Mindful Tech Habits

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone. Really happy to introduce Jay Vijarthy. He's the founder of Still Ape, which is the world's first UX design studio focused entirely on mindfulness, compassion, and well-being. Through Still Ape, Jay and his team helped design and build digital experiences from apps to AI tools that actually support human flourishing rather than quietly working against it. They've helped shape dozens of products used by millions of people, all with the intention of bringing more awareness and care into the way technology is created and experienced. He has a brand new book out that I'm really excited about called Reclaim Your Mind. His book is something I genuinely appreciate and recommend. It's thoughtful, practical, and deeply relevant, especially for those of us navigating the tension between mindfulness and our phones. So, Jay Vajarthi, I'm really glad that you're here. Thank you for being with us. And I'm really looking forward to learning from you today.

Speaker 2 · 1:19Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 · 1:21Okay, let's start with awareness. One of the things that tends to arise when we're talking about technology and our relationship to it is we'll see all these tips come across our feed. We even mentioned some of them today, like, oh, only use Instagram on Mondays at 9 a.m. or take your phone out of your bedroom or disable all your notifications or delete that app. These are all excellent tips and tricks, is maybe what I would call them as, right? Like they're ingredients in the pantry. But before you need to cook, you kind of need to know a little bit more about your own situation. So what I usually advise people as a starting point is to actually bring awareness to their current relationship with technology. And so that's an example of a place to start is to say, okay, let me investigate that. Like what is really happening here? What is causing this discomfort with sharing my work online? What is the feeling tone that I have around pulling out my phone? Like, where is the guilt and the shame? Where is the distraction? How am I actually feeling? And so what I usually advocate is that before investing and making changes to your tech habits and your routine to try and become aware of how tech is influencing your mind in the first place, looking at your everyday life, investigating the different platforms you engage with before using it, what's the urge and the trigger that's causing you to pull it out? How does it feel during use? And how do you feel after use? And I actually advocate for people to take a week or even a day and maybe even journal to bring full awareness to your interactions with technology and which ones feel aligned to your deepest intentions and which ones feel problematic. What's really interesting about this is mindfulness practitioners often when I'm working, they compartmentalize technology. Like, oh, I go on a retreat or you'll do your morning practice. And then the minute the laptop turns on or whatever, it's like all that's out the window. You're just like, you know, I'm just doing my work. I'm just whatever. It's like a compartmentalization. And so what I'm really advocating is the starting point for yourself and for those you guide and the your loved ones is not to say, hey, you really need to delete that app or you need to put a timer or whatever it is, and to say, hey, how does this feel? I'm seeing you engaged in your phone right now, or like with yourself. Like, wait, how does this feel? I've been on Instagram for an hour longer than I wanted to, or I'm on TikTok. How am I feeling right now? I'm like, oh, I noticed my body is super tense, or like, oh, I noticed I had set an intention and I blew past it, or whatever it might be. What actually arises from this can be very powerful because awareness itself itself can institute changes.

