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I have a confession to make: I’m an addict. Over the last 15 years I’ve built a comprehensive library of instructional materials; books, DVDs, play-a-long CDs, online video lessons, VHS…
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How To Practise, Part 3: Keeping Track In a drawer under my bed I have a collection of old diaries stretching back to 2008, detailing almost every day of the…
How To Practise, Part 3: Keeping Track
In a drawer under my bed I have a collection of old diaries stretching back to 2008, detailing almost every day of the last decade. Here are a few of them:
These are not diaries in the conventional sense – they don’t contain my musings on life’s trials and tribulations, there are no empowering affirmations or overly confessional spoken word poetry. Instead, there are scribblings – hieroglyphics listing exercises, keys, metronome markings and time logged at the instrument, part of the never-ending process of attempting to achieve musical mastery.
So why would anybody want to engage in such a boring, borderline-OCD activity?
Tracking your practice has numerous benefits:
Keeping Track Keeps You On Track
Maintaining a log of what you practise, how often you do it and how much time you get at the instrument is a great way of providing yourself with accountability (this was also emphasised in the last post on finding a teacher). Nothing motivates me more than opening my practice diary and being embarrassed by the long gaps between practice sessions – I can see when I’ve been slacking off, or letting life get in the way of spending time at the bass. Seeing the fine details of your practice (or lack thereof) in black and white reinforces the message that you alone are responsible for your musical development – even if you’re taking regular lessons, your teacher cannot do the work for you; if you want to improve then you have to put the hours in.
Tracking Provides Accurate Feedback
What were you practising 6 weeks ago today? What were you working on? What keys did you play in? How fast were you playing? How much have you improved since then?
If you rely solely on your memory for these items of information then you’re not only burdening yourself with lots of extra figures to carry around in your brain but you’re also likely to forget many of the details, especially if you’re practising regularly. There’s a Chinese proverb that goes something like this:
“Even the palest ink is better than the strongest memory”.
I find having an accurate written record of the minutiae of my practice routine helpful in gauging my musical progress, not least because my short term memory is terrible – in fact, the act of ‘going back in time’ in my practice diary by 6 months or so is a useful way to remind myself of all the things that I should be able to play but have probably forgotten.
Tools and Tactics
I have two ways of tracking what happens on a day-to-day level – one physical, one digital:
The Practice Diary
As detailed above, this acts as a detailed written record of what I’ve been working towards on a given day – my preference is for an A5 notebook, but if you’re clocking up lots of hours then you might want to opt for a larger size. I used to prefer the ‘day per page’ diary format, but my embarrassment at wasting numerous pages has forced me to adopt a plain notebook instead.
Forest
I’ve mentioned this rather childish looking productivity app before in this post on brain-rot but I’ll cover it here as well, because it’s my favourite method of fighting digital addiction and maximising productive time. In short, the app rewards you for spending time locked out of your phone, which forces you to concentrate on the task at hand without distractions. This means that I can easily keep tabs on how much practice time I’m logging in each week and my natural tendency to be competitive with myself means that I’ll push myself to try and increase my score each week.
In fact, I’m such a mega-nerd that I apply the concept of tracking to other areas of my life…
Tracking Daily Life
The book that’s had the most profound impact on how I operate on a daily basis is Deep Work by Cal Newport – a manual for achieving peak productivity in a world of constant distractions. One of the tactics that Newport advocates for maximising productivity is to keep a weekly log of so-called ‘deep work’ hours, which over time form what he terms a ‘cadence of accountability’ – regularly engaging with important tasks in a focused manner soon becomes habitual; deep work begets more deep work.
For me, the following areas fulfil the criteria of ‘deep work’:
Reading for research (not all the stuff on here is made up on the spot)
Transcription
I don’t include gigs, teaching or any sort of ‘digital admin’, as playing ‘Superstition’ and replying to emails aren’t pushing me out of my comfort zone.
