فصل پنجم

Ch. 5 Technology is your Frenemy

The matrix has you. We are all plugged in and as much as we like to think that we use technology as a tool… sometimes it seems that we are the tools and technology is using us. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love technology. If it weren’t for google drive, e-readers, text messaging, and internet radio, this project would have never seen the light of day. One thing I’ve noticed in my professional training as a therapist is that the older generation of shrinks out there just don’t quite get the influence of technology on modern life and modern mental health. I really think that technology has changed the landscape of anxiety. There are many things that it is great for. You can use technology to really facilitate your domination of anxiety, but it can also feed into that anxiety and the bitch about it is that sometimes those two scenarios look almost identical.

This topic is very personally loaded. Not just in my personal experience, but for my wife, who has been gracious enough to allow me to blab about her in this book. She has issues with anxiety. Sometimes it’s not so bad and she can go about her day and do important things. Other days, she can get thrown into a panic attack as she’s trying to go to sleep and completely unravel within a few minutes. The reason I’m talking about her here is that she is self-employed as a blogger, author, calligrapher, wedding designer etc. Like so many of you out there who are self-employed or just work for modern companies, that means she lives her life on the internet and interfaces with technology for everything.

It’s amazing what you can do with the world at your fingertips. Just right now, she was like, “Hey send me a quote from the book to make a graphic out of,” and I was all like, “Yo… there’s a doc in the drive.” Pretty awesome. With the pervasiveness of technology and our lives becoming one with “the cloud” it is sometimes hard to understand where work ends and life begins. When part of your job is keeping up with blogs, does reading them count as a break anymore? Having emails delivered directly to your phone is great, but what about when it is interrupting dinner or stressing you out right before you go to sleep? You gotta get that shit under control before it controls you. Rage against the machine, my friend.

There is no one right answer to the “correct way” to interface with technology, but in general, you want to set yourself up for success. You want to do a little bit of lifestyle min-maxing. Minimize the ways technology can intrusively set you off course or influence your mood and maximize the ways it can facilitate your use of anxiety slaying tools.

Here’s one. Raise your hand if you use your phone as an alarm in the morning. Ok, now raise your hand if the first thing you do after turning the beeping on your phone off is to open your groggy sleep-filled eyes enough to check your email. That’s what I thought. You ever heard of waking up on the wrong side of the bed? Well that’s one great way to do it. If you have a stressful email or something that is going to screw up your mood for the day, then you just completely sabotaged yourself. What’s the point in doing that, really? Unless you are waiting for an email that contains your schedule for the morning, I’m fairly certain that it can wait until you’ve taken a shower, gotten dressed, and had your coffee. Remember the whole invest in yourself and recharge your batteries thing? Well you’re doing the opposite of that. I dare you to try and remain spritely after waking up to an angry email from a client.

So what can you do about it? This depends a little bit on your job or lifestyle. Definitely do something that fits with your role and the expectations of you. I don’t want you blaming me if you get in trouble at work. There are a lot of ways that you can help set yourself up for success in this way, though. Give yourself office hours. Regardless of what your professional or academic life may entail, give yourself personal office hours. Set an auto-responder on your email to anyone that emails you outside those hours, letting them know when you will be able to respond to emails. Simple. If you never stop that flow of information, you’re going to start sucking at responding anyway and then no one is happy.

There are a lot of people that I really look up to for their ability to maintain “inbox zero” and avoid killing themselves with email. Tim Ferriss, the author of The Four Hour Workweek, has talked about his technique of checking his email just twice per day. He downloads all of his current emails and then goes offline to a coffee shop or something like that, where he can respond in full to the important emails without the risk of being interrupted by more emails flowing in. This is just one example of one way to manage it, but the point I’m trying to make is that you gotta grab this bull by the horns before one of those horns ends up… somewhere you don’t want it to be.

As the chapter name suggests, technology can definitely be a friend as well. I would be nowhere without all of my gadgets and gizmos. With a little creativity, there are some nifty ways that you can make technology work for you and help you manage your anxiety. Here’s one that I use. Remember the breaks that I talked about in the previous chapter? Well, since you are such a jerk to yourself and it is against your very nature to take the chance to relax and recharge, you can use technology to help you out. Here’s a conversation I often have with Siri (the iPhone voice thingy). “Siri, remind me to take a break today.” “Okay, Robert. When should I remind you?” “Umm… in an hour.” “Alright! Reminder set.” Simple as that. When an hour comes around, I will get my reminder to take a break and even though I may not feel entitled to one, I dare not disobey my robot overlord.

There are also tons of great apps and stuff that you can use to streamline your life and facilitate your quest to a better you. I can’t mention a ton of specific ones, because they are changing every week, but I would have a look around your phone’s app store and see what’s available. There are apps that help you with your deep breathing and give you different guided options depending on your current mood. There are also journaling apps to help you just get it all out. There are extensions for Chrome that will let you block websites that stress you out or limit your access to email within certain hours. You can really go crazy with these. Just remember to not go down the rabbit hole of fake productivity and look for new and cool apps for 4 hours right before you go to bed. Don’t make the solutions part of the problem.

One good way to understand how technology might be interfering with your life or disrupting your mood is to track your activities throughout the day. I don’t mean tracking the general things you do each hour. I mean hardcore, obsessive, annoying tracking of every single thing you do. You really only need to do it for a day, but every time you switch the tab to Facebook or go to that blog of that person you hate, every time you check your work email when you should be enjoying your lunch, you will start to see the effects laid out there for you. It’s pretty scary actually. As I said… the matrix has you.