Since 2012, I’ve changed dozens of habits. One consistent pattern is that it’s easier for me to establish good behaviors than to weed out bad ones.
I’ve successfully run several every-day-for-a-year experiments, like walking 10,000 steps or taking a cold shower. And this blog, meditation, a mini workout, and gratitude journaling have been daily habits for three, six, six, and nearly 14 years, respectively.
Meanwhile, all of the stuff I tried to quit eventually keeps creeping back in. I didn’t drink for over two years, then re-started, though I would describe my relationship with alcohol as much healthier than it used to be. No caffeine? Five and a half months. No porn? 200+ days. Biting my nails? I don’t remember. But sooner or later, I find myself in the same place again: ready to quit, having another go at letting go.
In 2009, researchers published a study investigating monkeys’ preferences for information. In its most basic design, the experiment offered the monkeys a choice about an upcoming water reward. The reward itself was either big or small, selected at random. Before they received it, however, the monkeys were presented with two colored boxes on a screen. One box hinted at the size of the reward, the other didn’t. Within days, the monkeys kept selecting the box which held the information, regardless how big the reward ended up being. And, in a tweaked design with an option to receive the information earlier, the monkeys quickly decided to know more about their reward as soon as possible.
The researchers concluded that the monkeys’ brains—and, therefore, our brains—treated information itself like a reward, even when it had no impact on a future outcome. They even observed the same dopamine neurons firing during information discovery and reception of the water reward, suggesting the brain also didn’t distinguish between the ultimate reward being tangible or simply more information. In other words: Information can be an incentive like any other. And incentives can turn into drugs.
While reflecting on my bad habits and wondering if they had anything in common, I noticed many of them seemed to end up in me compulsively processing lots of information in one form or another.
I’ve been mostly off social media for a few years now, but it’s the obvious example—and perhaps where all of this began for most of us. Once Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Snapchat discovered the easiest way to make money was to keep you scrolling through an endless feed with intermittent ads, the great conditioning race began. Their goal? Make you addicted to their platform most effectively so you’d spend most of your time with them, not their competitors. And the only means of their addictive programming? It was information. Sometimes useful. Sometimes entertaining. Sometimes emotional. But always information. And while social media pioneered and perfected this—and is now trying to automate it entirely with Sora, OpenAI’s social media app which consists 100% of short, AI-generated video clips—the high-level model of algorithm, information addiction, then ads has now spread far and wide.
Free mobile games use daily, randomized in-game rewards to keep you coming back, then force you to watch videos promoting other addictive games in-between rounds. Blogs, magazines, and news websites want to maximize retention in order to show you as many ads as possible once you land on their pages. Online shops use discount banners and newsletter signup incentives to keep you browsing their wares. And while AI is still in the honeymoon phase of spending billions on user acquisition alone, have you noticed that each chatbot asks you a question at the end of every output? “Do you want me to do X next?” They also want you to continue talking to their AI to extract data to improve the model and, mark my words, eventually, show you ads.
Technology has been nudging us into information addiction in all its many forms for two decades. Most of us are hooked on some app, game, website, or other online experience at any given point. In fact, we’re so conditioned, simply picking up our phones has become a reflex we perform over 100 times a day on average. And if information is indeed the premier, unifying addiction of our time, it’s not much of a stretch to consider that, perhaps, our other compulsive behaviors are merely enabling this mother of all bad habits.
Think about it: Porn users tend to excessively cycle through adult pictures and video clips until either orgasm, exhaustion, or both. Binge-watching on Netflix makes us just like the monkeys tapping on those boxes: When we barrel through four, five, six hours of TV show episodes, we mainly do it because we want to know what happens next. Youtube now has more arguably great videos uploaded to its platform every hour than we had options on all 30 or so TV channels in Germany in the 90s for the whole year. The result? There’s always an amazing, relevant video you can watch next, no matter which topic you’re interested in. Even music is information. When I start a 30-minute writing block, I can easily spend the first 10 cycling through various songs to find just the right one to write to. That’s a slightly better, more deliberate action than merely listening to whatever comes next, but it’s still a distraction. Even technically offline hobbies and activities can suck you in. I, for one, collect Pokémon cards. Sometimes, I find myself watching market video updates or hunting dozens of sites for the best deal on a card for hours when, actually, there’s nothing in particular I’m trying to buy or sell.
