Why you are addicted to email, news or social sites

Are you addicted at checking your email or news stream every 10 minutes? You are not alone and research shows that this is a common problem with deep roots in human (and animal) psychology. There's also a way to solve this problem.

Today I read a great article on this matter called The distraction society, the article paints a grim picture of how addictive behaviour and distractions affect us and have affected us for centuries:

Centuries earlier, philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal put this very succinctly. "The sole cause of man's unhappiness," he wrote, "is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

I think the root of the problem is how reinforcement works. Psychologist B.F. Skinner has done a lot of research in reinforcement and one of his findings is that random rewards beat predictable rewards - both for animals and humans. It's the basic principle of why slot machines are addictive and why we get addicted on getting the next "email fix".

I also think there's a way to solve this and the solution is to make reinforcement and rewards predictable. If you constantly check email or news stream then your reinforcement will be random and you will eventually get addicted on getting your next fix. If you don't want to get addicted then make your rewards less random by for example checking your email two times a day or every two hours.

Instead of focusing on our work or home life, we're waiting for the next 'hit'.

I have before written about this in a blog post called The Slot Machine.

Life · Psychology • 7. May
5 comments so far

>checking your email two times a day or every two hours

I think it's still random feedback. 'cause you can get new mail in two hours or not. The compromise is to have tray notification for everything: mail, rss etc. It can be notification for every email you've got, or 50 articles from RSS. But if you don't want to lose concentration while working then those notification system should turn on automaticaly during lunch or when you are at home or something. But it should be done automatically.

So the point is to have only 'success' notifications for fixed amount of 'positive' events. How do you thing?

PS: sorry for my english

iLych:
Generally, I really dislike tray notifications or any notifications for that matter as they can be really distracting. But your solution would work if the notifications are only turned on in certain intervals.

I think keeping yourself busy, preferably away from your home computer helps a great deal. At least for me, that's what I've noticed.

Emailogic cure email addiction is just 90 minutes! I went on a great course. just google Emailogic or check them out on twitter

Well you can plug out the internet and set a kitchen-timer until you are "allowed" to plug in again. Say 2-3 "work-cycles" of 1h.

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