Your thumb is already moving before your brain has caught up with what you’re doing… You put the phone down two minutes ago … and somehow now it’s back in your hand…
Feel familiar?
I’ve created an attention sequence based on the research, training and personal practices I’ve been doing over the past seven years in digital wellbeing.
Scroll > Loop > Notice > Choose
In this issue I’m going to share more about the sequence and explain why its so simple, but super potent over time :)
SCROLL
This is the moment of phone pick up. Maybe it’s intentional. More often it isn’t. You didn’t decide to pick it up, it sort of just happened. This is the beginning of the sequence and it’s worth paying attention to because the scroll doesn’t always start with a conscious decision.
It starts with a trigger.
Sometimes the trigger is external. Notifications, pings and dings. Someone else gets their phone out.. it can be contagious…
More often though it’s internal.
I can be a top procrastinator at times and I will pick up my phone whenever there is a task I’m avoiding or something I am unclear on. Social media. Amazon. Substack. Whatsapp. They can all suck me into a SCROLL.
A conversation over text. Yes. Or perhaps one thats gone quiet for a bit but now I’m emotionally invested. Have they replied yet? Check.
Maybe something is happening in the world out there that has my attention, and I want all the latest info, the insights, comments, vibes. Check. Check.
Maybe its AI. What am I thinking to ask it next? Check.
Notice your triggers.
They’re different for everyone. Mine tend to be the internal ones…Yours might be different. But the triggers they be there alright… And once you start to see them, to NOTICE them, the SCROLL starts to take on a whole different dimension…
LOOP
Now you can get into a LOOP with your SCROLL in more ways than one. But once you’re in your phone the way our brains respond starts to shift because of the way the apps and the ‘persuasive’ design is rolled out en masse.
Content is also now super personalised, your phone is an extension of your life and the apps know what you like, what you linger on, what makes you stop scrolling for half a second longer than everything else… and they show you more of it…
The algorithm has been paying attention even when you haven’t been.
Personalised content activates the Default Mode Network, this is the part of your brain that daydreams… remembers.. It is where your identity lives. The MirrorNet.
Time collapses in this LOOP… You look up and twenty minutes have gone. Or forty. Or five. And you can’t quite account for where they went or what you actually saw.
Like the triggers the LOOP can feel like, and be, different things for different people.
A dopamine LOOP (one I am rather partial to) a tightening in my tummy, an excited anticipation feeling, even if nothing that rewarding is actually going to happen.
For some it’s a validation LOOP (Another one of mine!) checking to see if anyone responded, if anyone liked it, if they saw me, if they took the time to tell me…
I call it my “Please Like Me” LOOP
For some it’s a rabbit hole (oh yes me. hey. hi. i’m the problem it’s me.) Just one piece of info or post about something I’m interested in, leads to another, leads to another and suddenly I’m watching a documentary before breakfast.
The LOOP can feel good. Great even… I love me a rabbit hole. But a LOOP can swing the other way, the way loops do, and leave us feeling hollow, slightly grim, low on energy, without quite knowing why.
The LOOP is endless SCROLL and it is autoplay. All designed. On. Purpose. To have no natural stopping point …because a stopping point would mean you might stop.
Do you NOTICE when you’re in the LOOP?
NOTICE
This is the moment the sequence hinges on.
Here we feel something glitch and become aware of what’s happening. Maybe it’s a physical sensation, shoulders are up around your ears, clenching your jaw, or you are hanging almost over your knees, your thumb / arm / wrist aches, eyes feel quite tired and squinty… and you clock that you’re staring at a bright rectangle in a room full of people, or by yourself, on the sofa next to your cat…
Maybe it’s more of a feeling, an emotion, where you feel frustrated, worried about what you saw, you feel tired, bored, anxious, envious even… some comparison has crept in, and now you are having negative thoughts about yourself, or your friends, or some people you follow online.
Maybe it’s a sudden burst of consciousness, of yourself, like you suddenly came up for air, as you realise you are on your phone, looking at something you didn’t intend to.
And here you name it.
“I am in a scroll loop.”
No judgments or self-criticism… A moment of pure recognition.
Remember, we are dealing with technology created by a trillion dollar industry, where we are their free product. They use the neuroscience of attention to keep us in the scroll loop, that is their persuasive design.
And we can use it to come out.
Oh. Here I am again.
SCROLL LOOP
And this is the moment of metacognition which I shared with you in Issue One.
You are not just describing what’s happening.
You are literally shifting which part of your brain is running the show.
This is the most important moment in the whole sequence, because without it, there is no choice.
You can’t CHOOSE differently if you don’t know what you’re doing in the first place.
CHOOSE
Now you have a choice.
Which you didn’t really have before.
Because you weren’t aware enough of what you were doing to make one.
You might put the phone down.
Look up. Take a breath.
Notice the room you’re in, the person across from you, the view out of the window.
Stretch, breath, drink some water. Come back into your physical space.
You might choose to keep scrolling… except consciously and with intention now. Deliberately. Because you actually want to see something specific, or you need a few more minutes to send that WhatsApp or email.
That is a completely different thing to the unconscious loop.
That is agency. But stay aware for the LOOP dropping back in on its well worn groove.
I don’t want to oversell the sequence, it’s new, digital wellbeing is still a new field, but I’ve been living it my whole career. This is why I’ve created it as an experiment.
I need something simple. And so do you. And so do your children.
The first few times you try this, the gap between notice and choose might be a fraction of a second. You name it, and then you keep scrolling anyway or doing what you were doing online anyway.
That is still the sequence working.
Because you noticed. And noticing is a muscle :)
The more you use it, the more you hear it, the stronger it gets…. That’s what the experience has been for me.
I scroll loop notice choose every day (every hour lol). Not always perfectly or successfully. I of course get into SCROLL LOOPS still on the regular, but now there is a door, which is helping me to get out of them much quicker. The sequence is changing my relationship with my phone in a way that no screen time limit ever has because its working from the inside out, not the outside in.
The Attention Experiment : Issue Two
Last time was about naming it when we NOTICE…
SCROLL LOOP, saying it out loud or in your head, to see what happens next…
For The Attention Experiment Issue Two:
When you NOTICE you are in the SCROLL LOOP
and just before you CHOOSE …
this time … I’d love you to
Take one deep breath. In through the nose and out through the mouth.
One conscious breath between the NOTICE and the CHOOSE.
Feel your feet on the floor. Feel the phone in your hand.
And then decide what you CHOOSE.
It sounds soooo simple. But that one breath is the gap made physical. It’s the metacognition landing in your body, not just inside your head. And for a lot of people and especially kids, that physical anchor into the body can make a big difference, they have neuroplasticity on their side.
Try it. Tell me what happens.
I’d love if it you would share this with a young person in your life, a child, a teenager, a student, by teaching them the sequence sometime this week.
Something interesting you learnt online…
Model it for them.
Say “I’m in a scroll loop” and put your phone down. See if they clock it.
Let it open a conversation and see where it takes you (and come back to share with me in the comments if you can (with intention obviously..)
I’d love to hear what happens.
Coming up
Next issue, I’m going to share another simple tool. A digital body scan. To see if you can NOTICE what you actually carrying from your phone that you haven’t noticed yet… Is it in your shoulders, your jaw, your stomach. Are there thought forms still running in your head from a post you saw?
On May 22nd at 4pm, I am very excited to be hosting a Substack Live with doreen dodgen-magee, psy.d. tech psychologist and author of Deviced and new upcoming book In Praise of Boredom.
If you are enjoying this new series, let me know with a like, share it with a friend, and tell me how it’s going as you go. It’s not just my validation loop that’s asking ;)
More soon.
Katie x
The Attention Experiment is my series exploring what it means to be navigating our habits, health and happiness in an age of AI. I’m a qualified Digital Wellbeing Coach, using the latest research, neuroscience and real life stories.
Missed Issue One? Read it here.
Loving the exploration of the neuroscience of attention in your article lovely. Gives rich new layers of insight as to how human attention is the most valued and powerful technological resource that the tech giants covet 💜