What tech companies have discovered is truly the secret to human behavior: Information is the fastest, most scalable, and consistently effective way to trigger a dopamine hit. So whatever you can turn into a flow of information discovery, you can make addictive. And for us, information-seeking becomes the pattern which absorbs many of our other patterns. Anything else we might classify as an obsession then either serves to enable or mute our preoccupation with information. Caffeine makes you feel focused and efficient or, at the very least, active. Guess what that’s perfect for? Compulsive browsing of page after page, video after video, funny meme after funny meme. And with alcohol, food, sugar, or weed, you can either also fuel an information bender or finally mute the dopamine game for a while—because once you’re the right level of drunk, full, or high, you’ll quickly pass out.
Whether information addiction lies at the root of all my bad habits or just some, it definitely seems to play a central role. And while the loss of productivity from wasted web browsing is annoying, that’s not the part that gets to me. We all need rest sometime—but this time is not restful. It’s stressful. If you’ve ever picked up your phone to message a friend only to find yourself confused in front of a locked screen 15 minutes later, trying to remember what you originally wanted to do, you know this feeling. This is what makes information addiction so pernicious: By hiding behind various habits, it steals from all ends of our lives. The work and the play. The targeted tasks and the wandering curiosity. The positive productive and the necessary restorative. It makes a thousand tiny cuts to our power to fulfill our potential as human beings—and thus short-shifts our chances of looking back in old age with a smile, feeling we’ve left nothing on the table.
So, what are we to do? This theory is a work in progress, and I don’t have a perfect answer. Partially, perhaps, because, this time, the answer is not one we can simply look up, no matter how much we google. But I do know a few patterns which interrupt information heists in progress.
Closing the laptop would be the first one. Not even to go outside, although that is perhaps the best grounding exercise. Nature has a way of slowing us down, making us breathe, and reminding us that everything is accomplished in its own time. But even an indoor circuit breaker does wonders. Get all screens out of sight. What are you really trying to accomplish? Where should you start? Is it time to clear all windows and begin anew? Once we’re in the loop, we chase one thread after another. The loop offers no space for asking questions. So get out of the loop. And restart.
The second move is to get off social media. How social is it anyway? In a court case probing Meta’s position as a social media monopoly, the firm made a telling claim: It’s actually a TV platform, since north of 80% of users’ time on both Facebook and Instagram is spent “watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are ‘unconnected’—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms.” The truth is social media has not functioned as such in a long time. If you want to truly keep up with friends, the best ways are the same ones they’ve been for the last 80 years: call, write, or visit. And you need little more than a spreadsheet and their phone number to do any of those. In any case, the potential downsides now seem to far outweigh the benefits of seeing an occasional, interesting life update photo from an old acquaintance. Just delete the apps. Try it. See how you feel. You can always come back if you’re really missing out.
Meditation would be my third pitch for remedying our monkey-style behavior. The better you are at noticing your thoughts as you have them, the more chances you’ll get to break any undesirable mental loops. Meditation is neither hard nor complicated. If anything, it’s initially uncomfortable—because we’re no longer used to merely sitting with our thoughts. But beyond anxiety, there is peace, and I’m confident you’ll feel the benefits of as little as 10-15 minutes of meditation after a few days or weeks at most. Sit. Set a timer. Close your eyes. No music, no gadgets, no devices. Thoughts come, thoughts go. Notice. Don’t try. Let. Observe. And the next day, you do it again. Try meditating. It could change your life.
Finally, any other ritual that allows you to slow down and switch contexts deliberately. When you start—on a project, a task at work, your next meal, taking your kid to school, or researching your next vacation—remind yourself what you’re starting and why. What’s the goal? What part of the goal do you want to accomplish in the next 15, 30, or 45 minutes? Give your attention a moment to zone in on what matters, settle on the true target, and subconsciously break away from all distractions. Adjust your environment as best as you can, and don’t be afraid to reset again, and again, and again if need be. Focus is a superpower—but it’s a superpower you can learn.
Where will I land with my cumbersome habits in the next 12 months? I have no idea. But I do know that all information I can find online, no matter its shape or form, is optional. Because I can generate my own—not from browsing but from living. I can think. I can wait. I can fast. I can do what I came here to do, and whether that involves going outside, talking to strangers, or typing words on a screen, I can find whatever I need and then some without excessively pacing down the information highway into the internet’s every last corner. And if I can see some of my other distracting patterns for the enablers of this one big detractor they actually are, I’m sure I can make better headway with them, too.
Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” Sadly, she only lived to age 39. You and I, reading this, connecting over these words, have good odds of living twice as long, if not more. Perhaps you already have! And yet, for all the infinite data we’ve collectively generated since her death in 1964, and all the infinite data we’ll create between now and when our time comes, her words remain true—and if that’s the only piece of information you’ll remember, there’ll be one less troublesome habit to worry about in the world.