Speaker 2 · 3:55So for me, as I started to become aware of different technologies, not only did I realize a certain video game, like there's this video game called Rocket League, believe it or not, it's like soccer with cars. You drive cars around and you hit a big soccer ball. It like makes no sense. You're like a robot car, but it's incredibly fun and sticky. And when I was playing it, I realized that it wasn't joyful fun. I wasn't really enjoying myself. It was more like eating Doritos, where you're just kind of like, I've actually brought awareness to eating Doritos before. And I will say what I noticed was it's not that Doritos taste good, it's that they do some sort of chemical soup in your mouth that after you swallow them, your mouth feels profoundly uncomfortable until you put another Dorito in it. It's like a perfect metaphor for a lot of our technology, right? So Rocket League was out. But before you run to the hills and say video games are bad, there was another video game I was playing at the time called Journey. And Journey was an incredibly heart-opening experience. It was calm, it was beautiful, you had these pleasant, serendipitous interactions with other players. And so with awareness, you start to notice oh my gosh, not only are there certain technologies that are problematic that I need to untangle, there are technologies that bring you meaning and purpose and joy and connection. And so the kind of natural inclination of your awareness is not only to end up using some of that problematic or exploitative technology West, but to not feel guilty and to enjoy fully that TV show that's actually bringing you joy or whatever it might be. And so that's a really, really important part of this. So guiding yourself and others to take a day or a week to pay attention before, during, and after your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations as you interact with technology can be an amazing first step before applying strategies. The more you understand yourself, the more you'll be able to select the strategies that actually will make a difference. I'll say one more thing on this, which is let's take a specific tip that you've probably heard before, which is to remove your phone from your bedroom. Seems like a reasonable idea. But with self-awareness, you might decide either, oh my gosh, I wake up in the morning, I look at my work, I look at the news, I stress out, I need to get my phone out of my bedroom, or before bed, I'm scrolling and scrolling and it's disrupting my sleep. But you also may bring awareness to it and notice my phone is in my bedroom and it's not really affecting me. Like I don't tend to use it before bed. I wake up and I play some nice music with it, and that tip is actually not applying to me. It's not a good tip. If I were to apply that tip, I would actually remove some of the joy in my life. So this is an example of how a single tip might apply differently for different people, and self-awareness is the key. So we'll get into more of that. Let's jump to the next strategy.

Speaker 2 · 6:42So, your laptop, when you put a file on the background of your operating system, we call that the desktop. You know, save this file to your desktop. It's obviously not a real desktop. That's an interface metaphor, right? So when computers were starting to be created with graphical user interfaces, metaphors were a very powerful tool for usability, which is the ease of use of technology. So, hey, it's a desktop, it's a file, it's a folder. This made it a lot easier to interact with technology. Great. Fast forward a couple of decades, we are now using metaphors that are a little bit more intimate and are a little bit more problematic. For example, a friend or a conversation that you have with AI, or even a conversation when you're texting your friends, right? It's not a conversation, right? That just because you sent a friend request and they hit accept, that's not a friend. When you have a match on a dating app, like what is that based on? You glance at a picture, they looked hot and you swiped. That's not like a match. It's like, oh, there's like initial interest, right? So when you start to look at this, it starts to unravel the illusion, the conceptual illusion of modern life online. I'll give you some other ones that tend to surprise people. So when you look at a video on YouTube and it's got a million views, you're like, whoa, million people watch this video. How many of them only watched five seconds of it and then closed it? When you are conversing with an AI and it seems like that AI is an entity, it's Claude or ChatGPT. Is it really like what are you speaking with? Right? It has a little avatar and a little username, just like we do when we're texting, but it's not. That's not what it is. Oh, oh, here's a good one. When someone likes or hearts your post, did they even read it? They're just like, oh, Jay posted something, I'll just give them a like. It's so illusory. And the more we're able to bring mindfulness to these experiences opposed to compartmentalizing them, we can see technology as it really is, that it's an extension of our conceptual minds. And as mindfulness practitioners, we know that our thoughts, they're not always to be trusted. And similarly, as an extension of our conceptual minds, the technology isn't always what it seems to be. The interface metaphors we use create illusions, but there can be a cost to those

