When was the last time you stared at a wall for an extended period of time?
Pause to think about it…please 🙂
…(thinking)…
…(thinking)…
Okay maybe you just skipped right over and didn’t pause…no one will ever know….
We, on average, spend over 10 hours consuming some form of media a day (this included). With sleep added in there, that’s a huge portion of our day.
A funny term used in the Tim Ferriss’ Show referred to it as “infobesity”…perhaps that’s been around for a while, but that’s the first time I heard about it, and I’ll stick with it.
Infobesity is based on the fact that over stimulation and constant bombardment of information impacts our ability to process complex matters, our attention spans constantly diminish, we struggle to create versus constantly consuming, and we go about 5 minutes before checking our phones…the ultimate culprit in infobesity. Okay it may not be every 5 minutes, but the figure is that the average American checks his/her phone 46 times a day…that’s a lot.
But none of this should be shocking to you.
So go back to my question: when was the last time you stared at a white wall for any extended period of time–say minimum 10 minutes? Chances are it’ll be pretty difficult to recall a time, if ever…if you even try to #pause and try to recall.
It begs the question why would anyone stare at a white wall. Point taken, and yet, it goes without any judgement when we ask how many hours did you watch TV today. There’s a cultural norm where staring at a “box of light and sounds” isn’t questioned.
So to go back and answer why it’s important….
Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow poses an interesting framework of how the mind works–dividing it into essentially the subconscious and conscious. We are so over stimulated that we use the subconscious to make decisions…which uses several mental shortcuts that tend to negatively impact our decision making, and Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational argues that it’s in a predictable manner allowing people and companies to intentionally take advantage of.
If you’re constantly distracted, providing knee-jerk reactions, in auto-pilot mode, poor decisions will be made from these shortcuts.
If you’re staring at a white wall, perhaps these shortcut errors won’t occur. Perhaps you get out of the subconscious operating system and into the conscious.
Perhaps there’s a reason to stare at a white wall.
It’s not really the white wall that matters here, it is what happens in your mind when you do: reflection, visualization, thinking, shutting off the constant stream of info. If you reign in those thoughts in a disciplined manner, you’ve essentially got meditation. And meditation is getting a pretty positive rap these days, so I’m happy to just point to it here.
We’ve got infobesity and meditation is the cure.
We’ve got the fast food of the mind, and mindfulness is the Weight Watchers.
What I’m interested in and focused on is the implementation of Jenny Craig of the mind. And that’s what companies like Headspace and Muse are doing well. Their value proposition is not to offer some exotic locale to do a yoga retreat to become mindful (which by the way is pretty awesome). You don’t have to be on the Mental Biggest Loser or do some intense crazy bootcamp of the mind to be an active meditator.
Their claim is simply do what you are already doing, use your phone and continue to consume #nomnom.
Much like these diet routines who champion eating ice cream and dessert and still lose weight, that’s exactly what startups in the space are doing.
Instead of putting your phone away–your biggest distraction–they want you to use your phone. But instead of eating an extra large slice of cheesecake–instead of opening up BuzzFeed or Facebook–just use their app.
They are using the behavior of the user to their advantage.
When dealing with the user, the individual, it’s all about cognitive behavior when it comes to habit building. Many startups espouse the benefits and need fulfillment of a multitude of human problems (some more pressing than others). But the key tipping point to success is not on the technical features or the overarching mission, it’s on how the technology interfaces with the user. Thinking of the solution as a system, the most important piece–the biggest variable–is the human, how can you get him/her to do X. In order to understand that, you must dig into human behavior and habit forming.
So what areas of your life does knowing about human behavior matter more than other aspects?
I posit that in pretty much all aspects of aspiration it will matter more than you might think.
Perhaps you can ponder this while staring at a white wall…