Internet designed to eat up the hours

CHECKING Facebook should only take a minute.

Those are the famous last words of countless people every day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos, commenting on Instagrammed sushi lunches, and Googling to find out whatever happened to Dolph Lundgren.

If that sounds like you, don’t feel bad: That behaviour is natural, given how the internet is structured, experts say.

People are wired to compulsively seek unpredictable payoffs like those doled out on the web. And the internet’s omnipresence and lack of boundaries encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the willpower to turn it off.

“The internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are,” says Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in Britain.

“But it’s compulsive; it’s compelling; it’s distracting.”

Humans are social creatures. As a result, people enjoy the social information available via email and the web.

Email and social media have the same reward structure as that of a casino slot machine: Most of it is junk, but every so often, you hit the jackpot — in the case of the internet, a tidbit of juicy gossip or a heartfelt email, Stafford says. The instantaneous pay-off only strengthens the internet’s pull.

The web’s unpredictable pay-offs train people much in the same way Ivan Pavlov trained dogs, which were conditioned in the 19th century to salivate when they heard a bell they associated with food.

Over time, people link a cue (such as an instant-message ping or the Facebook homepage) with a pleasurable rush of feel-good brain chemicals. People become habituated to seek that social rush over and over again, says Stafford.

Reading emails or hunching over a screen can also activate humans’ fight-or-flight response, says Linda Stone, a researcher who studied the physiological effects of internet use.

Stone has shown that about 80% of people temporarily stop breathing or breathe shallowly when they check email or look at a screen — a condition she calls email apnoea.

The web often has important content that requires action or a response — for example, an assignment from the boss or engagement photos from a close friend — so people anticipate this and hold their breath as they look at their screens.

But breath-holding sets off a physiological cascade that prepares the body to face potential threats or anticipate surprises. Constantly activating this physical response can have negative health consequences, says Stone.

Another reason the internet is so addictive is it lacks boundaries between tasks, says Stafford.

Someone may set out to “research something, and then accidentally go to Wikipedia, then wind up trying to find out what ever happened to [rock band] Depeche Mode”, says Stafford.

Studies suggest willpower is like a muscle: It can be strengthened, but can also become exhausted.

Because the internet is always “on”, staying on task requires constantly flexing that willpower muscle, which can exhaust a person’s self-control.

“You never get away from the temptation,” says Stafford.

For those who want to loosen the vice-like grip of the web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.

Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of web-surfing, says Stafford.

“Technology is all about eroding structure,” says Stafford. “But actually, psychologically, we need more structure, and those things are in tension.”

And to save you Googling it, Dolph Lundgren is still acting, recently appearing in The Expendables 2.