Speaker 2 · 8:54illusions. Let's take a moment and I want you to just think about, or if you like to journal, if you've got a pen and paper you can write. What is the first technology that comes to mind in your life that's something you might want to shift your relationship with? Something that feels like it might be problematic or sticky. Don't overthink it. Just the first thing that comes to mind. And there's no need for guilt or shame or self-criticism or self-judgment, just with curiosity, noticing, contemplating, writing down a piece of technology that tends to cause you to maybe use more than you'd like or deviate from your own personal intentions or values. And once you have something, let me ask you another question. What is the deeper, healthier emotional need that is drawing you to that technology? So dropping all the judgment and all the shame. There's some part of you that's trying to take care of you by engaging with this technology. I'll give you some examples. Like a video game, the deeper emotional need might be a healthy need for play. Social media, a deeper emotional need might be a healthy need for connection. It might be trying to resolve loneliness. It also might be like if you use social media for work, healthy need to gather resources and take care of yourself. Now, notice in this simple experiment that the technology in many cases is serving up an illusion that is designed to meet your healthy emotional need. So an illusion of connection, an illusion of play. In some ways, it might actually provide some connection. For example, social media can provide connection. In some ways, it might provide an illusion of connection. Similarly, like a video game might provide some play. It certainly is fun. But when you see kids playing out on the playground, there's a whole other aspect to play, which is like navigating interpersonal dynamics, and someone might get hurt and you have to figure out the rules. And like, I have a seven-year-old, so this is really alive for me. Like, it's like you broke the rules, like you're out of bounds. Like, no, I'm not. These are like really important parts of play or when we play a sport, which tend to be just programmed in on the game. Through this very simple experiment, not only do we see, first of all, some self-compassion around our healthy needs, but also we see that there are illusions in these technologies that can be kind of more problematic than they seem at first. It doesn't seem like a big deal to call your connection a friend on social media. But then if it starts to become an illusion that you have more friends than your body really experiences, more friendships and connection than your body experiences, that's where you see it start to become a little problematic. So being aware of these illusions is a very, very important strategy. And when you identify the emotional needs you're trying to meet and the feelings you're trying to avoid when using a technology you're stuck on, it can be really helpful to like take that journal and brainstorm more satisfying and lasting ways to fulfill that need. Maybe I should join a club. Maybe I've spent all this time. Now I can give you some examples. I moved to a new town four or five years ago, definitely was feeling pretty lonely, mindlessly found myself driving more towards social media, and then kind of reached a point where I felt really irritable and I was really uncomfortable and just in a bad mood and feeling

Speaker 2 · 12:08kind of sad. This dawned on me with awareness. I was like, oh, I think I'm really lonely, but I'm not doing anything about it because I'm getting this neutral slight sense of connection from social media. It's not enough to satisfy me, but it's just enough to demotivate me from like going out into this new town and making friends. And I was trapped in that for like a year or two. And it was really problematic. When my son was three, he started watching videos on YouTube. He started playing a few video games and he had a few iPad apps. Interestingly, I was thinking about this and I was exploring it, and there's all kinds of things to say, but one thing I noticed was specifically the iPad apps were making him very twitchy and irritable. So he would like watch a video and then he would be fine. He would play a simple video game and he would be relatively fine. But when he'd use the app, he would become very grumpy, and then he would like be really irritable for the next hour or so. And I was like, what is it? And then one day I saw him playing with his toys, and he had one of those boxes anyone with kids will recognize him. It's like a little box with a square hole, a round hole, like a crosshole, and you've got the blocks and you've got to put them in. And it's like a pretty genius little toy for kids because it teaches fine motor control. Like you have to put the plus in and you have to like perfectly line it up. But I noticed that on his iPad, he had the same exact toy, basically, but you drag the plus and then you let go anywhere near it, and it goes boop and it goes in. And this dawned on me. I was like, oh, this is actually something his brain is deeply trying to learn right now. Find motor control. And the iPad has given him a shortcut that makes it seem easier than it really is. And then when he goes back to the toy, the toy is way frustrating because he's like trying to put it in, but he's like, why won't it go in? Because on the iPad it just goes in. And I was like, oh, this is what I'm doing with social media. I was like, oh, it's way easier to have a quote unquote friend when I don't have to deal with uncomfortable things they say. I don't have to deal with awkward pauses when I can edit what I'm saying, when I can perfectly craft my profile, but accidentally it also removes all the satisfaction of actually having a friend, learning to be a friend, and all the death that comes. And I think I can bookend this with saying that if you think about some of your deepest relationships, some of the people in your family and friends you feel closest with, and then you think to a time where you embarrassed yourself in front of them or they embarrassed themselves in front of you, or you had like to deal with a conflict situation, and then you realize like so much of that gets eliminated from our digital relationships. You can see exactly what my three-year-old son was doing with that touch screen. The nuance here is as I mentioned at the beginning, a touch screen is actually, for most of us, a more usable interface. When I'm dragging a file into a folder during my workday, I don't want to have to meticulously place it like right in the folder. But that same interface, when applied to a three-year-old who's learning fine motor skills, is like that's a problem. Similarly, social media, it can be very fine for someone who's got a thriving social life and also connects on social media. But it specifically became problematic for me when I got very lonely, hence the healthy emotional need and the illusory trap. Okay, that's strategy number two.

