as well. Often, I will go out with my family on a Sunday, even if just for half a day, without my phone. The benefits for my mental health are immediate and immense – I highly recommend it.

  If you feel you must have your phone with you for emergencies, why not disable your mobile data services so that you can receive texts and calls, should you need to, without the temptation of mindlessly surfing the web.

  In Pillar 1, Purpose, we discussed the importance of doing things for intrinsic motivation, not for external validation (see here). With that in mind, here is a list of questions I would like you to ask yourself:

  Do I really need to always carry my phone around with me?

  Do I really need to post every single holiday experience to my social media ‘friends’?

  Why am I doing this?

  Is it because I am struggling to switch off? What purpose does it really serve? Am I doing it for ‘likes’ and external validation or do I think that my ‘friends’ really want and need to see it? Am I doing it for my ‘friends’ or for me? Does it take away from the experience of ‘being away’?

  My role is not to tell you what to do. I simply want to help you understand your choices a little better. There is nothing inherently wrong with posting a photo from your holiday to your friends. It is much better, though, to be aware of why you are doing it. I have gone through these questions with many of my patients who suffer from stress-related symptoms and in the majority of cases these questions result in them changing their behaviour of their own volition.

  THE UNCERTAINTY ADDICTION

  Experiences like our device-free holiday convinced me that we all need to take back control from these all-powerful Silicon Valley tech companies. They’ve spent billions of dollars and recruited some of the smartest people in the world to try to make their products as addictive as possible. The result is that tech is now in control of us. One of their most nightmarish creations is the never-ending nature of social media. The feeds are endless, but we struggle to leave them alone because they trigger our reward pathways. Every time we get a ‘like’ we receive a hit of the brain chemical associated with reward, dopamine. This keeps us coming back for more. And when we do there’s always another article to read, another post to look at.

  This effect is magnified by the fact that you never know what result you’re going to get when you look at your social media. Is your post going to get ten likes, or a hundred? I know some Manchester City fans who, once the club go
t rich owners and the team started winning all the time, felt that a lot of the pleasure of going to matches was lost. Every week, they knew their team was going to claim victory. If you know the result before the match has even begun, watching football loses its charm. This same mechanism is in play with gamblers. It’s this uncertainty, and the powerful seductive tension that comes from the thought that they might be a winner, that keeps them coming back for more.

  And it’s not just social media. In the past, you might have watched one episode of Inspector Morse or All Creatures Great and Small, but on Netflix or Amazon Prime you don’t even have to do anything and you’re already into the next episode of Narcos or Stranger Things. It’s the same on YouTube. As well as being never-ending, these platforms encourage us to multitask, to jump from one thing to another. How many times have you sat down to complete one simple task on your computer and, next thing you know, there are twenty tabs open? All these things are reducing your ability to focus.

  CONTROL YOUR TECH BORDERS

  I found it fascinating that Dan Nixon, a senior executive at the Bank of England, went public recently, saying he was worried that digital disruptions were having a significant impact on our productivity. This isn’t some neurotic GP or a tech Luddite, it’s one of the most influential voices in business. Studies confirm that when we complete a task but are distracted while doing it we perform it with an IQ that is ten points lower than if we had performed it without distractions. That loss of IQ is the same as the loss from missing a night’s sleep. With our phones constantly at our sides, we’re going through our entire lives less intelligently than we might be.

  And the negative effect that phones can have on us doesn’t stop when we leave work. Twenty years ago you would come back home and sit down with your family or your housemates. You’d eat together, perhaps put the kids to bed then chat and relax in front of One Foot in the Grave. You wouldn’t have flipped on your device and started looking at work emails. When I ask my patients how many of them check work emails at the weekend, almost everyone says they do. We’ve normalized this kind of behaviour. It can be Christmas Day and someone can ping you a work email. A few weeks ago someone who has my mobile number added me to a big WhatsApp group. I wasn’t at all happy about this, because I’m really careful to protect my personal mobile number. Having someone’s mobile number means you have access to them whenever you want. Weekends, evenings, holidays – it doesn’t matter. The person who did it wasn’t acting with any malice, they simply didn’t think anything of it – but that indicates the extent to which we’ve grown used to the expectation that we should be accessible all the time. We don’t respect personal boundaries any more. We steal each other’s valuable headspace without thinking twice about it.

  But there are things we can do about it. Like all stresses, those that come from your online life can grow your emotional brain at the expense of your rational brain. This means you should erect some boundaries before it – inevitably – gets worse. Taking back control will feed the growth of your rational brain. One part of your rational brain, an area called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or dlPFC, is thought to be involved in our ability to exercise self-control and make rational decisions. People who suffer chronic work stress tend to have a smaller dlPFC, which means they have reduced ability to self-regulate. If you damage the dlPFC, people can be more prone to depression. By controlling the way we interact with our digital worlds, you’re exercising the dlPFC and reinforcing your rational brain.

