David R. MacIver's Blog

Reduce the need for active stabilisation

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/reduce-the-need-for-active-stabilisation.

I recently visited my parents and accidentally left my Kindle behind at their house. I’ll claim it back soon, but in the meantime I’ve been reading on the Kindle app on my phone, and it’s interesting how much worse I am at it.

I fail at reading on my phone in pretty much the expected way: I get distracted. I read some, then I check discord, or substack, or go shop on something on Amazon, look at Feedbin, or play Sudoku… There are myriad things I can do on the phone, and when I zone out while reading I naturally reach for one of them.

In contrast, the Kindle is a single purpose device. When I zone out while reading on my Kindle, I just zone out for a bit and then either stop reading or return to reading. Very occasionally I might switch to another book, but I tend not to have multiple Kindle books on the go at once because I find it a bit irritating to do.

The laptop has the same problem as the phone. Literally right now I caught myself zoning out and reflexively swiping up to switch apps. Wouldn’t have that problem on my typewriter.

I’m not helpless in this situation. I can notice myself doing it, and suppress it. I have to do that in order to write a lot of the time - as I said, I got distracted mid sentence and tried to switch away. Instead of doing so I caught the action, inhibited it, and returned to writing. This is completely possible.

This is something that some of my early writing on magical practice and secondary anchors aims to help with. You have a desired state you want to be in, and you set up some rules to help you stay in that state and allow you to return to it when you lose it.

I think, though, it’s better to just set things up so that you don’t lose the state in the first place, and the Kindle vs phone issue is pretty illustrative of the problem.

Reading a Kindle, or a book, if I lose my focus, my attention fairly returns to the activity. If I’m reading on my phone, it tends to settle on something else. Sometimes that activity is itself one that I lose focus on and switch away from (occasionally back to my original reading), sometimes it’s something more absorbing (usually in a bad way) and I lose the thread of what I was doing entirely. Either way though, the point is that moving away from the intended activity causes one to continue to stay away from it.

In contrast, when reading a book in the absence of a source of distractions, if my attention drifts the natural thing for it to drift back to is the book. The state is a stable one - it tends to correct small perturbations.

The problem puts me in mind of one I have with certain exercises. I’m moderately hypermobile, and as a result certain activities are harder for me than they would be for people with normal joints. Plank is one, and standing on one leg is another.

I used to attribute the difficulty standing on one leg as being a “balance issue”, and in some sense it definitionally is: I’m trying to balance and failing, therefore I have a balance issue. On the other hand, classic victim of metonymy problem. It’s not a balance issue in the sense that I’ve got some abstract generalised difficulty with staying vertical. It’s a balance issue because my joints are extra wibbly, and as a result it’s harder to keep them in place.

One way to demonstrate that the culprit is ease of movement is that I can stand one one leg just fine if I tense all the right muscles extra hard. This is, to some degree, normal. Standing on one leg requires using your muscles to stabilise. I have to use them a lot before it feels stable though, and this is exhausting.

The easier something is to move, the harder you have to work to keep it in one place.

I think the same is true with reading and writing, or anything else with this shape. Using a multifunction device like a phone or a computer gives you a lot more “freedom of movement” - you can easily switch from what you’re doing to something else, and as a result it requires active effort to avoid doing so.

In contrast, single function devices lack this freedom of movement, and as a result you can free up the time and attention you would spend on staying focused. It’s easier, and it’s more pleasant.

Of course, a single function device is often not much help if my phone or laptop are nearby. If I was reading on my Kindle, or reading a physical book, or writing on my typewriter, or doing anything else that requires focus, but had my phone in my pocket, there’s a decent chance that I’d get my phone out and check it. The mere presence of the device is enough to make the situation at least moderately unstable.

I tend to solve this by blocking out devices entirely. Sometimes I do this by physically separating myself from them - leaving them in my room and going downstairs with books, pen, and paper. Sometimes I do it by lighting a candle and agreeing with myself that as long as the candle lit I will not use any devices.

These aren’t states I always want to be in of course. I like the internet, and my phone and laptop are both hugely life improving devices. But their power comes with a cost, and when I don’t want to pay that cost, explicitly separating them frees up capacity for what I want to focus on.

It doesn’t always work of course. Sometimes it turns out I genuinely don’t want to read or write, or don’t want to read or write the particular thing I’m doing. Even then I’ve often found it’s interesting and useful to see where my attention goes without an easy attractor for it, and it leads to me finding other stable states that I’d otherwise have missed.