S5E16: Is your phone the distraction you think it is?

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday, and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don't but have to learn one anyway! And today, I just wanted to ask you a quick question as we start this week, to get you thinking about what really distracts you when you sit down to study, and especially with regards to our phones.

Because it feels like we're hearing the messages from everywhere, that our phones are major distractors.

That if we want to get our best work done, we need to put our phones on airplane mode, on silent, face down on the desk, or ideally in another room altogether. And all of that makes sense, and we've heard it all a million times. But today, I have a question for you. And that is, when do you reach for your phone?

Because here's the thing, we always hear that it's our phone that distracts us. A notification, a pop up, people calling us. That the reason we can't concentrate is that we have this whole universe of information and entertainment in one tiny device beside us, and it won't leave us alone. But, I've been auditing my own phone use this last few weeks, and every time I reach for my phone when I'm working, or trying to focus on something, I've been stopping and questioning it. “Why am I going to my phone right now? What do I want to get out of it? What need is it fulfilling right now?”

And here is what I found. A lot of the time, it's not my phone that pulls me out of focus with a notification or anything like that. No, I am the one that that's seeking it out. It's about discomfort.

So, some of the time, granted, it is just me thinking, oh, did someone message me? Did someone reply? Did anyone like my post? There's a bit of that, but there's a lot more of it that's about actually me trying to get out of the situation I'm currently in. So the first one is the most obvious, the present moment, this is difficult, I'm stuck, I'm frustrated.

I reach for my phone. And there's also a bit of the future and past thinking in there. Doubt and telling yourself stories. Is this going to work? What if this? Generally just projecting your worries into the future. Or the opposite: replaying past memories, I'm making myself uncomfortable, so I reach for my phone.

And the other thing which is kind of similar but I wanted to say it specifically was that one time I was watching a sitcom and it was, it wasn't going especially well between the mother and the father character. They were trying to have a conversation, neither of them were coming across particularly well, they were trying to communicate, they were failing and the mother character said something, and it came out completely wrong. And that feeling of, Oh God, this is going to degenerate. Before I had even taken note of what I was doing, I'd left and picked up my phone. I had just stopped watching and I'd gone into Instagram because that feeling of just, almost everything cringes. I had to escape into my phone.

But of course, so much of the time, that relief is short lived when we find the distraction in our phones. Because if we head to something like Instagram or TikTok or Reddit, where there's such a range of content and a lot of it is so mixed up, videos and posts about cute cats and nice city tours are interspersed with talk of toxic relationships, corrupt governments, health complaints, or anything else that makes us brittle.

So, in order to get to the very things that comfort us, we have to trawl through a whole load of things that don't. And then we switch again to give us something that might give us a reprieve from that. So, we're constantly switching. We almost need distractions from the distractions. And then, of course, it takes us so much longer to get back on track with the thing we were doing to start with.

And you may be wondering, why does this matter for my language learning? You know, if my phone is in another room and I can't reach for it, is that problem solved? I'll have to stick with the problem then. But no, because for so many of us, that's not how it works.

We'll just distract ourselves in some other way. We will play with our pen lid, or look out of the window, or we'll daydream. Anything to give us a refreshing change from this hard thing or unpleasant feeling that we're experiencing right now. So yes, we can all put our phones in another room. But in a lot of cases we won't get control of our focus until we realise that those moments of wanting to escape, they're feelings, they're signals, but they're not orders.

So, it's fine to pause for a moment and ask, Am I sure I want to duck out right now? Should I spend a couple more minutes trying to figure this out? Should I turn up the music to drown out the doubts? Or should I pause what I'm doing, calm myself down, take some deep breaths or a sip of water or whatever, but without immediately diving into a distraction to regulate me?

And if you're curious this week, I would love to invite you to run some similar tests yourselves and figure out when you reach for the distractions, whether it's your phone or anything else in your studies, but also in your social and leisure time. I hope it's as enlightening for you as it has been for me.

And finally, have you checked out my new website yet? If you haven't, visit me at www. languageconfidenceproject. com. It's in the show notes. I've got some really, really positive feedback so far and I am so proud of it. And I hope you love it as much as I do. Have a wonderful day and I will see you tomorrow.