This week, I found a quote from Toni Morrison that helped me. The quote was in one of the many articles I read in the New York Times after her death. Here’s a snippet from the Op-Ed written by Roxane Gay that includes the quote.
In a conversation with Hilton Als for a profile in “The New Yorker,” Ms. Morrison said: “I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”
This quote reached me at the right time in my self-doubt as I write the opening for my memoir. I know more and I’ve experienced more than most of my readers. Even among my peers, my experiences have been different. I must trust that my experience is not a shallow place, but a rich place to write from.
Each writer may struggle with self-doubt in her own way, but anxiety is ubiquitous. Today, I got a notification on my iPhone from the Screen Time app. It told me that in the past seven days, I’ve used my phone an average of 2h, 32 mins a day, a 9% increase from the previous week.
Going down the rabbit hole of reading about Toni Morrison contributed a large chunk to the average this week. The Screen Time notification made me wonder how I compare to others. I had a feeling my average was low compared to some of my coworkers who spend their lunch hour on their phones.
Your Phone and Your Brain
I did an online search, and I found this article in the Chicago Tribune from last November. The article quotes Larry Rosen, a research psychologist and expert on the “psychology of technology.”
Research has shown that “what’s driving [the increase in the number of phone check-ins] is anxiety, and it’s a particular kind of anxiety some people call nomophobia but we call technological dependency.” Nomophobia is also known as fear of missing out. That’s right: FOMO. Rosen explains it like this: “As soon as you check in, chemicals start to build in your brain,” including the stress hormone, cortisol. …These are arousal chemicals, he points out, not the feel-good chemical dopamine. …[T]he increase in check-ins doesn’t seem to be driven by addiction-style pleasure seeking. Instead, it’s driven by anxiety.
After reading the article, I took one of its suggestions to turn off notifications on my phone. This adds another layer to my Digital Minimalism, which I’ve written about before. I was surprised to find that even with cutting down to the minimum number of notifications, I still need 10 apps to notify me.
The only concession I’m making to non-essential notifications is to keep receiving breaking news from the New York Times. Despite the deluge of bad news, I would rather know than not know. Perhaps in the future, I will be able to take a news holiday, but not today.