Breaking the App Habit, and Reclaiming the Capacity to Love (Part 1 of 2)

How did this happen – again? Here were two men – both dear friends of mine for many years – that had connected through a dating/hook-up app over the weekend – both calling me to complain about their time together. I knew them to both be soulful, heartfelt, spiritual men with a yearning for real connection – and yet, some mysterious force kept them from feeling any connection. What they longed for was right in front of them – but completely inaccessible. The tragic and incredibly funny thing about this absurd situation was, I knew I wasn’t any different.
 
How many of us have wasted minutes, hours, even days in the hunt for love, or even a little connection? Endlessly perfecting ourselves, presenting ourselves, creating profiles and checking the apps on our phone, only to find ourselves somehow incapable of really enjoying our lives or the people in them? Somehow, the very things we're doing to meet other people make us (and them!) less available for real connection and intimacy -- and before we know it, the app habit has become an addiction of its own ...

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What we don’t realize at first, is that that’s exactly what the apps are designed to do! The very services we use to connect with each other are designed to keep us using those services, instead of enjoying the connections we sought in the first place. They do this in four primary ways: relentless distraction, intermittent reinforcement, tantalizing intrigue, and false perfectionism.

1. Relentless Distraction: Apps – and the alerts that invite us to engage with them – are everywhere and all the time. Day and night, we live in a world of unending beeps, buzzes, and melodies; surrounded by other people who leave the moment and the people they’re with in order to respond to their devices. In public, at meals, in conversations, even in therapy and healing sessions with my clients, our connections with each other are disrupted by the sound of notifications and quick sidelong glances. Even when they are momentarily quiet, our nervous systems hover in constant anticipation.
2. Intermittent Reinforcement: Apps are built around game algorithms, much like slot machines, that are designed to keep us hooked.  The visuals, notifications, sounds, and prompts are all engineered around the principle of intermittent reinforcement, triggering small, unpredictable jolts of interest, excitement, anxiety, rejection, relief, pleasure and joy. They grab our attention away from the present moment, sucking us into a never-ending cycle of searching, seduction and shame.
3. Tantalizing Intrigue: Human beings are profoundly curious, and we are driven by an extraordinary need to know! Dating and hook-up apps tantalize us with the promise of intrigue and insight. There is a whole world hidden to us until that magical moment when we open up the app! Suddenly, we are surrounded by an invisible crowd of others seeking connection, and we see how close they are, what their bodies look like under their clothing, what they are “really” like. We find ourselves looking more to our devices to discover each other, than to the actual human beings that surround us.
4. False Perfection: Finally, dating and hook-up apps give us the opportunity to present only the most desirable parts of ourselves, to craft an image that we deem worthy of attention, approval, or affection -- an image that hides everything we reject in ourselves. Then we have to live up to that image if we actually meet the person – keeping everything that we ourselves reject and make wrong or inappropriate, carefully hidden from view. We also buy into the false reality presented by the other person – ignoring the very information we need most to feel truly connected -- and we are accomplices to each others' continued self-rejection and self-hatred, confirming our mutual unworthiness.

Is it any wonder we are addicted? We spend our days and nights in a state of anxious anticipation, checking and rechecking our devices, tantalized by the endless possibilities, and rejecting ourselves every time we offer a false perfection to the world. We move further and further away from everything that makes real love possible.
 
Fortunately, there is hope, and there is help! We can set boundaries around our app use, and cultivate the conditions that make real love possible. What are these conditions? After thirty years of working with people of every walk of life, both individually and in couples, I have found it helpful to group these qualities and skills into these broad categories:

1. Relaxed, alert, responsiveness: As we recognize the triggers that keep our nervous systems in high levels of sympathetic arousal (excitement/anxiety/threat), we also learn how to refrain from those triggers, and practice skills for de-escalating our nervous systems and cultivating the, safety, spaciousness, and enjoyment we need to bring relaxed, alert, and responsive presence to our world.
2. Creative, playful spontaneity: As we understand and unwind our own addictive patterns, we develop our capacity for creative, playful, and spontaneous responses to our world, and strategies that get our relational needs met more effectively.
3. Kind, compassionate curiosity: As we develop relaxed presence and creative response, we can cultivate a warmth and genuine interest in the deeper truth of our own being, and the other people in our world.
4. Natural, resonant vulnerability: As we cultivate warmth with ourselves and others, we increase our capacity to be truly ourselves with each other, giving and receiving each other’s truth with real vulnerability and love.

 
These four qualities are what I call the Zen of True Love because it is exactly these qualities that I have discovered in myself, and in my world, through the practice of Zen meditation over the last twenty years. No, I don’t mean sitting like a concrete Buddha, holding the body rigid, attempting to detach from feelings in a desperate attempt to escape from the suffering of my life! And no, I don’t mean studying Buddhist philosophy, or any other philosophy, for that matter. Zen meditation is quite the opposite, really; it is the cultivation of a way of being that is supported, centered, relaxed, connected, and dancing with an extraordinary aliveness and compassionate responsiveness. It is letting go of all our philosophies, expectations and assumptions, and showing up in the present moment. Whether we are sitting on the cushion, working, eating, or making love, Zen meditation is practicing a way of being that brings us back to love, and makes real love possible again. It is the practice of “joyful ease”, to use the words of the great Zen Master Dogen.
 
So, where do we begin? Please join me for part two of this article being released soon!
 
--Hunter
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