The Power of Planning in Advance
An important key to maintaining a regular, effective practice routine is to schedule dedicated blocks of time in advance. I find that I’m most disciplined and productive if I spend 10-15 minutes on a Sunday scripting as much of the week ahead as possible in iCal – this means I can see where I’m going to be each day and allows me to pencil in practice around other obligations.
One crucial part of this process is also deciding what I’m going to work on in each session based on forthcoming gigs, website projects or personal interest. This minimises ‘decision paralysis’ – losing the first 15 minutes of a practice session by trying to decide what it is that you’re going to practise.
Why you (and I) still need lessons Regardless of whether you’ve been playing bass for 2 weeks or decades there are always things about your playing that could do with…
Why you (and I) still need lessons
Regardless of whether you’ve been playing bass for 2 weeks or decades there are always things about your playing that could do with improvement – the problem is that it’s very difficult to be truly objective about your playing while you’re in the act of playing; too much of our mental processing power is taken up with the task of playing music, so it’s tough to accurately critique yourself while making music.
One idea is to record your gigs and/or your practice – whilst this can be a useful tool in assessing your playing, it might not always be the best thing:
Your current gigs might not reflect the way that you’d like your playing to sound; if you’re looking to master improvising over changes, then recordings of you playing ‘Superstition’ or ‘Dancing Queen’ at last weekend’s wedding gig won’t be particularly relevant.
Recording your practice might be more indicative of what you’re working towards, but everyone is the best player in the world when they’re in their own room and there’s nobody else about. It’s also easy to kid yourself that everything in your practice sounds great (you might not even hear the things that need work).
So, what you need is a second pair of ears to give you feedback on your playing and direct your practice with the aim of reaching your musical goals. This doesn’t have to be a teacher in the traditional sense, it could be a ‘critical friend’ – a bandmate, other musician or another bass player who you trust to be objective about what your playing really sounds like.
One issue with asking this of a friend is that they might not want to be brutally honest about what you need to work on – they also might not hear any areas for improvement either; the best option is an experienced teacher who has no other agenda other than helping you to improve your playing.
It should be noted that even after 18 years of playing the bass and almost a decade of teaching I still try to take lessons whenever I can; there’s nothing more powerful than the occasional reality check to get rid of any musical complacency that might have set in.
What type of lessons?
Studying the bass can come in many different forms, the main formats of lessons are:
1-on-1, ‘in person’ lessons
1-on-1 lessons via Skype, Facetime or similar
Group lessons ‘in person’
An online subscription service
Of these options, I’d strongly recommend the first one – there’s no substitute for getting in a room with someone more experienced than you and gaining immediate feedback on your playing. This is also the best format for asking specific questions and getting detailed answers about any areas that you’re not sure about.
The other benefit of regular, in person lessons is that they makes you accountable for your learning; you have to show up every week (or every fortnight) and show that you’ve put in the hours in the practice room, otherwise you’re wasting your teacher’s time and your money. Whilst the online subscription option provides easy access to a huge amount of lesson content, it requires tremendous self-discipline to log on regularly, decide what it is that you really need to work on and stick to it – due to the constant influx of new content, it’s very easy to get sidetracked and just work on what’s been most recently uploaded. Although this feels like the most exciting option, it has the potential to leave you with a very broad but shallow knowledge base.
Finding the right person
Assuming you’re looking for a teacher to give 1-on-1 lessons in your local area, what criteria should you be looking for?
1. Find someone who actually works
Your top priority should be to ascertain how much your prospective teacher gigs (or engages in other musical work, e.g. recording sessions). If they’re of an age where they might have had enough of gigging or they might be focusing on teaching over other things, then make sure that they have done plenty of varied work at some point in their career. And here’s the clincher – make sure that they’ve been hired by other people. It’s very easy to manufacture a lot of hype about yourself and make it seem like you’re a big deal by creating an online prescence consisting entirely of projects that are of your own invention, so seek out people who get booked by others because they are musically skilled.
2. Make sure they deal in musical facts
What do I mean by ‘musical facts’?
