Losing sleep one swipe at a time

Who else wakes up in the morning and checks Instagram like it’s the morning paper?,’ asked a celebrity trainer on social media the other morning, and got 1,11,905 likes for her troubles. The question was on point; a 2016 tech study by Dscout on ‘humans and their tech’ showed that people tap, swipe and click their phones 2,617 times each day, and that’s on average. The tech interactions of the heaviest users touched (no pun intended) 5,427 a day. Per year, that’s nearly one million touches by the average phone user, and two million for those given to excesses. (Incidentally, the numbers didn’t take into account the activity on locked phones, when users check the time, change the volume or a song on their mobiles without unlocking them).

I can personally vouch for the obsession. Turning over in bed in preparation for going to sleep, I often catch sight of my phone nestling near the pillow and, bam, the next hour is gone. I’m checking out stories on Instagram, reading links that people have posted on Twitter, watching trailers on YouTube…. On occasion, I even catch myself watching movies on the Netflix app on my phone—long after I’ve switched off the TV because I think I’ve done my idiot box-watching for the day. You get the drift? I’m basically losing sleep over nothing.

I don’t need scientific research to tell me that I’m not the only one. I have friends moaning all the time about how they hate themselves for wasting time on the phone through the day and night. And now it’s official. Last year’s tech research found that 87 per cent of the study participants checked their phones at least once between midnight and 5 am. Forget New York. Now, it’s the fingers that never sleep, across the world.

The scary part is that though a swipe on the phone feels harmless—requiring almost no effort—the implications could be huge. In fact, the Bank of England has just put out an article stating that our attachment to gadgets is part of the “attention crisis” that is stopping people from working as productively as they used to, which in turn could be holding back the economy at large (at least in the developed nations).

While this may be more alarmist than accurate—there isn’t enough evidence to connect the attention-sapping effects of gadgets to productivity in the wider economy as yet—it can’t be denied that checking notifications or scrolling through social media in office does reduce working time. Throw in the fact that it supposedly takes 25 minutes to refocus on a task after dropping it due to a distraction, and the work situation looks even grimmer. And there’s more. An article in New Scientist, quoting UK research, says the relentless influx of emails, calls and messages is more harmful than marijuana for one’s IQ. Apparently, in an experiment carried out with volunteers, people immersed in infomania saw their
IQ falling by 10 points—double the amount seen in studies involving cannabis users.
Maybe it’s time to wake up and start checking out the morning paper like it’s social media.

Shampa Dhar-Kamath

shampa@newindianexpress.com