Decrease Your Media Use to Increase Your Happiness
Late at night, you can find me looking at my smartphone. I’ll be lying on the cover of my bed, face glued to the screen, checking messages, typing notes for tomorrow, reading the latest news…you know, just staying on top of things so I’m ready for tomorrow.
In the morning, it’s the same thing. I wake up before my alarm and I’m reaching for my smartphone to check for notifications and alerts. What’s happened since I went to sleep? Or tried to sleep. To be honest, I haven’t been sleeping that well.
No need to forward me the articles by sleep experts. I’ve read them all. They all say the same thing. An hour or so before bed, you should turn off the television, shut down the computer, and put your smartphone in airplane mode — something about blue light cutting back on your melatonin and disturbing sleep patterns. But I never had a problem falling to sleep, so I ignored them. I just have a problem staying asleep.
Then I read happiness expert Shawn Achor’s book The Big Potential a couple of weeks ago. It’s not a book about sleep or sleep research but it changed my relationship with technology and my phone. I still use technology but in a much more positive way.
Achor is a happiness expert and the bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage. His previous book looked at how you could improve your individual happiness and offered happiness exercises. The Big Potential, however, focuses on how you can achieve more by working with others, increasing positive influences, and decreasing the negative ones.
Defend against your negative influences
It was Achor’s chapter “Defend Against Negative Influences” that was the most useful. If you think the title sounds like a chapter from some Harry Potter book on “Defense Against the Dark Arts,” you would be right. Just like Harry Potter has to learn how to defend himself against the power of dark magic, us success seekers need to learn how to defend ourselves against the negative influences that are stopping us from achieving our full potential.
In the book, Achor cites research on how viewing negative news can make you unhappy. If you watch or read negative news for only three minutes in the morning, then you’re 27% more likely to be unhappy six to eight hours later in the day. However, it’s not just negative news that can turn your mood and bring down our potential, but all the stress-inducing emails from clients, messages from our boss, and pessimistic social media posts we encounter.
The defense against the dark arts of technology is simple. Achor recommends no media before breakfast or morning coffee and no media after lying in bed. That means nothing. No news, no email, and no social media. Whatever can affect your mood negatively.
But what about positive media, you ask? Achor points to sleep research that any media you read or watch before you go to sleep, can cost you as much an hour of sleep a night (once again due to that blue light stuff).
How I defend against the dark arts of technology
I was doubtful of his research but was willing to give it a shot. What could I lose? More sleep?
So I shut down the media. I stopped reading emails, checking social media, and reading the news in the morning and at night. I wouldn’t check emails until I actually got to work and at night, I would switch to more peaceful activities before bed. I would read a book or listen to music before I went to sleep.
Like a Harry Potter spell, the effect was dramatic. No more waking up and staying up, or waking up way too early. I started sleeping deeper and better right away.
And I found another benefit. Once I quit checking social media or reading the news in the morning or evening, not only did I feel better I found less of a need to do so during the day. Like a junkie who quit, I no longer needed a fix. By cutting back, I was able to focus more on work and be more productive.
Kyle Crocco thinks the Squirrel Nut Zippers are a great concert band you should check out and also works as a Writing Guru for BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and a Content Marketer for Airtime Watertime®.
Writing Guru is an unofficial job title, patent-pending.