I mean the fundamental elements of music: harmony, melody, rhythm. This may manifest itself in a teacher who emphasises things like chord tones, ear training, sight reading and transcription.
If in doubt, my rule of thumb a teacher who works solely from TAB and encourages things like ‘finger independence exercises’, ‘string crossing drills’ or ‘two-handed tapping etudes’ is a witch and, as such, should be burned at the stake.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to go to a teacher to learn flashy slap bass licks and other associated circus skills, but the reality is that those abilities are required for precisely 0.01% of paying gigs that exist in the real world.
If you are fully conversant in musical facts, then you can easily direct your learning in whatever direction you wish. However, if you’re a slave to finger patterns and numbers then it’s hard to make any real sense of anything.
3. Do they really know their stuff?
One way to increase the odds of finding a teacher who deals in the above musical facts is to seek out someone who has formal musical training, possibly in the form of a music degree. Now, there are plenty of great players who didn’t go to music college and don’t have a degree, and the academic music path is certainly not the only (or best) way to do things, but I’ve always found there to be a strong link between formally studying music for an extended period of time and possessing the skills necessary to perform at a professional level; this is not to say that there aren’t exceptional players who aren’t ‘schooled’ (or terrible players who are), but they tend to be in the minority.
In closing, here’s something to ponder:
Everyone is self-taught. Noone is self-taught.
Think about it – even if you’re operating ‘under your own steam’ then the information still has to come from somewhere; knowledge doesn’t exist in a vacuum and even if you’re watching YouTube videos, trasnscribing solos from recordings or reading instructional books then you’re still getting the information from someone else. The other side of the coin is that if you go to a teacher (or enroll in a music school) then you still have to do the work – a teacher can show you the right door, but you have to walk through it.
How to Practise, Part 1: Posture There’s an almost infinite amount of content out there on what to practice, but very little in the way of how to go about…
How to Practise, Part 1: Posture
There’s an almost infinite amount of content out there on what to practice, but very little in the way of how to go about it with maximum efficiency and efficacy. I’m going to kick this one off by absolving myself of any responsibility whatsoever:
DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor or physical therapist, nor do I claim to be one. Any suggestions towards specific movements, exercise routines, alternative therapies or diets are based on personal experience and may not be suitable for everybody; please consult a qualified medical professional before making any significant lifestyle changes.
The following are some ideas that I’ve arrived at over the last 18 years of playing the bass and roughly a decade of teaching; I’m pretty badly constructed from a physical point of view and have had numerous back problems and other soft tissue injuries over the years including tendonitis, so I’ve put a fair amount of time and effort into optimising my posture and movements for playing bass (and life in general).
Whilst it’s not generally top of of most bassist’s to-do lists, posture is the first essential element of interacting with the instrument and it comes before technique; the physical aspect of playing the bass is often taken for granted (if not ignored completely) by many players and teachers.
This video gives a brief rundown of the seated and standing postures outlined in this post:
New Kid in Town
The main issue when discussing posture is that the electric bass has only been around for 67 years and, as such, we haven’t quite reached a consensus on the best way(s) to play it – contrast this with more elderly instruments, like violin or piano, which have well-established teaching methodologies and definite guidelines for best practice that have been refined over hundreds of years. If you look at five different bassists that you’re aiming to emulate, chances are that you’ll see a huge amount of variation between them in their stance, strap height, neck angle and hand position.
First port of call is realising that playing the bass is a fundamentally unnatural and asymmetrical task for your body to perform – we’re placing a load of between 3 and 5 kilos on one shoulder for an extended period of time. Playing will always be a compromise between what is natural or comfortable for your body and what is necessary to get around the instrument in a relaxed, musical fashion. No one particualar posture is perfect – all have pros and cons – but some make more sense than others.