  DELAYED GRATIFICATION

  Exercising the dlPFC will also help you with a skill that some argue is in short supply these days – delayed gratification. The ability to defer pleasure and reward has been linked to all kinds of positive life outcomes, but in these days of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime, we’re becoming used to getting what we want when we want it. We can decide we want a fancy new TV, a new rucksack or simply a brand-new pair of socks and, with a few clicks or button presses, it’ll arrive on our doorstep the very next day.

  A strong dlPFC will mean we’re less likely to be impulsive when confronted by temptation. We can train our dlPFC by taking on tasks that require effort and practice such as:

  • Learning a musical instrument

  • Learning a new language

  • Playing chess, which encourages fierce concentration, mindfulness and focus

  • Trying to learn and master a new sport

  • Playing cards

  • Playing computer games that require skill and patience. (A colleague of mine recently bought her daughter a computer game that teaches dance routines. She tried to play herself and found it incredibly challenging to watch, copy and then learn the dance patterns. This is the kind of activity that exercises the dlPFC.)

  MUTE YOUR DIGITAL WORLD

  This intervention is going to help exercise your rational brain. It recognizes that there are lots of amazing things about tech and that it’s not realistic or possible to live without it, even if we wanted to. What we can do is dampen its impact on us down to a manageable level.

  I’m asking you to pick three of these to start off with. See if you can work your way up from there.

  Have a non-tech lunch hour: Turn your phone off and put it in a drawer. Enjoy your lunch without it.

  Declare email bankruptcy: This is a great idea I heard from the author Tim Ferris. If you’ve reached a critical mass of unreplied emails, declare bankruptcy on them. Trash the lot and start again.

  Schedule a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) hour: Give yourself one hour (or two daily half-hours) to look at social media so it doesn’t become the default thing you do whenever you’re not doing something else.

  Batch your emails: Find a set daily time to look at them. Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. can work well, because we’re often in a circadian lull at this time, and doing more mindless tasks makes sense. Add an automatic response to your email, telling people that you read messages only between these times.

  Intermittent fasting for your phone: You might be aware of diets like the 5:2, in which people restrict their calorie intake for two days and eat normally for five. I recommend the 4:1 diet for phones. Put your device in aeroplane mode (or ‘airplane mode’, if you have an iPhone) for one hour for every four that you’re awake.

  Mute Facebook messenger groups and WhatsApp groups that are causing you stress: Muting these groups will allow you still to use those services, but without getting stressed. Leaving a WhatsApp or FB messenger group will alert all other users that ‘you have left’ the group, which may attract hostility or further stress.

  Turn off automatic syncing and notifications: Many of your phone apps, such as email, will automatically ‘sync’, so every time you pick up your phone to make a call you will also see how many new emails have come through; other apps, such as Facebook or Instagram, will send you a notification every time that someone ‘likes’ or comments on your latest post. Tech companies are like biscuit companies that fill their treats with sugar in order to make them moreish. You can fight back by making sure your phone isn’t constantly pinging for your attention.

  Open dedicated email accounts: Create a friends-and-family-only email address and turn your work one off during antisocial hours. You can also open a dedicated ‘spam’ address that you give when ordering products online or checking into hotels so that your email accounts don’t overflow.

  Put your phone completely out of sight in social situations: Don’t underestimate the power of its distracting lure. A recent study showed that its mere presence, even if you put it on ‘silent’ or turn it face down, will reduce our cognitive ability.

  Take notes and keep a diary on paper: Studies suggest that when we take notes in a book rather than on a device we have a much deeper connection with and clearer understanding of it. Why not treat yourself to some new stationery?

  If you have an iPhone, switch on ‘greyscale’ – it turns your screen colours to black and white, which makes your phone a lot less desirable. The first time
I did it, the amount of times I looked at my phone over the next few days was dramatically reduced. When I feel that my phone usage is starting to climb, I flip it into greyscale mode for a few days.

  Take the news app off your phone: Try to consume less ‘news’. I did this a few years ago and it has transformed my stress levels. If you infuse your brain with images of war and the worst of humanity, your brain will start to think that is the norm, even if it isn’t. This will heighten your anxieties and stress you out. Choose to consume the news when, and if, you want to.

  Track your usage: Until you track how much time you spend on your phone, you probably have no idea at all how much of your time is taken up with scrolling. My cousin recently used an app called Moment. Some days he thought he hadn’t really been on his phone all day, and the app told him he’d been on it for a solid three hours. He’d touched his phone about every seventeen minutes. The average user of that particular app spends 23 per cent of their waking lives on their phone!

  Challenge a friend or partner to see who can use their phone the least: Track your usage on the Moment app to see who wins. This is surprisingly motivating. A friend of mine, Emily, does this with her partner. When she is tempted to pick up her phone in the evening she will often resist because she wants to ‘beat’ her partner. If motivation doesn’t work, ‘gamifying’ the situation can be remarkably effective!