Speaker 2 · 15:18Fight design with design. So I'm a designer by trade. I think a lot about design. There's a huge debate in the field of design, because some designers get really triggered when someone says everyone's a designer, because they're like, no, no, no, I'm a designer. Obviously, there are people like me who skill up in the discipline, but I do actually believe it's true that everyone's a designer because everyone thinks like a designer. When you rearrange the furniture in your living room because something feels off, it's a very small scale, but you're like, how do I make this room like flow for people? I want to make sure I can see out the window. You're picturing what is it like when I've got my whole family here? You're thinking like a designer, you're solving a problem. My favorite quote about design describes it as a course of action to change an existing situation into a preferred situation. That's from Herb Simon. I love that quote. Everyone designs, it's a way of thinking. It's not about color, it's not about specific tool set, it's about solving the problem, taking an existing situation and changing it to a preferred situation. Now, here's a question. What is the preferred situation of the tech companies? It's certainly not your mental health and well-being. Let's just start there, right? And as we talked at the beginning about the attention economy and all that, that's closer to what the preferred situation is. Maximum clicks, maximum time spent on type, on sites, conversions, purchases, in some cases of voting behavior, et cetera. When we're talking about how we can use design in our attention activism, you may not be able to design the platforms that you're using, but you can design the operating system within which those platforms engage. You can design the rooms of your house in which you are accessing those technologies. And you can introduce friction and absence, which are the two things I cover in the book, to cultivate a more mindful relationship with technology. So here's some examples. Where is your TV? And what would happen if your TV was in a different place? Where could you strategically place your TV? Where do you leave your phone overnight? Where do you charge your phone? Where do you have your office or your laptop? Where do you work? Do you sit on your laptop while your kids are around at the table? Or do you put that on a side? These are ways you can introduce friction and absence in the physical environment. But then the virtual environment, what's on your home screen? I mean, if you have your phone, pull it up right now, take a look. I'll do mine too. We'll do an example. What do you have access to at one click? And which of it is bringing you joy, connection, purpose? Which of it is a natural inclination to draw you in into the attention economy. So this is an example of customizing your virtual environment to create more space for awareness.

Speaker 2 · 17:53The skill here, the experiment to run as you start to bring more awareness, is to intentionally introduce friction or sudden absence around a problematic tech. So friction would be like, hey, delete an app off your phone so you can only access it. For example, I don't have Instagram on my phone, but I can access it on my laptop only. Another example of friction is blockers, screen timers, turning off auto sign-in. So you have to sign into an app every time. It introduces some friction. Sudden absence is just deleting an app. Like I'm just going to unsubscribe, I'm going to delete an app. I'm going to disengage completely. The important thing about this strategy, though, is that it's not out of guilt and shame. And this is where a lot of people get it wrong. They guilt themselves into feeling so much shame because they're using a certain app too much. And then they delete it out of this kind of self-hate, this self-criticism, like, oh, I'm so addicted to my phone, I need to delete these things. My advice is to treat it like a singing bowl in the meditation practice, to say, delete your email off your phone for a week. And instead of the email icon in that exact place, put like insight timer. And then every time over the week, when you naturally pull out your phone and you're looking for your email, your thumb is instinctively going to open it and you see that little singing bowl icon, take a moment to bring some awareness to the moment. Wait, what is going on right now that's making me reach for my email? And then you look up and you're like, oh, I'm waiting for the bus and I'm stressed because I'm late and I'm just like trying to find something. Or maybe it's 8 p.m. and you're checking your email and you're like, why am I checking my email at 8 p.m.? And you and if you're like me, you might go down the rabbit hole and realize, oh, because the way I was raised tied my self-worth to productivity, and this is a deep wound that I need to spend the next 10 years working. So you never know what might come out of a little awareness. But introducing friction and absence in a very skillful way, in a non-judgmental way, can reveal a lot about your own experience with technology. Let's move on