Most of us have to deal with the fact that we sit down to practice but are forced to stand up when it comes to gigs – sitting on a gig basically out of the question unless you’re in a theatre pit or you happen to be Anthony Jackson. Because of this, we need to make sure that our sitting and standing postures are complementary rather than contradictory, otherwise we’re sending our body mixed messages about how to play and our practice time will have been wasted.
Here’s the first essential element of the posture checklist: your strap height needs to be the same whether sitting or standing. Why? If you spend hours sitting and practising without a strap and then get on a gig and have your instrument slung low then your hands will suddenly be in a completely different position relative to the bass. Get over the fact that having your bass somewhere around where your abs ought to be doesn’t look particularly rock ’n’ roll; if you sound great then nobody will care how you look.
Seated posture: option 1
Choose a seat that allows your thighs to be pretty much parallel to the floor – my preference is to use a drum stool, as I find that almost all chairs are the wrong height for my long limbs. Practise with a strap, even when seated, so that your arms aren’t having to do the work of balancing the bass and are free to deal with the complexities of whatever you’re working on. If you’re reading music, then make sure your music stand is at a decent height and you’re not dropping your head forward and looking down to see the dots.
Pros: upper body position is almost exactly the same as standing posture, bass balances easily on the strap, comfortable enough to sustain long periods of practise.
Cons: I find that as the practice session wears on I tend to collapse over the bass, slumping forward with my head, shoulders and upper back.
Seated posture: option 2
I stole this from the classical guitar – here you use a footstool under your left leg (reverse if you’re left handed…) and sit the bass between your legs; this means that you can get rid of the strap and the bass will balance by itself by leaning the top horn against your chest. I find that this allows me to maintain a more erect upper body posture (you at the back, stop giggling!), maintaining balanced shoulders and an open chest without collapsing forward.
Pros: Arms, shoulders and chest are not encumbered with the weight of the bass, all areas of the instrument are within easy reach.
Cons: The bass is in a more ‘diagonal’ position compared to how most people play when standing, I also find that I get pins and needles and the occasional dead leg if I practise for too long without a break as my feet and hips aren’t balanced – this might well be due to my dodgy physical construction.
Get up, Stand up: Standing Posture 101
Think you know how to stand up? I certainly thought I’d got the hang of it after 30 years of being vertical on a daily basis, but spending time in various health professionals’ treatment rooms brought up some things that I’d been ignorant of. The main point that I’d missed is the importance of spreading your weight equally through your feet – if you don’t properly ‘ground’ yourself then it’s hard to maintain a decent posture with neutral position for your pelvis, spine and head.
Regardless of the posture that you happen to adopt, the main thing to focus on is being relaxed – if you’re holding tension in your muscles, or holding your breath when you play (a surprisingly common occurrence) then your playing will sound tense. Your posture is your sound and your sound is your posture.
Alongside relaxation come the ideas of balance and symmetry. A common problem that I was guilty of for years is allowing my left shoulder to rise up over the course of a gig in response to the weight of the bass – I wasn’t aware of this until I saw pictures of myself onstage looking rather unbalanced. As much as possible, we want to reduce (or eliminate) harsh angles in the wrists – having the bass relatively high up means that we can keep the wrist of our fretting hand relatively straight, but this posture tends to emphasise an acute flexion of the plucking wrist. Having the bass lower down reverses the problem; the plucking wrist can straighten out, but the problem is now transferred to the fretting hand.
Life outside of bass playing will have a huge impact on your postural habits as well as your general health and wellbeing; if your day job involves long hours sitting at a desk, driving or hunching over a laptop, then chances are that your range of motion is less than optimal (when was the last time you were able to touch your toes without fear of tearing something?). To paraphrase the great Russian strength coach Pavel Tsatsouline, your body most readily adapts to the positions that you spend the most time in – spending an hour a day in a good bass playing posture will not undo the countless hours that you’ve spent at your desk, in traffic or slumped in front of the TV. Having some sort of regular movement practice is vital for counteracting the poor postural positions that life often puts us in.
