Lose Your Phone, Find Your Body

If you like, before you begin to read, try listening to this Calvin Harris and Rihanna track (I find it more effective without the visuals) and then watching this Marx Brothers clip. What unites them? What distinguishes them? What do they make you feel?

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Technological distractions

Perhaps because in another writing project I’ve been focusing on the emergence of self-consciousness in children and in other animals, and perhaps also because I’ve recently accompanied my partner from England to California to help him settle in for a new job, I’ve been thinking about self-awareness, particularly bodily self-awareness.

I feel pretty good about my body. But I’ve noticed of late that I’m very aware of it, in a detached, observing-it-from-the-outside kind of way. I’m aware of observing it, and seeing or imagining others observing it. Sometimes this awareness slides down the slippery slope of comparing my body with others; often it doesn’t. But even if not, I suspect that life would be even better if my awareness were otherwise: more embedded in what I’m doing, not floating around watching myself doing it. And I also suspect that I’m not alone in feeling like this: in fact, I think it bothers me in myself because I see it in others. I see it in the girl-woman who lies preening her tanned body hour after hour by the swimming pool, and I don’t want to get even an inch closer to being like that. And it feels like media influences – how we get attached to the hardware as much as what we actually consume via it – are a real part of the problem, if it is a problem.

Now, the first stage of my thought process about this is by no means novel, but once you start seeing it, the sheer number and range of methods we use to rescue ourselves from being bodily present really is remarkable. We talk on the phone while we walk; we watch TV or listen to music while we exercise at the gym; we read or watch or listen while we eat; we photograph and film ourselves on the flimsiest pretext; we fill in every brief moment waiting for someone, or for the bus, with the reflex checking of our phones. There’s also nothing new in observing that with the most self-reflexive of these activities, it’s precisely the desire to capture one’s presence – on the sunset beach, at the gig, in the poignant moment of a goodbye – that makes us absent throughout: always on the lookout for the best shot, the right moment for making the record that will let us pretend, in some imagined future, that I really was here now, and that it was perfect.

I’ve never done a vast amount of any of this – either the distraction or the self-monitoring – though I do find the most emotionally loaded things hard not to want to preserve in photographic form, probably because I have too little faith in my memory. The one time I very deliberately distract myself, though, is when, occasionally, I go running. Often I just do sprints because I dislike anything longer, but when I do anything beyond a few minutes I find that having music helps. I’ve found the right BPM range to help keep up a decent pace, but I think the crucial thing isn’t really the tempo, it’s the masking of the signals from my body that say it’s tired and it doesn’t much like this.

Beyond the fairly rare occurrence of me running, though, I almost never listen to music or use my phone at the same time as I’m doing something else. My worst phone habit is using it to signal, pointlessly, to the world that I am otherwise engaged: busy, not just waiting. In this particular regard, it is interesting making an effort to do less of it. Now, if I catch myself reaching for my phone as a reflex against the awkwardness of just being, I say no, for now I will simply sit, or stand, and look around me, and be, and even meet someone’s gaze, and even smile at them. (In this, being abroad and having mobile data switched permanently off is a great help.)

One feels increasingly alien, just sitting, or standing, or walking. It’s strange to reflect on how quickly this has happened. Even when I was a teenager in the mid- to late 90s, barely any of these methods for self-alienation were available to anyone. If you had to walk somewhere, you walked, and that time was for walking. It was for attending to your surroundings, for making the journey. You might also use the time to daydream, or fret, or revise for an exam, but that distraction was self-created, with all the effort and the finite temporal arc such cognitive activity involves.

But about 35 years ago, a few years before I was born, the Sony Walkman had come into being. And now, so many technological revolutions later, the distraction is endless, effortless, more than effortless: carefully designed to be compulsive. Much has been said and written about the likely effects of our wirelessly streamed culture on concentration and other cognitive capacities, including those involved in social interaction, and some systematic research has started to be conducted (see e.g. Wilmer et al.'s 2017 review). There’s also a growing literature on how social and conventional media affect body image – pretty much uniformly in negative ways (Cohen and Blaszczynski 2012, Grabe et al. 2008). But the negative effects on body-related measures that have been investigated so far are, to my knowledge, only those that result directly from representations of other bodies, whether the bodies of people we know (e.g. on Facebook) or the pseudo-bodies constructed deliberately to make us envious and dissatisfied (e.g. in advertising).

My academic research is starting to investigate whether our responses to text as opposed to image, and specifically literary or fictional text, might be harmful and/or helpful in body-related ways. But I also wonder whether continual distraction in itself, regardless of the content of what distracts us, might be doing significant damage when it comes to our relationships with our bodies. Probably this argument has been made before too, but I haven’t come across it in quite this context.