Speaker 2 · 19:53to number four. So this is about the false dichotomy. So you may or may not have noticed this explicitly, but there is a false dichotomy emerging, especially in wellness and mindfulness circles, that authentic relationships are IRL in real life, and inauthentic relationships are online. That, well, we all need more in-person friends and we don't want friends online. This is a false dichotomy. I have plenty of inauthentic face-to-face relationships. And I actually do have many authentic digital relationships as well. And don't get me wrong, we need physical relationships. Our body needs that kind of connection. We need to hug people and shake their hands and see their faces. There is a limit. You can't have all your authentic relationships online. That being said, it is possible to have satisfying authentic relationships online because authentic relationships are reciprocal and you can have deeper reciprocal relationships online. That being said, also, if you think about your in-person relationships, there is an element of something that you're probably all very versed with. As you practice more and more mindfulness, you learn to be a little bit more vulnerable and a little bit more honest in your communication. For example, my partner and I, when we first met, we've been together, I think, 20 years or so, almost 20 years. When we first met, we're all very guarded and we're just maybe making passive aggressive comments and trying to figure things out when we're in conflict and presenting ourselves to each other. And as you sort of grow in relationship, it's like you get to this point where you're like a little more honest with each other. And through the practices of mindfulness, we've reached the point where we can get in an argument about something. And then one of us might be skillful enough in the moment sometimes to say something vulnerable, like, oh, I'm feeling super hostile right now. I don't really want to fight. I don't know what's happening. And that'll immediately disarm the other person. Yeah, oh my gosh, I don't know what we're getting into. Let's take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about it. Or even in the moment. And so that's an example of like bringing awareness to your relationships. The same thing can be done online,

Speaker 2 · 21:46right? We can bring more awareness before we post a comment on someone's post or send a text. Also, the experiment that I offer in the book is really to experiment with sending audio and video messages instead of words. To see how that feels because the obvious thing there is it's like higher bandwidth communication. What you're seeing now or hearing now of me, there's a lot more bandwidth about what I'm showing up as than there is if I were to just type this or you to read an article that I wrote or something like that. But the other thing that I love about audio and video messages is they make room for what we spoke about earlier. They make room for authentic mistakes. So it's really important that you don't end up rehearsing and then recording three takes of the video and then sending that to your wife. Or did you know what I mean? It's like the idea that I would recommend is to like hit record, say your piece, send it, and that's it. Don't listen back and judge yourself. Because I think part of the authenticity comes from hearing your voice on the other end. But part of it, it's more like a conversation and you just hear your authentic thoughts in the moment. Now, this is not only true of texting. So those of us who are on Zoom or if you're watching the recording, but even if you're listening to the recording, even in this moment, we can bring more authentic awareness to this interaction. We can look at each other's camera feeds. If anyone has their camera off but wants to turn it on, you're welcome to. You don't have to. Or you can also just look at our camera feeds, or you can just listen to the sound of my voice with more clarity and detail. And you might notice some details in people's environment. You might notice some details in their face, in their body posture. And it's so interesting how these technologies they allow for a kind of passive social engagement that even the synchronous technologies, they allow for you to sort of engage. And that's fine. But at the same time, what I'm pointing to is not that one way is better than the other, but it is possible to bring awareness to our digital relationships and authentic relationships and have that connection. The idea, though, is not that you have to do this now or that I'm asking for it. It's more that it's possible to take something like a Zoom call or even listening to a podcast and bring more awareness to the emotional tone of other people and the environment and the context of other people. And that actually is an example of bringing more connection online. And the same is true when you send a text message, when you send a video message, that sort of thing. To summarize, let go of the false dichotomy. How do we have more authentic relationships online? How do we have more authentic relationships in person? Also, I will say there are some advantages online. It is possible to find a community online of people who have something shared with you that no one in your real life does. This is famously true for people who live in the closet, people who are gay can find people like them online and learn that it's okay to be who they are. For me, I have a seven-year-old, as I mentioned, he's neurodivergent. And I've found communities of parents who also have neurodivergent. I don't had a lot of those people in my life in person. So to have those authentic relationships, I think what you're seeing here, hopefully, is that it really breaks down this clear boundary between tech bad, you know, real life good. It's a lot more nuanced than as mindfulness practitioners, we can bring a lot more awareness to it.

