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Dharmette: Tech-Sati (2 of 5): Vedana, Notifications, & the Urge to Click

Greetings all. Good day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

We continue today our exploration of tech-sati—mindfulness, awareness of our engagement with digital technology. Yesterday, the invitation was to ground in the body and know our intention. Be aware of the body and be aware of the intention, especially as we start to engage, as we send an email, as we open our phone. Be aware of the body, be aware of our intention.

Today, we explore feeling tone. This translation of the word vedanā, the teaching of vedanā—v-e-d-a-n-a in Pali, vedanā—is translated as feeling tone or valence, which is simply pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Actually, you can even drop the word "feeling" because sometimes people really think it's about feeling or emotion, and it's none of that. It's very simple.

It is one of the constituents of our experience and every phenomena. If this hand is your awareness, your mind, and this other hand is an object, whenever the mind or awareness comes in contact with an object, feeling tone arises. For example, ear consciousness comes in contact with a sound, taste consciousness comes in contact with food which has some flavor or not, or body consciousness comes in contact with a sensation in the body, and vedanā is always present.^[5] We often don't notice it, but it's always there. And if we get to notice it, it can be very insightful about how we react, how we move in the world, and how we conduct ourselves. Because often there is pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral acting up, and we're reacting to it, but we're not aware that we are reacting.

With respect to our digital life, let's bring this awareness of the vedanā of feeling tone, of valence, into our digital life. Notice how our digital life brings up all these feeling tones, and how we also sometimes go into, or numb ourselves with, digital reactivity, perhaps in order to get away from unpleasant vedanā.^[6]

Let's say you get an appreciative email, or there is a beautiful image on the screen, or novelty. Actually, novelty often brings up a sense of pleasantness. So if you're scrolling, looking for that next hit of the pleasant, notice that. Notice if there's already an unpleasantness of perhaps boredom—boredom is considered unpleasant—or maybe there's some ache or pain in the body that you're trying to get away from, or some ache or pain in the mind, unpleasantness, or maybe just dullness. Maybe there's some loneliness, some uncertainty, some criticism, or some troubling news that you're trying to get away from by seeking some pleasantness.

You can see this. It is so easy to see how, really like a marionette, we are connected to these invisible strings of vedanā that pull us: "Oh, unpleasant, I want some pleasant. Oh, pleasant, I want more of the pleasant." When you get to see these strings, they become loosened and cut.

When this urge points towards perhaps unwholesome action—it's not always unwholesome, but especially when it is and it can bring consequences—we can just sit with it. We can just sit with vedanā arising and passing. Pleasant vedanā arises and passes. Unpleasant vedanā, unpleasant feeling tone, is just feeling tone. It's not going to kill us. It's just unpleasant. It arises and it passes. Everything arises and passes.

Get to know the feeling tone, especially as it's associated with the various ways that we interact. Different digital stimuli bring the sense of pleasantness so that we want more of it, or unpleasantness. Perhaps it is even intentional. As we know has been the case, and in the US we're getting very close to another election a month from now, in the past there has been intentionally incendiary and very negative news that we have received on various channels designed to bring up a sense of anger and self-righteousness. This creates really unpleasant vedanā: "This is bad, this is awful, this is terrible," followed by the pleasantness of "Oh, I'm right, I will do this, I will do that." So be aware.

Earlier in the meditation, as our minds get very calm and settled, we can see with precision. Stimuli arises, contact arises, consciousness and awareness contact a stimuli. The contact gives rise to vedanā. That precision is really nice to see and witness. And yet in our daily lives, we don't always need that precision in order to have insight.

Another insight is simply seeing that vedanā arises and passes. That is really powerful—to be able to see its arising and passing and know that we don't always have to react out of reactivity in order to escape discomfort or prolong pleasure-seeking.

A couple of other things I wanted to mention this morning. There is also this sense of being pulled. A notification arises: "Oh, notification. Pleasant. I want to see what's happening." Going to the notification, checking something, and getting lost in it. Research suggests that whenever we interrupt ourselves and come back to whatever we were doing, our primary task suffers. One experiment found that with notifications, even if people did not act on them—even if they just saw the notification and didn't follow it—when they were doing an attention-demanding task, their performance still degraded.

It was even worse if they switched tasks and came back, because part of their mind was still engaged in the task that they just went to, like that email they checked. Again, their performance and attention suffered in the primary task they were doing. When our attention keeps being repeatedly summoned and there is this vedanā of "Ooh, pleasant, let's go check that," our attention suffers and our level of stress increases.

Another study suggests that when we get interrupted and we keep task-switching, it's true that many people still get their task done within a certain amount of time, but their level of cortisol, stress, and fatigue increases at the end of the day.

I want to share one last study with you. There was a two-week experiment that found that when people were invited to use their smartphones for just calling and receiving texts—but not scrolling, not doing all the other things that we tend to do—they reported less daily stress during those two weeks. Another study found that people who didn't check their email throughout the day, but instead bunched it up and only checked three times a day, saw their level of stress decrease at the end of the day.

Consider all these ways that vedanā, this feeling tone of "Ooh, new email. Ooh, I want to go check it. Ooh, a yummy morsel of information," operates. Employ the restraint of staying put. Have some wisdom around our engagement with digital technology. I have started to do that now. I don't check my emails continuously as I used to. I bunch it up, and I realize I'm less fatigued and less stressed at the end of the day. Similarly with my texts.

So the invitation for today, as you are going about your day and interacting with technology, is to notice one recurring urge to check something. You know what your pattern is. Notice one recurring urge to check. Pause. Identify the feeling tone, the vedanā, if possible. Is it pleasant? Is it the expectation of pleasant? Is it unpleasant? And make a deliberate choice.

If it's useful, turn off one category of unnecessary notifications. Okay, so one recurring urge, pause briefly, identify the feeling tone, and make a deliberate choice. I can tell you that I've turned off a lot of notifications after engaging in these research studies and learning so much more.

I hope these ancient teachings in our modern times are supportive. Tech-sati. I wish you a good day and a wise day of interacting with your technology. Be well, and I look forward to practicing together tomorrow.