The Addiction to Distraction
Its Risks to the Global Population and Possible Antidotes (Vol. 5; Issue 6)
Who evades either living or observing the following scene:
Rushing to accomplish multiple tasks before her first meeting at 1pm, Susan Simpson, a middle-aged corporate attorney, awakens early, dresses, drinks a coffee, and speeds her red electric Fiat to an imaging center for a laryngeal CT scan (nothing scary). She orders a garden hose from Amazon and dashes off “hey there” texts to her two sons while waiting. The scan completed, she snaps a photo of the hospital hallways as she scurries out. The white windowless scene reminds her of the (excellent) Apple TV show, Severance.
Heading next to the nearby Vons, Susan uses Siri to dictate texts to two clients and three colleagues, confirming the afternoon meeting. She grabs a tuna sandwich to eat in her car. After parking in her office building’s drab parking lot, she takes the last bite of the sandwich, fetches noise-canceling headphones from her gym bag, inserts them in her ears, and turns on heavy metal music to “keep going.” She walks the three blocks to the gym. iPhone in hand as she approaches the entrance, she clicks on the gym’s app to check in. The workout, enhanced by an energy drink, leaves her “fully amped.” Exercise complete, she showers, dresses, and walks rapidly back to her office. Susan keeps the music streaming as she enters the building, rides the elevator to the 27th floor, and dashes into the conference room. The first one to arrive, Susan opens her laptop to review the morning’s emails and texts while waiting for the others to arrive.
These frenzied scenes play out in the lives of professionals and similarly engaged wage slaves across the developed world. You may perform such hypertensive theater yourself.* The addictive quality of these overwrought mornings is well known.** Less discussed, and a component of addiction, is how these frenetic activities obliterate the experience of the self.
Susan barely had a moment to reflect on her thoughts, feelings, or bodily sensations. The 21st century distraction dance entirely swept her ego away. The cortisol streaming through her blood vessels thrilled her, for sure, but such hormones, diffuse muscular tension, and other symptoms of sympathetic nervous system arousal damages tissues. Her time at the gym hardly compensated. And, her lonely tuned-out exercise routine deprived her of social interactions potentially nourishing to her body-mind.
It is often the desire to escape self-awareness that fuels such frantic activities. Susan’s morning passed by as a succession of flashing instants, each unfolding in anticipation of the next. She lacked any sense of being in the moment. Becoming attuned to oneself—even in the best of conditions—involves at least some discomfort. It may come from unresolved trauma, insomniac fatigue, romantic partner annoyance, climate fears, money worries, and more. Of course, self-awareness can also bring joy—of closeness to a loved one or of the sound of birds in a garden. Yet, because of our knowledge of our inevitable march towards death, we cannot help but feel some existential angst. Whether happy or not, darkness tints our life experiences.
In addition to natural wishes to avoid such pain, global culture demands we live in states of frenzy. Invitations to distraction are constant. Televisions line the walls of restaurants, neon-flashing billboards litter the streets, and digital screens dominate nearly every moment. Efforts to escape these disturbances render cliches like swimming against the tide ridiculous. To avoid distraction is to stop breathing. But it’s not the atmosphere that is polluted; it’s the culture that’s perverse.
Counter-cultural forces holding the potential to dampen the fever of excitement speak in whispers. Quiet reflection, like that found in meditation or prayer, offers solace. It allows for hearing the actual sound of the universe:
Silence.
When used with care, psychedelics also wipe the slate clean—albeit briefly. Michael Pollan (2019) analogizes our psycho-behavioral patterns, including desires for distraction, to well-trod trails in the snow. Psychedelics create states like fresh snowfall, erasing these deeply worn trails. They invite experiencing the world afresh. By exposing the unconscious mind, psychoanalytic psychotherapy also holds the power to decrease how we use distraction to avoid. It diminishes the pain many run from constantly.
Addiction to distraction occurs, in part, because it reduces pain. It thereby behaves like a drug itself. Substances like alcohol or the opiates literally numb subjective experience. Compulsive gaming, shopping, eating, or dating work similarly. And so does distraction. These start as temporary salves, like Susan’s multi-level-agitated morning. But once addictions take hold, they assume a life of their own—phenomena that must be overcome before the distraction-social-anesthesia can be addressed.
Individuals have the power to regain authentic re-experiencing of themselves. They can learn to elude the constant invitations to distraction. Imagine the effect of even slight revisions in Susan’s morning:
What if she had stopped for coffee after her CT scan to reflect on the experience? What if she drove slowly, and decided to eat her sandwich with a friend instead of in her car? Or, what if she set aside her headphones and dared to say “hey” to others in the gym?
In doing so, she just might have actually experienced her morning. It may have allowed for a different, more sensual morning. Such ways of embracing peacefulness or love, if practiced over time, help us avoid the fate philosopher Alan Watts (1989) fears awaits us. In the moments before our death, when our lives race before our eyes, he proclaims,
only then do we realize we’ve never really experienced our lives.
_________________________________________________________________
*Fearful of denying my own distraction addition, Susan’s story closely resembles a recent Thursday morning of my own; shamefully, I listened to a lecture about G.W.F. Hegel rather than Metallica and I am anything but a lawyer.
* *Child Psychiatrist Emily Sehmer (2025), in an opinion piece published in The Guardian, provides one example of the proliferation of articles about addiction to technology. She writes of her “terror” in seeing, “children who are disappearing into online worlds, who are unable to sleep, who are increasingly inattentive and impulsive, emotionally dysregulated and aggressive, crippled by anxiety or a fear of missing out and who spend hours alone, cut off from those who love them, who spend hour upon hour speaking to strangers online.” In a sense, the fictionalized story of Susan seems nothing less than an adult version of what Sehmer fears.
Enjoying this newsletter?
And check out my book, Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy, available on Amazon.
References
Pollan, M. (2019). How To Change Your Mind. New York: Penguin.
Sehmer, E. (2025). As a child psychiatrist, I see what smartphones are doing to kids’ mental health – and it’s terrifying. The Guardian, January 3, 2025, Opinion Section.
Watts, A. (1989). The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. New York: Vintage Books.