The basic idea is: we spend proportionally ever more time treating our bodies as things we possess, because we’re distracted during more and more of the times when being present as bodily beings should be easy. Or, in more scientific terms: cognitive distraction increases the frequency of self-objectification relative to more positive experiences of embodiment. And this causes problems.

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Ways of being embodied

In the ordinary way of things, or what was once ordinary, every day holds innumerable opportunities for experiencing myself as an acting agent. I, as a body, move through the world, interacting with other bodies and with objects and landscapes. My constant experience is of my own capacities as they originate in my embodiment. I notice the weekly, daily, hourly, minute-by-minute fluctuations in my physical strengths and vulnerabilities, my attunements and misalignments with aspects of my environment, and I adjust to them, often without noticing it, but maybe noticing the results: that if I melt through the instinctive hunching of my shoulders in the cold, I feel warmer and more relaxed; that if I slouch less at the table I feel more alert and savor my food more. My body is what I live, and only sporadically and secondarily what others appraise.

Source: Emily Troscianko

Now compare that with the way we so easily find ourselves living now. Bodily presence is the exception not the norm. There is rarely silence: every physical experience has a soundtrack or a chat overlain on it. There is rarely immobility: there’s always something to scroll through or click on, no matter how short the interlude. Or if there is immobility, it’s the inert kind that comes with mental absence. There is rarely anything even approaching simple presence: something other than here and now always has a claim on my attention. And what does all this mean? That when I do experience my body, those moments are an anomaly, and should be precious in their rarity: we need them to be really good, because we have fewer and fewer of them. But instead, in reality the kinds of bodily experience that do make it into the narrow gaps between the distractions are likely to be the bad ones. The ones that grab us despite ourselves.

So there is no evenly woven tapestry of bodily experience underlying every moment; instead, bodily experience is more likely to jump out at you, catching you unawares. Sometimes this happens harmlessly: when you hang up, or in the moment between this track ending and the next beginning. Sometimes it comes from bodily realities that intrude on the distractions themselves: you can’t enjoy the music because your head aches. Maybe, more positively, you tune out of Facebook because the food tastes so good, or the sun is so warm, or you just had an interesting thought about something. But when you’re tired and busy, as so many of us are so much of the time, it’s easy for the negatives to predominate.

And so, very often, when self-awareness comes, it comes not as an enhancement of unreflective awareness that was already there, but abruptly, from nothing into something. And the something as which it comes is, more often than not, self-observation. This sporadic influx of embodiment is most readily prompted, after all, by situations in which my body is represented visually to me. I catch myself in a mirror, or try to take a photo of myself – I see myself from the outside. The visual sense is highly dominant in humans, and human forms are so visually salient we even imagine them where they aren’t, and visual perception and the visual imagination have many qualities and mechanisms in common. So although vision works best for this kind of abrupt becoming-embodied-again, the visual imagination can do it well too. Maybe I catch the eye of a passer-by before both our gazes slide awkwardly away – I imagine myself from the outside. I see a photo of a friend or a fashion model – I imagine myself via comparison. Instead of being me, I am observing me.

But what if when I see my reflection in a shop window or compare myself with someone else, the verdict is positive? Well, maybe the problems don’t arise only if my self-appraisal in these moments is overtly self-critical. Perhaps the outcome doesn’t even hugely matter. If I catch sight of myself in a mirror in a shop and am pleased because I think I look rather nice, or am slightly disheartened because when on earth did I start to look so tired, in either case maybe there is a potential problem because I am treating my body as an object. An object in both senses: as the grammatical object of my verb, my looking – and as a physical entity from which I am separate.

So you might think your body image is fairly good and that you’re healthily appreciative of your body as it is, but still be falling into the trap of appreciating it too pervasively as an objectified possession – something that you can appreciate, despite its ‘flaws’, as an aesthetic object. It’s pretty hard not to do this when you’re using a piece of reflective glass to study yourself in left-right reversal from head to toe, so the key is perhaps, quite simply, not to do too much of that, compared with how much you let yourself experience your body in action – even if the action is just breathing.