What’s a movement practice? These are all movement practices:
Yoga
Pilates
Gymnastics
Strength training/weightlifting
Rock climbing
Martial arts
Dance
The importance of movement cannot be overstated – your physical health is intrinsically linked to your mental wellbeing and your musical output; whilst we can all cite many players that are obviously not taking care of themselves physically it’s important to remember that they’ve succeeded in spite of this rather than because of it.
Your Brain Is Rotten (and how to fix it) January. The month where you take a long, hard look at your life and promise yourself that this year you’ll finally…
Your Brain Is Rotten (and how to fix it)
January. The month where you take a long, hard look at your life and promise yourself that this year you’ll finally sort everything out. For me, the main focus of my January life-purge is my practice routine – or, more accurately, the distinct lack thereof.
Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to really make the most of the time that I spend at the instrument; I had a lightbulb moment when listening to a podcast and the interviewee said something along these lines (I can’t find the episode in question to be able to provide a verbatim quote, but still…):
“Things like maths or foreign languages are like apps that we ‘install’ in order to increase our knowledge or improve our skill set in a given area. Most people spend all of their time and effort on installing or upgrading their apps instead of attending to their operating system, which is how they run their brains.”
Jackpot. How can I expect to get the greatest possible benefit from practising when my brain is perpetually distracted? Why have I been focusing on upgrading my mental ‘apps’ when my operating system is full of bugs?
If you also feel perpetually overwhelmed, or that your attention is fragmented, if you struggle to concentrate, or are always ‘busy’ but never seem to get anything done, then this is for you:
The Myth of Multitasking
We’ve been led to believe that the only way to cope with the relentless demands of modern life is to do lots of things at the same time, and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets has allowed us to be able to chip away at our never-ending to-do lists regardless of where we are or what the time is.
Over time, the ability to be permanently connected has gradually morphed into a necessity. Many of us have become habitualised to permanent digital stimulation to the point where one device is not enough; we browse multiple internet tabs while watching TV, we can’t make it through a film or a concert without checking our phone – the hyperconnected life has left us incapable of being alone with nothing but our own thoughts for company.
Here’s the inconvenient neurological truth: multitasking is bad for you. Whilst it provides the illusion that you’re being efficient and productive, the fact of the matter is that you’re actually just doing two (or more) things badly at the same time.
The crux of the problem is that the very region of our brain that we depend on to keep us on task is easily distracted by novelty; the prefrontal cortex is where all the action is – this part of the brain governs ‘higher order’ behaviours, including:
Delayed gratification
Impulse control
Long term planning and goal setting
Maintaining socially acceptable behaviour
The neurons in this part of the brain are sensitive to dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward; when you’re about to complete a task your brain gives you a hit of dopamine which acts as a precursor to reaching your goal and is designed to keep you on track – a biochemical motivator, if you will. The problem is that the brain can’t distinguish between the relative sizes or values of the tasks that you might be performing, so every time you send or receive an email, text, tweet or other digital notification your ancient brain senses that you’ve achieved something significant and rewards you accordingly. This leads to what scientists term a dopamine feedback loop, in which we’re constantly trapped in the cycle of pursuing low-level tasks to feed our sense of productivity.
Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin’s book The Organized Mind offers a comprehensive insight into the numerous perils of multitasking and the damage it has on your brain’s capacity to focus. His view on multitasking can be summed up as follows:
“Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system”
Attentional switching comes at a high neurological cost – constantly chopping and changing between tasks burns up oxygen and glucose, increases the production of stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline and reinforces the dopamine addiction feedback loop in the prefrontal cortex.
Clifford Nass, professor of communication at Stanford, had this to say on the matter:
“It turns out that multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organised; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.”
By contrast, scientific research has shown that sticking to one thing at a time (‘uni-tasking’) has been shown to protect against Alzheimer’s; older adults who participated in training sessions to develop their attentional control began to display brain patterns similar to those of younger adults after just 5 hours.
