Breaking Bad Habits With the Science of ‘Friction Design’
‘Digital Detox’ is Dead. What’s next?
Do a quick Google search for ‘digital detox’ and you’ll find countless of programmes, documentaries, offline retreats, gamified screentime apps, self-help books and blogs. They’re all trying to achieve the same thing: help you break your bad scrolling and texting habits.
While all noble and — to a degree — helpful in our collective awareness of the undeniable truth about our favourite nervous tick, there’s little evidence to support the argument they’re effective at all in changing how we use smartphones. This is definitely not a lecture on detailed smartphone statistics so here’s the recap:
Average daily phone use is up everywhere in the world, across every age group, for every single year since the iPhone 1 came out in 2007.
Meanwhile, a growing body of research around the psychological damage of tech overuse is becoming overwhelming as well.
We’re usually advised to simply “turn off your notifications”, “flip your phone upside down” or “muster up the discipline”. However, you’re quickly disillusioned thinking these will fundamentally change your behaviour. It’s — to put it bluntly — quite naive.
The reality is that phones have now become ubiquitous with life. Apps know you better than you, outsmarting us at every second in an arm’s race to maximise human attention. It’s even becoming harder and harder these days to skip the “download this app” step (e.g. many shops don’t even accept cash anymore). I wish it was as easy as doing a yearly detox but it simply isn’t.
And yes. That’s probably why that off-the-digital-grid detox in the woods didn’t do the trick, ultimately.
So, how do we address the real root of bad habits?
According to what I discovered, real behavioural change happens if we:
- learn to deal with our emotional states as the real driver of behaviour
- rethink our frictionless use of mobile devices
OK, let’s dive into those a bit more in detail.
1. Dealing with emotions is hard. Take small steps.
The path to truly understanding and addressing your emotions requires you to dig deep and do some serious soul-searching. That road is entirely yours. Here’s a few things, however, that can help you on your way:
Screen time: Simply start by looking at the what you’re actually doing on a phone. Open up your screen time. Maybe try deleting social media or e-mail from your phone for a week to see how hooked you are on those apps?
“Urge Surfing”: A mind technique meant to not resist the emotion or urge to grab your phone but simply detect and “surf” it before acting on it. Usually if you allow yourself to “surf” for 10 minutes the urge disappears. A very simple (it’s hard though) and effective technique to learn more about your behavioural patterns, and deal better with the emotional triggers.
Reflection questions: the act of writing down thoughts and goals has proven benefits. Here’s some great questions to start with:
- Take your top 3 most-used apps. Write down each one on the left and, what value they bring to your life on the right.
- Complete this sentence as honestly as possible: “I open …………….(your #1 app) on average ….. times per day because I hope to find……………. (desire or need)
2. Tackling how we interact with a phone? That’s more practical.
When you break down each step of a typical smartphone screen time session, you quickly notice a pattern: handling a phone feels frictionless. Designers will pitch it as ‘user-friendly’ or ‘convenient’ features but they’re actually allowing for & fuelling our impulsive human nature that eventually leads to compulsive behaviours that’s are so difficult to control.
Think about it. At no point does my phone ask me ‘are you sure you want to continue?’ like when I’m trying to close an unsaved document on my laptop.
Why would it do that anyway? Put up a barrier to protect you against yourself? Simply put, a phone was basically designed to be used as much as possible to run personalised ads which, well, run on your time. With everyone competing for a slice, the attention economy has thrived in the last decade while your ability to focus has plummeted.
Instead of waiting around for tech regulation or throwing in the towel, there’s actually a lot you can take in your own hands. For free.
It’s a matter of reverse-engineering the steps and applying the simple yet effective science of ‘friction design’ to change the frictionless use of your phone. Check this out.
Implement the following simple changes to your phone settings:
Start small. But start now.
Consider these not as rigid rules but more an experiment. Not all of these will fit your lifestyle or are set in stone. They’re meant to get you out of the default mode right now and then see what the effect is on your life.
So I invite you. Try these out for at least one week and see how they’re revealing the impulsive nature of your phone behaviour, and how they’re helping you slowly become more intentional.
Who knows some of these changes will turn out to stick? At the very least you will be switching back to the default setting in a much more conscious way instead of doing the same old.
I’m Julien, founder of Stolp®
Find me at: julien@stolp.com