There’s some interesting research on how visual and nonvisual kinds of bodily awareness may interact. Some evidence suggests that reduced awareness of your body ‘from the inside’ (interoception) correlates with greater susceptibility to illusions that involve ‘proprioceptive drift’: a perceived shift of one’s bodily location and body ownership which occurs when the visual input overrides the tactile input (Tsakiris et al. 2011). There is also counterevidence that it’s increased visual context-dependency rather than decreased bodily awareness which predicts the amount of drift (David et al. 2013). Dancers may rely less on the visual sense than others for postural control, and the less they rely on vision, the better their dynamic balance may be (Golomer et al. 1999), and eating-disorder sufferers seem to show more proprioceptive drift than healthy controls, perhaps because they rely more on the visual sense for their bodily appraisals (Eshkevari et al. 2012). The relationships between different forms of body awareness are of course complex, but there may be something to the idea that we need to do less seeing and more other sensing: ‘it may be that viewing oneself more from an appearance-based perspective, as in self-objectification, distorts the interoceptive experience of the bodily self’ (Eshkevari et al. 2012, p. 826).

Clarifications

Now, time for a few caveats and qualifications. Firstly, I’m of course not saying that all ‘distraction’ is bad. Listening to music, reading, even social networking, can of course have lovely and therapeutic effects, or be fun, or just alleviate boredom; used judiciously, these activities can even enhance our capacity for presence, like a drumbeat to a thunderstorm. I listen to a lot of music while driving, maybe because the lack of ambient noise means there’s a more neutral canvas on which the beat and the lyrics can help my awareness sit happily somewhere between all the complex skills required to drive well and thoughts that can stay idle complements to being here now. My suggestion, then, is just that when we engage in these activities not in their own right but as backdrops to other activities, and when they are also no longer the exception but the norm, they can grow damaging.

I’m also not saying that absence of distraction is by definition good for us. We can be profoundly self-focused in the most destructive ways, and these include self-objectification: I think again of the expression of dissatisfied and intensely programmatic self-polishing in the young woman by the pool. (Probably I’m being deeply unfair to her, and she’s actually not studying her bikini line but reflecting intently on the latest bit of quantum field theory she read in her room before she came down.)

And finally, I’m not saying that what we should be aiming for is some Zen-like state of full meditative unity with our bodies as inseparable parts of an infinite universe – at least not all the time. The question of where on the spectrum (or where in the multidimensional space) of ways of engaging with our bodies some kind of everyday ideal may lie – and where the endpoints are – is a question for another time.

But maybe there’s something to the hypothesis that if the default way of being is not the experience of my body as a capably acting agent, then I need to make sure these experiences don’t disappear altogether. I need enough of these experiences to keep me from treating my body as something which looks rather than doing. And that when the norm is not enactive embodiment, it’s easy to be pulled into experiencing our bodies disproportionately by environmental prompts that encourage bodily objectification (e.g. mirrors) or objectifying dissatisfaction (e.g. airbrushed advertising). And so our experiences of ourselves are more likely to be as subject and object divorced from each other: me versus my body, not me as my body. We spent little time as our bodies, and when there’s a chance to, often we let it slip past because of the grabbiness and the stickiness of cues to stand in judgement on them. (See van Vugt and Broers 2016 on the ‘stickiness’ of intrusive mind-wandering thoughts and their negative correlation with mindfulness.)

Ways of appraising your body

Let’s return for a moment to the sub-hypothesis that it doesn’t much matter whether your bodily self-appraisal comes up with a positive or a negative verdict. I’m aware that saying there’s no difference between appraising one’s appearance positively or negatively could be dangerous, and I don’t mean that. But I do mean that the two have the same underlying structure: the process starts off the same, and then diverges at some later point to reach either a more negative or a more positive verdict. So perhaps it all comes down to proportions: if there’s plenty else going on in your life in which your body is not an object to you, great – deciding you look sexy tonight is good. If not, and that type of self-appraisal has too much salience in your life – then maybe there’s a problem.

The self-appraisals I’ve focused on here are the bodily ones: treating one’s body as an object rather than a subject, usually via the visual sense – am I pretty, slim, tanned, toned enough? But they can take other forms too: am I strong, fit, clever, selfless enough?

The paradigmatic aesthetic cases derive their power from the way the visual sense can bypass whole swathes of reasoning, and leap to the conclusion not pretty enough. Why it matters that I be pretty enough is usually left undetermined: the aesthetic judgement is rapid, and all there is. You can learn to backtrack and unpick it, although that takes effort.