It’s not just the scientific community that are alerting us to the dangers of technology; some of the most vocal critics of the hyperconnected lifestyle are those who helped to create it. Recently, a couple of former Facebook employees have publicly spoken out on the deleterious effects of the social media platform:
ex-VP of ‘user growth’ at Facebook Chamath Palihapitiya said that:
“The short term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works… It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem… this is a global problem.”
Sean Parker, ex-facebook president, said the thought process behind building the social media giant was:
“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
Parker also confirms that the site’s creators understood the impact that they would have on users’ psychology:
“…we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever … It’s a social validation feedback loop … You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology … [The inventors] understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway.”
Add to this the news that two of Apple’s major investors are pressing the company to do something about smartphone addiction among young people and we’re starting to get an idea of the extent of the problem. But what can we do about it?
6 Ways to Fix Your Rotten Brain
1.Learn to Concentrate
The most effective method of rewiring your brain and improving your ability to concentrate is by developing a regular meditation practice. If you’re turned off by the religious or ‘new age’ connotations that tend to get lumped in with the typical depictions of meditation then fear not – apps like Headspace offer a totally secular route into improving your ability to focus. I’d also recommend Sam Harris’ excellent, no-nonsense book Waking Up, which focuses on how to cultivate secular spirituality. My own experience with meditation is that it offers a subtle, yet powerful technique for coping with everything that life throws my way. I stumbled into the practice of insight meditation (often referred to as ‘vipassana’ meditation a decade ago and have found it to have numerous benefits, including (but not limited to):
improved concentration
better sleep
increased recovery time after workouts
a more consistent emotional state
increased sensory awareness
effective management of symptoms of depression/anxiety
Numerous high-functioning individuals swear by a dailly meditation in some form or other – bestselling author, lifehacker and meta-learning guru Tim Ferriss has interviewed almost 300 top performers across a range of fields and estimates that around 80% engage in some sort of regular mindfulness practice – this includes distinctly non ‘floaty’ individuals like super-producer Rick Rubin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jazz legend Herbie Hancock has been meditating since the early 1970s (at the suggestion of bass great Buster Williams) and the late sax legend Michael Brecker was also a practitioner.
2.Reconfigure your devices to reduce distraction
The most obvious cure for being constantly interrupted by digital distractions is to delete the offending apps from your device; if this is unthinkable then there are still several steps that you can take to reduce the damaging effect they have on your productivity:
stop your email automatically checking itself every 5 minutes (more on inbox management later)
turn off notifications from social apps that alert you to every single like, comment or retweet
put email and social media apps on the 2nd or 3rd ‘page’ of your device and bury them in folders
A more comprehensive guide to optimising your phone by former Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris can be found here
3.Start and Finish the day away from screens
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? If the first thing that your eyes see is your newsfeed or your inbox, then you run the risk of burning through all of your attentional energy before the day has even started; your brain has a limited capacity for processing new information and maxing out your mental bandwidth first thing can lead to lack of focus and diminished impulse control. In short, starting your day with screen time can impair your ability to make decisions and sabotage your creative endeavours later in the day.
If you enforce a morning ‘buffer zone’ in which you don’t look at your phone for the first hour of the day, then you’re giving your brain the chance to wake up naturally, without the barrage of data offered by the internet. Doing the same thing with the last hour of your day prior to going to sleep allows you to wind down without the stimulation of technology, resulting in an improved ability to get to sleep.
One of the easy traps to fall into is checking email every few minutes – whenever you have to wait more than 5 seconds for anything, out comes the phone and habit pulls us straight into our inbox. One way around this is to allocate specific blocks of time for checking and responding to email (this can be applied to social apps as well). I find that I’m happiest and most productive when I check my email twice a day – at roughly midday and 4pm – when I stick to it, this policy results in precisely zero people getting upset because I haven’t attended to their email; if something is truly urgent, they will call me. I can get a few hours of quality work done in the morning before dealing with my inbox, then the second check allows me to process any responses that might have come in before the end of the working day.
