Your email addiction is not your fault

Have you watched The Social Dilemma you on Netflix? If not, I encourage you to get off your phone to see what's actually going on with you and your phone. I’ve been following Tristan Harris and his team at the Center for Humane Technology for over 3 years. They've done a great job of pulling together all of their knowledge and thinking into this one absorbing film.

Many of the film’s conversations were about the social media companies attempting to fragment your attention. Keeping you on site, or wanting to keep returning throughout the day. They design the software to be addictive. They know your human vulnerabilities and will look to exploit them, to maximise profits.

One thing they didn't talk about was Email. This isn't controlled by a company, although companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft certainly profit from it in hardware or software. Email was never designed to be addictive, it was never its mission. But somewhere along the way it did.

I see some key things that started it. Firstly was the introduction of Push email in the 2000's. We didn't have to intentionally "dial in" to retrieve our mail. It magically arrived on our PCs and laptops. It then started arriving on your Blackberry smartphone. A blue light flashed when you had a new email. It soon became known as the "Crackberry". Checking those emails was like a drug, playing to your compulsions.

Notifications, whether it was the Blackberry's blue light, or the envelope in the bottom corner of Outlook, or now the "ding" not the iPhone, were of course useful but also a curse.

Then there was the "pulling down" on the iPhones mail screen to refresh it. Hoping that a new email was going to arrive. Sometimes you check and there is nothing, sometimes you check and there is something amazing, and there is a whole lot of other stuff in between

It's this variability of the rewards that causes addiction. Just like how a slot machine works. You pull the lever and get nothing, you pull it again and get something, then a big prize, then nothing, then nothing, then something.....and on it goes. The more random and variable, the more your brain wants to keep going back.

If you can, try and observe what is happening with you and your phone throughout the day. Try and spot when those impulses arise, especially with email. Can you pause for a few moments and resist the temptation to check. Its really difficult, but it might be the first time you notice that it's causing you a mental problem.