internet addiction

It is easy to find on-line guidance to a better life. But the recommendations contained on those self-help web sites (and in books that aim at the same audience) have become almost too commonplace to make any impact.

The remedy? Something that is just the opposite: a list of suggestions on how to make yourself and others miserable. Of course, I’m not wishing that you follow these directions. Rather, I’m hoping that some of you who might yawn at still another list of “things to do” to improve your life, will be struck by the things you already do that make it much worse.

Here goes:

Regularly compare your material and financial circumstances to others, especially to those who are doing better than you are.

Make a list of all the people who have wronged you over the years and try to remember exactly how awful they made you feel. Think about those who owe you an apology. Forgive no one. Let no slight be too small to dwell on it.

Carry on a vendetta. Stay up late at night planning and plotting how you might get back at people. Stay angry. Let all your hatred out in blistering, profane, and cowardly “flames” behind the mask of the Internet.

Give your children gifts rather than your time. Set no limits on them. Then wait until they are teenagers and wonder why they are depressed or rebellious.

Curse the darkness, the winter, the cold, the rain, the frailty of the human condition, and all the other things that you can’t change.

Get impatient with the people who are walking in front of you at a snail’s pace, the couples whose bodies and shopping carts block the entire grocery aisle, and the slow progress of the check-out line at the store.

Make no contribution to the betterment of humanity. Assume an attitude of entitlement. Figure out how to avoid work. Idle away your time. Ask “what your country can do for you,” not “what you can do for your country” in opposition to JFK’s 1960 inaugural address admonition.

Forever rationalize your dishonorable or questionable behavior or deny it altogether, even to yourself.

Persuade yourself that you need to wait until you feel better before you do the difficult thing that you have been postponing. Keep waiting, even if the time never comes when you believe that you can take action.

Do not let conversation with your spouse or children get in the way of watching TV. Keep the TV on most of the time, most importantly at family dinners. If possible have a television in every room.

Ignore the beauty of a spring or summer day, the newly fallen snow, and the cheerful laugh of small child. Stay in-doors as much as possible, year round.

Allow yourself to be upset by overpaid, under-performing athletes who doom the home team to continued failure. Yes, Cubs fans, this means you!

Treat emotions of sadness, tenderness, and hurt as your enemy. Push them away and thereby alienate yourself from yourself. Curtail grieving and try to deaden your feelings to the point of numbness.

Work up as much hatred as possible toward opposition political parties. Listen to every talking head who wants to whip you into a frenzy.

Expect justice and fairness in all things.

Drink too much, drug too much, and spend every extra minute on the web or playing computer games instead of having direct human contact with someone who is in the same room with you. Further distract yourself from your problems by watching TV and listening to music. Escape reality.

Keep using failed solutions to your problems even though they haven’t worked in years, if ever.

Behave in mid-life the way you did as a young person; or, if you are a young person, behave the way you did as a child. Do not reflect on or learn from experience which might teach you something new.

Use others instrumentally. That is, value them only in terms of what they can do for you. Lie, cheat, betray, and steal from them if that serves your interests. Then wonder why people mistrust you.

Spend as much time as possible worrying about the future and regretting the past, rather than living in the irreplaceable moment.

Aim low. Avoid the disappointment that comes with high expectations. When the going gets tough, quit.

Train yourself to be a miser. Practice selfishness. Hold on to your money as if you expect to live forever and will need every last cent. Make Scrooge from A Christmas Carol your hero.

Judge others less fortunate than you are by using the phrases “he should have known better,” “he didn’t try hard enough,” and the like. Assume that all people deserve whatever misfortune befalls them. Disdain compassion, but remain puzzled when others call you heartless.

Indulge in every available excess: unprotected sex, food, spending, smoking, caffeine, etc. Don’t exercise. Ignore medical advice and, even better, avoid going to your doctor. Treat your body badly and then wonder why it betrays you.

Be sarcastic, passive-aggressive, and indirect whenever you are injured rather than looking someone in the eye and expressing your displeasure in a straight-forward fashion.

Avoid facing things. Give in to your fears, anxieties, and phobias.

Don’t let anyone know you well. Believe that your vulnerabilities will always be used against you. Keep social interactions on the surface. Eschew intimacy and maintain your distance, thinking that this is the best way to avoid personal injury. Trust no one!