Speaker 1 · 24:56Just to have a quick thought, you know, you led a guided meditation in the very beginning, and I was really admiring the way that you guided that in the sense that you were inviting us to drop effort. It kind of reminded me of point three around design or fight design with design. It's like you design the meditation to remove friction, add friction where we need to, but the meditation was frictionless. You weren't asking us to do something per se, but you're asking us to let go, essentially. And I just thought that was kind of a nice design. Just a kind of a thought that occurred to me while you were talking about number three, but I really like that meditation that you had.

Speaker 2 · 25:48Thanks for sharing that. I think what you're bringing up, it brings something up for

Speaker 2 · 25:51me. When I work with people on these topics, what I often find is a story that in order to have a healthier and more secure relationship with technology, it's going to take a lot of work and effort and willpower. And I think strategy three is about realizing that with smart design choices in your home and on your home screen, it is possible to not rely so much on willpower. It can feel like a real scary thing to delete your email off your phone. But like, do it, try it. It's an experiment. Bring curiosity to it. You can always reinstall it. How does it feel? Are you really falling behind on work or is that just an illusion? I think that's one of the things that paralyzes people is that they feel all these big technology companies in the attention economy, and there's nothing I can do. And the only way to do it would be to slog away every day and work super hard to resist my temptation. But that's not how the human mind works. You make some skillful choices, you let the habit erode. To use email as an example, when I deleted email off my phone for the first time, let me remind you, I'm a tech entrepreneur. So like I get lots of email. Every one of them is like, we need this yesterday. I was definitely feeling like I might fall behind on everything. And so I basically set a plan. I'm gonna delete it for a day, see what happens. Went okay. So I left it off. And then I was like, oh, you know, it was really frustrating when I was in line for a concert and I needed to get the concert tickets and they weren't on my phone. But then I was like, you know what? It's not crazy to just be like, I'm just gonna install the email app that day to get the phone, or even just like sometimes I'll just text myself the ticket, and then I don't have to use my email. And then here's the funny thing that happened because there was maybe one week of confusion or two weeks, and then the habit just eroded. I stopped looking at my phone for email. I only look at it on my laptop. But then here's the funny thing. A couple of months later, my wife and I are in line for a concert, and I'm like, oh, I need to get the tickets while we're in line. So I go and I download my email app. And then when I went to the app store, the email app was already on my phone because of the last time I needed the ticket. I mean, it felt freeing when I deleted it, but it felt incredibly freeing when I realized I actually have it on my phone now and I just don't check it. I've completely brought awareness to that habit and dissolved it. And it was not a high effort. That's the power of awareness. It's almost quantum in the way that when you bring

Speaker 2 · 28:12awareness to a habit, there is a natural force, the natural humanity that just starts to untangle it. I think you're pointing to that, and I think it's really important. It's not about working super hard, it's about working smart.

Speaker 1 · 28:23Beautiful. Yeah, thank you.