Most people have no idea how badly their screens are breaking their brain.
The very thing we use to cope with overwhelm is quietly making it impossible to think clearly, feel deeply, or live meaningfully.
One of the early surprises I’ve had screen coaching is how unaware clients are about how badly their technology is impacting their cognitive abilities.
The purpose of this article is to draw awareness around the 11 ways that screen usage is impacting our mind. Notice how many of them actively hinder our ability to regulate your usage.
1. Erosion of Attention Span
Yes, this one we are all familiar with. The digital environment we inhabit is experienced as fragmented, non-linear, random, often sensational and ever updating.
This in effect has trained our brain to skim read and be constantly shifting our attention. Gloria Mark speaks about this idea of ‘Attention Residue’ as we constantly switch context, an attentional reside is left over from previous tasks, leading to cognitive overwhelm as we switch focus and constantly re-attune to a new topic.
Once we become overloaded, we tend to search for more lightweight cognitive tasks, often making us even more prone to scroll.
2. Working Memory Overload
The human mind was not meant for this much information. Our pre-frontal cortex (responsible for decision-making and higher-order cognitive tasks) can only hold a small amount of usable information at one time.
The sheer variety and novelty of most digital environments overwhelm us, making it harder to remember things and make sense of the available information. An overstimulated mind will struggle to understand ‘relevance’ and may end up continuing to jump around, looking for more information, thus perpetuating its own challenges.
3. Impaired Deep Thinking
Cal Newport has written about this extensively. Our continuous exposure to shallow distractions, leaves us unable to train the muscle of deep focus. Cognitive ‘hard’ tasks which require deliberate attention become more intimidating and assigned less value. Hence our capacity to push our cognitive abilities through effort in any particular domain is reduced.
4. Memory Loss
This I am so familiar with, the era’s of my life where I was a heavy screen use are so small in my mind, I know things happened, but the depth, richness and sheer number of events and details I can remember is small.
The constant switching contexts confuses our Hippocampus and prevents it from baking in memories long term. Our poorer memories and forgetfulness thus tend to rely on external devices to outsource our memory.
5. Empathy Decline
This one should be headline news. Living through your screen long-term reduces your ability to empathise, read emotions, and form deep connections. Our beings, and specifically our mirror neutrons, are designed to respond to a litany of subconscious cues (facial cues, voice tone, physical posture) that form the basis of empathy. Screens remove them.
What's more, we are exposed to a high volume of upsetting information on the internet; and over time, our minds become less sensitive to these upsetting emotional cues. This repeated exposure dulls our amygdala response, a type of emotional fatigue. Sherry Turkle's book ‘Reclaiming Conversation’ covers this topic extensively.
6. Lack of sleep and all it’s attendant issues
Sleep. God, sleep. That home to the sublime, the spirit, the wisdom keeper.
Have no idea what I’m speaking about? Fall asleep with your phone?
Blue light which smartphones emit is the enemy. When your eyes detect the blue light, they send signals to your internal clock, telling you it’s daytime, suppressing melatonin, your Bodie’s natural indicator. Without a healthy buildup of melatonin throughout the day, your sleep will be negatively impacted. Lack of sleep or disrupted sleep messes with memory formation, mood, and decision-making. No surprise, that means we are worse at self-regulation. Hence, more scrolling.
7. Addiction-like behaviour
Tech platforms and apps are littered with manipulative design, triggering content and variable rewards that hijack our dopaminergic system by constantly triggering that anticipation of reward. Constantly having these insanely cheap dumps of dopamine effecitely dulls your capacity to chase natural rewards and reinforces that constant scrolling. This addiction-like situation comes with a nasty side-effect. That of withdrawal. Your brain is used too higher than usual amounts of circulation dopamine, your receptors have down-regulated to adjust. So when you stop, it’s emotionally painful, there’s low mood, irritability, anxiety, you name it, a potent justification to not bother and continue scrolling.
8. Reduced imagination
This one makes me sad. Imagination, in my opinion, is our portal to the beyond, it’s a slither connecting us to the eternal. The severing of the imagination by heavy screen use, under that interpretation, begins to have metaphysical and spiritual consequences.
Regardless of my opinion on this, our passive use of technology to fill the small moments has replaced the mulling, daydreaming, processing, and thinking idea time where the Default mode network is active, and imagination originates. Boredom generates internal stimulation. This prevention of boredom, associative and novel thinking means the brain stops self-generating thoughts. The brain still craves this, though, and so guess where it turns…. consuming more content.
9. Chronic Stress & Low level anxiety
Being chronically online is overwhelming and anxiety inducing. Ever get that premonition that turning on your phone is going to cause anxiety and still do it anyway. That’s a curious habit I noticed, as well as the anxiety of missing out, I wanted to feel anxious. I felt almost comfortable with low-level anxiety.
Unfortunately that anxiety is effecting your executive functioning (broadly how your mind helps you stay in control), gradually degrading it making it harder to focus and plan ahead.
10. Losing touch with your gut feelings
When our attention is near constantly fixated on those little devices in our hands we begin to lose our ability to internally monitor our own states. These constant stimuli steals attention from introspective processing, those subtle cues that often are useful guides in judging situations. Interoception: Basically, the awareness of your body’s internal state. These intuitions also rely upon the slow integration of experience, the underground deciphering of subtle patterns which our conscious mind might not notice.
11. Contemplative thinking
The Book SuperBloom by Nicolas Carr explores how certain types of thought are also being marginalised by technology. Open-ended contemplative thinking, philosophical thinking, and introspection are also being hindered. The very experience of art and expression is being turned into mere vehicles for content or a message. Algorithms allocate them into an ideological category for you to engage with rather than allowing for slow aesthetic appreciation. The constant acceleration of information is rubbing out these slower thought processes.
What’s coming next?
The current digital situation is toxic, I’ve yet to see evidence that AI will be any different for the majority of people, it’s like to be a further source of cognitive decline, distraction, and increased loneliness.
If we don’t wake up to this, screen time will become one of the major sources of cognitive decline, chronic distraction, emotional blunting, and loneliness in our time.
But I think the alarm bells are softly ringing in the background of us all. We don’t have to surrender our attention, creativity, and depth to the machines. The ability to reclaim your inner life slowly, deliberately, and passionately is always available to you.
If this resonated with you, I invite you to subscribe for more writing like this.
Next week
I’m planning to cover 10 non-obvious ways to reclaim your mind (along with 10 obvious ways).
And if you want support untangling from the grip of screen overuse, you can also book a free call with me, I’d love to connect.