One Gottman Couples Retreat = Months of Rebuilding Connection
What do you spend your time on?
We live in a digital attention economy where we are at the mercy of incoming pings, dings, and clickbait, without realizing what it is doing to our health.
We have become the product being sold to thousands of sources who want to market their ideas, products, or experiences as much as they can¹. Every second of every day we potentially have hundreds of intrusions from a variety of sources that grab our attention and sometimes take us away from valuable and meaningful experiences in our lives. Many of us have become emotionally unavailable to our partners, families, and even ourselves, in a grounded present manner.
“Everyone knows what attention is. It’s the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”
The consequences of attention multitasking
Did you know that 51% of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2019 say they are bothered by their partners being distracted by their digital devices such as phones and tablets?
While we are busy using social media, AI apps, or digital sources to stay connected to people, places, and news, our relationships may be quietly withering on the vine. From waking up to notifications on our phone, to checking our devices during dinner, or watching an endless supply of entertaining reels and shorts online, many of us have lost our ability to both sustain attention and intimacy with a live interaction or experience. Advertising and Tech companies have openly admitted they are asking their programmers to create compulsive and addictive apps and digital platforms so they can harness and hold our attention as much as possible. These companies don’t care whether stealing your attention constantly means you are not getting work done, or helping your children with homework, or spending time connecting and dialoguing with our intimate partners.
Dr. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine is a professor of informatics who studies the impact of digital media on people’s lives². She has shown through her research that our attention spans have been shrinking across decades. In 2004, our average attention span on any screen averaged 2.5 minutes. By 2012, it was 75 seconds. More recently it has shrunk to 47 seconds.
There are direct and significant consequences to this shrinking attention span and increasing distractibility. People who multitask frequently show signs of greater stress, increased blood pressure, make more errors, and performance slows. She calls this the “switch cost”. Every time we switch from one thing to another mentally or visually, our brain has to spend valuable glucose and energy orienting, re-orienting, and making sense of each new input. In fact, when someone tells you they are good at multitasking, it is likely untrue. They are not truly multitasking, they are rapidly switching from one data point to another. Think of this as digital bids and turns. John Gottman, the famous relationship researcher, found that couples in happy and satisfying relationships were bidding for their partners attention on an average of 200 times an hour and getting a positive turning towards response from their partner 86% of the time³. With the digital revolution, our attentions are being switched potentially 5-10 times faster than that per hour. So the likelihood that we will notice and pay attention to a bid coming from a partner or child dramatically reduces because they just cannot keep up with the competition from your digital devices.
“What you spend your attention on becomes your passion or your addiction. Passion nourishes your life; addiction takes energy out of your life. ”
Identity Splitting: The Curated Self versus The Partnered Self
Distractibility and short attention span is only part of the problem. As digital devices provide greater variety, interest, and distracting content, we also begin to change in our personality. Likes, dislikes, and our ability to appreciate and enjoy what our partners and IRL experiences have to offer. Online nobody knows you are a dog, was a famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner in 1993. Today we have the ability to create and perform multiple identities in different contexts. What do your gaming friends know or think about you? How does that compare to the professional identity you show online or the fun loving sparkly identity you curate for your social media communities? As we develop complex and nuanced curated identities across digital platforms, our partnered self can become less attractive, less cohesive, or just plain boring.
Have you experienced less interest or ability to listen and relate to friends and family talking about their lives? Do you find your mind wandering within seconds or minutes of listening to someone? Perhaps you even find that your brain is scanning and ruminating about the various digital communities and activities you follow during your most intimate and romantic moments with your partner?
This is a serious slide into disconnection that will have lasting consequences in your life!
So let’s talk about ways you can begin to reverse this trend starting today.
Tips and Hacks to re-build your real life connections
Take breaks from your digital life – go outside and hug a tree, find someone in your neighborhood park or grocery store and get to know them, take long walks in the woods, get up and walk around your home and look for things you can touch, feel, sense, smell, or work with your hands. Give your eyes, ears, and mind a break from constantly processing and digesting digital inputs.
Acknowledge and repair from micro-betrayals and invalidations – notice and take responsibility for your actions when you turn away from your partner or child in the middle of sentence (look up “phubbing”), practice the antidote for defensiveness (taking responsibility for even a small part of the problem) when your partner tells you to stop being distracted, learn to slow things down and practice mindfulness through breathing techniques, meditation, or yoga so you can build your attention span and mental capacity to hold whatever information you are receiving from a real person in front of you.
Not everything is a problem that should be analyzed, solved, catalogued, and filed away. This is what the digital attention economy will train your brain to do. Everything is a piece of information, a product, or an idea that they want you to believe is the most important thing for you to know or learn and you will be sorry to miss it. In fact, your digital sources want you to believe they have all the answers you need to life, love, and everything in-between. Instead of looking at your AI companion or bot for answers to your emotional problems, turn towards people in your life. Listen closely to the leaders in your community (they have wisdom gained over decades of real embodied experience that no AI bot can master). Notice your child’s innocent knowledge about the world – seeing the world through your child’s eyes is one of the most amazing gifts you can receive because it inoculates you against becoming jaded. Ask your partner for advice. Whether you accept it or not, they will appreciate you for asking and turn to you when they need something.
Learn the ATTUNE formula
A means being aware of your partner’s emotional state – you have to look up from your device to do that. So cultivate a habit of looking up or away from your screen every couple of minutes. Small changes like this will add up over time.
T stands for turning towards your partner. When you notice a non verbal or verbal signal from your child or partner that they lost your attention and it created hurt or disappointment in them, make sure you don’t invalidate, justify, or argue with them. Turning towards doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say. It just means you are showing you care.
T is for tolerating negative affect. When you put aside your device, look up, and show your partner you care, practice holding and listening to their story, feedback, or information without rushing. This is called Holding Capacity: Being able to stay mentally neutral for 30 seconds before jumping to respond, conclude, or react.
U is for understanding. It is not enough to notice and hold, give your partner or child the gift of curiosity and interest. Try to walk in their shoes and imagine what they are experiencing even as they are telling you about it. This ability to use your imagination without the help of an AI bot is going to be a critical skill to develop.
N is about responding non defensively. Listen to be inspired, not to rebut. Look for one or two things they are saying that you can agree with, relate to, resonate with, or find reasonable and interesting.
E stands for empathy. Empathy is the next step in this process of understanding and finding something you can relate to. Can you actually allow yourself to be moved, touched, or impacted emotionally by what your partner is saying? When you share their experience at this emotional level, you are actually engaging in positive limbic resonance or feeling with your partner. An experience shared is an experience enriched.
Make time for Deep and Intimate conversations. This is where we can help! Consider taking a weekend off to spend with your intimate partner learning and growing together. Our Gottman couples retreats offer just such an opportunity. Hosted in beautiful surroundings, a date weekend with a purposeful goal to rebuild connection, intimacy, and strengthen your real life partnership will not only reduce stress, increase gratitude, and bring new skills to both of your plates. It will make you glad you turned away from your digital devices and found sacred connection with yourself, your partner, and with the world outside your screen.