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What if tech tried to be healing instead of just addictive?

Whether you are a giant global platform or a hip new startup, the most important first step in your business plan should be to care about mental wellbeing

‘It is ridiculous that we blame young people for being addicted to their phones and apps when the simple truth is that they are designed to be addictive. 

 

 Despite the growing research into the negative impact that screen-based technologies can have on wellbeing, the trick the tech sector people have somehow pulled off is that they have made it our problem, not theirs. We are told to try things such as digital detoxes to learn how to use our devices in more balanced ways. My own work includes helping people include their technology in how they understand and practice mindfulness. However, both these approaches still makes it our problem while ignoring the root cause.

Facebook and Twitter 'harm young people's mental health'

It is ridiculous that we blame young people for being addicted to their phones and apps when the simple truth is that they are designed to be addictive. It is time to apportion responsibility where it is due.

Addiction is not an accident: it is a strategy. In the world of app economics, addiction is what brings in the money. Whether it’s by trapping your attention and then selling it to advertisers or by trapping your attention and manipulating you to make a one-off or subscription-based payment, the basic idea is the same: catch that attention and then monetise it.
As a maker of mindfulness meditation apps, I work in the space where technology and wellbeing meet. It is an exciting place to be, but I know that no matter how successful the biggest wellbeing apps in the world become, they’ll never even come close to being in the same league as Facebook, Snapchat or Clash of Clans. It was reflecting on this that I realised that for mindfulness to truly scale up, the solution may not be to make specialist products, but instead to stitch it into everything.
The whole premise of mindfulness is that by deliberately training our attention in certain ways, we can grow a range of positive qualities such as self-awareness, calm, kindness and concentration. But this process doesn’t only happen when we do something like meditation. When our attention is given away to an app, a game or website, the same mind-training process takes place but this time we’re no longer in charge of the technique or the outcome – the company is.

The reason that so much tech doesn’t support wellbeing is because wellbeing was not a consideration in its design

So should you run a video service, a social network, a news site or a mobile game, by definition your product has an impact on the mental health of your users – be that negative, neutral or positive. And the sad reality is that if you are not optimising that impact, it tends to be the former: which means distraction, stress, self-criticism and all the rest.
It is easy to throw our hands in the air, declaring that this is simply how technology works, but that’s not correct. The reason that so much tech doesn’t support wellbeing is because wellbeing was not a consideration in its design. To solve the problem, companies have to make it a design condition that’s measured and optimised.
Whether you are a giant global platform or a hip new startup, the most important first step is to give a damn. Then if you still decide to use techniques that undermine that wellbeing, at least you will be doing that consciously, rather than through ignorance or denial.
The next logical step is to be honest about the techniques and tricks you use in your product. The technology world has developed all sorts of ways to trap consumers’ attention. Netflix’s autoplay feature makes it so easy to binge-watch that before you know it, you’ve gone through seven hours of The Good Wife. Instagram’s infinite scroll of images gives you just enough of a dopamine hit to keep on going so that you get to the next ad. These tricks have become so routine that designers now rarely think about the impact they have.