The non-visual, non-perceptual cases are more interesting, because the dividing line between treating oneself as subject and as object is so very hard to trace when it’s a matter of skills rather than appearances. If, in the gym, I compare my own performance, let alone my physique, with another woman’s, and find myself wanting to be (or look) stronger than her, that’s a fairly clear case of self-objectification: I’m standing in judgement on myself and making my actions be not for themselves but for the assessment of my acting body against someone else’s. The same goes for feeling the eyes of other people on me as I prepare to lift, even adjusting my behaviours to fit some image I might want to convey – of confident oblivion, say. If, on the other hand, I focus all my senses with precision on the lift I’m about to attempt, and fill my lungs with air and step under the bar and step back with it and check my foot placement – well, where do I classify this? In some senses any focus on oneself is an objectification (me looking at my feet), but in the more meaningful sense, all these micro-actions are geared towards present action, as a subject: can I lift this weight or not? I am a complex system acting through multiple forms of embodied feedback and feedforward to carry out this complex movement. Then there are in-between cases: if I get frustrated with myself for failing a lift, is that self-criticism also self-objectifying, or am I just wanting to be a more capable subject?

When you think through it far enough, it can feel like the whole idea risks disintegrating. For a start, our language has not evolved well to convey self-perception as anything other than self-separation; all the possessives with which we talk about self as divided between body (what I own) and mind (the real me) are hard to get away from. Even the ubiquitous phrase ‘body image’ itself implies and encourages a reduction of the body to a statically imageable entity separate from my dynamic experience of it. Is this how psychologists should be inviting people to think about their relationships with their body? Is it rather telling that this has now become the standard shorthand for those relationships?

And then there’s the fact that we are social creatures whose survival has always depended on reading other people’s minds: intuiting with a thousand complex and highly evolved mechanisms whether this person is about to try to steal my food, tell me a lie, or get me pregnant. One large part of these constant operations of social cognition is understanding that I create such impressions on other people too, and that I can modulate those impressions, by means that grow ever more sophisticated. We can’t just switch all this off, though coming close can feel lovely. I like doing this by removing myself from other people altogether. I feel most profoundly calm and free when I have space and quiet around me, preferably vast space, like in the Californian deserts or mountain ranges, with no one else there save maybe one or two people I know and trust, and where the games of self-monitoring are dissolved out of existence by structures much vaster and more impassive than what we call human civilisation.

Maybe this is one reason why most people in big cities look so miserable most of the time: the imbalance between prompts to embodiment and to self-observation is so great. (Constructive vandalism against ads in public spaces confronts part of the problem.) But for most of us, withdrawing to the wilderness isn’t really a solution – for more than brief expeditions or vacations or targeted ‘off the grid’ retreats, anyway. Perhaps as the sophistication of our tools for social cognition grows, we need to grow with it. But again, there may be a rather simple lesson to learn: that it all comes down to proportions, to the frequency and duration of the times we are our bodies as subjects, or appraise them as objects. Perhaps the more constantly we’re confronted with invitations to see ourselves as real or imagined others do, the more concertedly we need to choose not to: not to leap into those self-critical comparisons; not to want, without even asking why, to be the prettiest or the cleverest all the time.

Choosing presence

Source: Emily Troscianko

And so it’s all really quite simple. It’s not about the evil media distorting our minds and relationships with our bodies; it’s simply about choosing to be present. That doesn’t mean resisting enjoying the birdsong because it might remove me from the treasured communion with my infinitely treasured body. It just means making space for sensations and other experience that have an intrinsic connection to my bodily here and now: the changing birdsong above and around me as I walk, not the birdsong on the MP3 of soothing nature noises flowing down my auditory canals from nowhere.

Maybe this learning curve starts with reclaiming the vast territory of every day that could be shaped by experiences of ourselves acting strongly and capably (or just competently) in the world. This is not me as two-dimensional reflection, nor me as faint echo to the lyrics of Nicki Minaj’s latest single, nor me at three removes from the exertions of my limbs, nor me caught in a freeze-framed moment of digital imperfection, nor me needing to signal to whoever’s watching that I’m busily engaged in not engaging with them, nor me afraid of where my mind will lead me or not lead me if on this walk, I just walk instead of calling someone.

This is me, walking, feeling the warmth of the LA autumn come to meet me, feeling the tension of slightly tight hamstrings, feeling the tickle of loose hairs on my neck, hearing the freeway hum and the barking of a dog and the rattle of a drill somewhere, meeting the eye of the man who passes, feeling the tilt of my head, feeling the weight of my bag, feeling the cool of the building that shades me, feeling my thoughts drift between work and email and food and pool and family and back to me here.

How would it be if this were me much more of the time? What else would change?

I think for the rest of my time out here in the sun, I’m going to remember:

Remember the balance between times spent as me, and times spent assessing me.
Remember that the times spent as me come for free.

Source: Emily Troscianko

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