4.Use Social Media as an Output
Most people use platforms like Facebook primarily as an information input – they scroll through the endless treadmill of other people’s status updates, processing huge mounts of data, most of it useless. But how about using social media solely as an output? If your business or creative endeavours demand that you have to interact using social media then there are steps that you can take to ensure that the technology is working for you and not the other way around:
use post scheduling software like Hootsuite or If This Then That to ‘batch’ updates for specific times; this allows you to get all of your daily/weekly/monthly updates done in one dedicated block of time, rather than multiple fragments of several minutes each. This prohibits the spontaneity that social media is predicated on, but it’s amazing how many users give followers the illusion of a ‘real time’ feed through carefully planned, well-timed updates.
Use browser plugins like Leechblock to limit the time that you can spend per day on social media and other websites.
If you want to really increase your productivity and improve your mental health, then it’s very easy to kill your news feed. This is what I see when I log into Facebook:
Isn’t that great? No hairloss ads, no people celebrating that they’ve gone to the gym today, no temptation to stalk people that I went to school with.
I can still keep track of notifications, manage this site’s page (you’ve already given the page a like, right?) and pretend to remember birthdays without getting sucked into the whirlpool of useless status updates. The real benefit – aside from not expending time and energy processing superfluous data – is the positive impact of not being perpetually bombarded by the artificial awesomeness of the lives of others; seeing the carefully edited highlights of those in your networks without having insight into their failures can create a distorted sense of reality in which everybody is doing better than you, which can fuel feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and depression.
The obvious criticism of this approach is that it’s cynical, manipulative, insincere and means that you miss out on important events in your friends’ lives; my argument is that you still participate fully in the relationships that matter most to you by seeing your friends and family IN REAL LIFE. Rather than attempting to maintain superficial, surface-level interactions with 1000 people it might be more worthwhile expending the same cumulative amount of time and energy on cultivating deeper relationships with 50 or 100 people that you genuinely care about. Scientists have actually quantified the maximum number of social relationships that any one person can effectively maintain – it’s known as Dunbar’s number (after anthropologist Robin Dunbar) and is 150, surprisingly small in comparison to the number of ‘friends’ that many of us have on social platforms.
5.Screen Sabbaths/Digital Sabbaticals
The idea of a screen sabbath is to take one day a week on which you abstain from social media usage and email checking (you can still use your phone for texts, calls and modern-day necessities like Uber); the effect of this is that you gradually come to realise that the world doesn’t fall apart if you miss one day of your digital life, which can help to reduce time spent on devices during the other days of the week.
A ‘digital sabbatical’ is a longer timeframe, typically ranging from 3 days to one week, where you go totally ‘off grid’ and get away from all forms of technology – set up emergency contacts and an email autoresponder so you’re not paranoid that something is happening while you’re unplugged.
6.Use The Brain’s Dopamine Addiction To Your Advantage
We can actually harness the prefrontal cortex’s dopamine-seeking tendencies to our advantage and effectively play it at its own game – for the last 6 months, I’ve been using an app called Forest to keep me away from my phone and get more work done. The app rewards the user for spending a set amount of time away from their phone, and plants a tree as a reward for focused time – if you use your phone at all during the allotted time, then your tree dies:
Now, this sounds ridiculously childish, but you can’t argue with biochemistry – I’ve found that planting a digital forest has been the single most effective trick in monitoring and increasing the amount of time I spend practising or doing other important things (like making content for this site). Because I’m slightly competitive, I find myself going to great lengths to try to beat my previous day’s score – playing a game doesn’t make it feel like work, and I get my digital dopamine fix from doing something useful.
These measures might seem extreme to some people, but to quote Mark Twain:
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
So there we are – I’m still trying (and ofter failing) to confront my internet addiction and break away from screens, but I’m doing my best to make sure that 2018 is the year that I finally get of the hamster wheel and spend more hours in the real world doing things that matter to me. If you’re interested in reclaiming your brain, then I’ve found the following resources to be extremely valuable:
