Excessive online time impacts my productivity and happiness the most when I have:
- an unmet need,
- lowered energy reserves, and
- something triggers me.
Photo by Victor1558, Creative Commons License.
Unmet needs can be something I actually crave, or it can simply be a strong feeling that I am not truly acknowledging or responding to. Lowered energy reserves can be physical, emotional, or intellectual – anything that lowers your energy also lowers your will power, which is a finite resource. And triggers, well, they can be anything. The last straw. One task that makes another task very easy to do without thinking about it.
Here’s a moment where this happened to me:
- I feel lonely because I haven’t made time for socializing lately (unmet need).
- I feel tired because I went to sleep a little late trying to finish something and then got woken up twice in the night by my child’s bad dreams (lowered energy reserves)
- I use my smart phone to check what time the zoo opens this morning (trigger) and start triaging my work email without quite consciously choosing to… and spend half an hour at it during my child’s nap even though I’d intended to do something else.
Or this one:
- I feel anxious, worrying over a highly emotional issue (unmet need/unresolved feeling).
- I feel emotionally wrung out by a seemingly unending series of two-year-old meltdowns. (lowered energy reserves… possibly my kid’s lowered energy reserves powered his unusual number of meltdowns, too!)
- I get stuck organizing the outline for my e-course and click the Facebook tab accidentlly left open on my browser (trigger)… and stay there instead of writing for longer than I’d care to admit.
We’ll always have unmet needs, times of low energy, and things that trigger us towards poor choices. For parents, this situation can come up easily because we often have been putting off our needs with stop-gap solutions for a long time. We also run into a lot of situations where we delay taking care of our needs out of necessity. Many of us are unorganized, holding a lot of half-finished tasks and projects in our heads which affects our attention span. We get interrupted a lot. And kids can be experts at lowering our energy reserves and triggering us.
Once we get into this kind of situation, the most compelling solution to our discomfort is one that is low-effort, low-cost and highly available. Online time as a distraction thus understandably has a lot of allure. Other habits can fill very similar roles.
This post is part two of a series. Read my introduction to overcoming online temptation here. Part three of this series will be out next week, and starts digging into how we can better meet those unmet needs, even when we are tired out and triggered. Want to make sure you don’t miss it? Sign up to receive all my blog posts via email or in your RSS feed.
What deeper needs do you sometimes fill with a quick distraction fix like excessive time online… instead of finding a way to truly take care of yourself?