Assume that the normal social rules regarding fidelity to friends and lovers don’t apply to you. Hold on to a double-standard that favors you.

Insist on having your way. Don’t compromise. Don’t consider others’ needs or wants. Assume a position of moral superiority, self-righteousness, and arrogance in things religious, political, and personal.

Do everything others ask of you. Rarely say “no.”

Try to control people and events as much as you can. Don’t go with the flow. Micromanage. Hover over others. Repeat complaints to them incessantly. Remind subordinates, friends, spouses, and children of small errors, even if they are ancient history.

Make no significant effort to better your life. Depend on others to take care of you and make all significant decisions for you. Be a burden.

Raise all your children exactly the same way even though it is obvious that they are not all the same.

Imitate vampires (who have no reflection in the mirror and therefore keep their mirrors shrouded) by never really looking hard at your own reflection in the looking-glass. That is, never take a frank inventory of your strengths and weaknesses or the mistakes you’ve made. Be like the evil queen in Snow White, whose only desire was that the mirror would tell her that she was “the fairest of them all.”
Whenever you talk with someone, wonder what they really mean, pondering the possibility that they find you boring, stupid or physically unattractive.

Feed yourself on gossip more than food. Delight in talking about others behind their backs.

Value beauty, appearance, reputation, and material success over integrity, knowledge, kindness, hard work, and love.

Try to change others, but do not try to change yourself. Take no responsibility for your life circumstances, instead blaming those who have stymied you.

Stay just as you are regardless of changing life conditions. For example, if wearing warm clothes worked for you when you lived in Alaska, continue to wear them when you move to Arizona in July.

Don’t forgive yourself. Maintain the most perfectionistic and demanding moral and performance standard even if you are not a brain surgeon. Stay up at night castigating yourself over every imperfection, no matter how small.

Make a list of all the things that are wrong with your life, all the opportunities lost, every heartbreak, and the physical features and bodily changes that you don’t like. Stew in your own juices. Salt your wounds. Pick at your scabs.

Take everything personally.

Permit friends, family, and co-workers to walk all over you. Do not stand up to them for fear of causing offense and disapproval.

Discount your blessings. Concentrate on the dark side of life.

Never even consider going into psychotherapy. Assume that this is something only for those who are weak and that anyone who needs to grapple with emotional issues in counseling demonstrates a failure of will power and logic.

—

With thanks for the inspiration for this essay to Dan Greenberg and Marcia Jacobs, co-authors of a very funny, but ironic book entitled How to Make Yourself Miserable.

—

The top image is Grief by Edgar Bertram Mackenna. The video frame that follows is from John F. Kennedy’s 1960 inaugural speech. The next image is Sommerblumenstrauss by A. Gundelach. The following photo by Andygoodell is A Jack Rose Cocktail. The fifth picture is of two children in Bangladesh by Nafis Kamal, while the sixth is called Chicklet-Currency courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. After the image from Disney’s Snow White, is a 1911 photo of Enrico Caruso, the great Italian tenor. All but the Snow White frame are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

H A R M O N I C A F R A N K

I knew the world was in trouble about 20 years ago when I watched a psychiatrist (yes, a psychiatrist) talking on two telephones at once, one in each hand, held up to each of his two available ears.

God help him if he had more hands and more ears and more phones.

Its called multitasking and, trust me, you can’t do it as well as you think. At least, unless you are in the smaller than 3% of the population that some researchers believe are “supertaskers.”

For the most part, scientists have looked at the negative effects of multitasking on concentration and focus, the way it tends to increase stress, and the addiction-like stimulation that attaches to computers and other digital devices. Is it a wonder that so many children are diagnosed with attentional problems? Some researchers suggest that their brains (and ours) are increasingly being rewired to the point of having our concentration drawn away from its original target by novel, but irrelevant information and other distractions.

The result? Impatience, fatigue, and a fragmentation of lived experience.

Think about it.

How many things do you really concentrate on to the exclusion of just about everything else?

My guess is, for example, that you do lots of things while watching TV: listening to music (sometimes turning off the TV sound of a sporting event you only want to see), holding a conversation with your child or spouse, reading a magazine, eating, text messaging someone, etc.

This becomes so routine, so normalized, that we are not particularly aware of how many things we take-on simultaneously and the fact that none of them capture our full attention. Later, if asked to recall what we did, we just might have some trouble. And a person who really wants to talk with us while we are preoccupied with all the other things I mentioned, will find himself frustrated or, at least partially, ignored.

When was the last time that you really savored a single bite of food? If you were heavily involved in conversation or on the computer you probably didn’t.

When was the last time that you really drove your car in a mindful way? Felt the vibration of the car on the road, the tactile sensations produced by your body against the seat and your hands on the steering wheel, the variegated sky ahead, the differing sounds of the other cars, the changing shapes and shadows on the highway, the slight alteration in position and muscle movement when you pressed on the brake? No radio, no CDs, no texting or talking on the phone, no conversation of any kind, no day dreaming; just you and the machine and the highway.

When was the last time you listened, really listened and watched your conversation partner? Focused intently on the tonal quality of his voice, his inflections, the changing expression of his face, the way he used his hands, the volume of sound he produced, when he took his breath, not to mention what he was saying? Or were you distracted by other sights and sounds, your own sense of impatience; and the chatter going on inside your own head wondering what to say next, when you needed to get home, how soon you could eat, or the presentation you had to make the next day.

Is it time to slow down? I know, you might feel that you can’t. But is multitasking really making you more productive? Is it enhancing the quality of your life? Or, to paraphrase Wordsworth’s comment long before the computer-age: “Getting and spending (and surfing), we lay waste our powers.”

As a therapist it is essential for me to pay attention to what my patients say and don’t say, how they look and how they move; small changes in their facial expression, tone of voice, and mood; the hint of a tear coming to their eyes, the crispness and energy of their gait. And, if I do this, they will usually be freer to be open and trusting; and more prone to validate their own feelings — think of their words and emotions as having value, because someone else does.

I must bring my own intensity and focus, be in-the-moment with my patient, mindful of everything related to him; and certainly not preoccupied, day dreaming, thinking about my next meal, worrying about some other patient, or texting another individual while I half-listen to the person sitting across from me.

Although not always perfectly successful, I try to be an enemy of routine.

You would not and should not go to a therapist who does less than keep this kind of focus. So why would you live so as to fragment your own focus by doing so many things at once that almost nothing fully engages you and produces your own personal life satisfaction?

I imagine that you are reading this on a computer that you own. But might it not be just the other way around? Might it be that the computer (and other digital distractions) “own” you?

What would your life be like if you practiced, more and more, being in-the-moment, attentive to just what is present at that time and place — making a living-space for yourself so that you can really live — not just plow through the day in its attention-absorbing, mind-sucking, soul-deadening, endless haste over things that won’t matter to you in 10 minutes or 10 days or 10 years?

You can start so simply. Just one bite of food, savored for color, texture, the sensations on your tongue, the taste and aftertaste — slowly.

The news on the radio or TV or AOL will wait. The “Vice President in Charge of Looking Out the Window” will take care of the weather. The CD or downloaded music can be accessed at another time. The incoming text message is almost certainly not that urgent. The phone can be turned off.

We hear lots about traffic accidents caused by ADHD teenagers, who are driving, texting, talking to the person in the passenger seat, combing their hair, putting on nail polish, listening to the radio, and conversing on their cell phone, all at once.

Why would one want to be an only marginally less distracted, fragmented (and dangerous) version of that person? Out of touch with the world and oneself?

A few years ago I saw a cartoon that looked something like this: a middle-aged couple, obviously married for many years, were sitting together. The husband was trying to read his newspaper and watch TV while his wife talked. Then the husband spoke: “I’m sorry dear, but I was distracted and missed what your were saying. Can you repeat everything you’ve said since we got married?”

Really.

—

The above image is of “Harmonica Frank” Floyd, who is seen playing two harmonicas, one using his nose and one using his mouth. He also was reportedly able to play the harmonica and sing simultaneously. Today we would call Frank a “supertasker.”

Dr. Gerald Stein

Blogging About Psychotherapy from Chicago

How to Make Yourself and Those You Love Miserable

Multitasking: You Are Missing More Than You Think

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