You Have More Time Than You Think - The Digital Treadmill Effect
- Jessica Globe
- Jun 19
- 5 min read
You know something’s wrong when you spend an hour of your well-earned free time “relaxing” with your phone and end up feeling more exhausted than when you started. That post-scroll stupor brings on a hollow sense of purposelessness and clawing anxiety.
It’s ironic how it shows us what others are doing, makes us feel inadequate, and yet it’s the very thing keeping us from spending our life the way we want to.
Modern life continues to offer us solutions to do more. Dishwashers and vacuum cleaners made it faster and easier to clean the house. Yet the standards for cleanliness simply increased. The latest promised time-saver is AI.
We can do things faster, but at what cost? Raising the bar on how much content we need to create to succeed? Adding more projects we must complete to be good employees?
Modern life’s productivity culture and individualism disrupted tight-knit communities and made us dependent on ourselves. It taught us that our value comes from doing rather than being. And made us afraid to ask for help.
Parents work longer hours and spend more time parenting than previous generations. Jobs encourage us to do more focused work per day than our brains are capable of. And our kids’ calendars look like full-time jobs with more extra-curricular activities and more homework.
It’s a bleak picture. One I’m familiar with as a new mom. But today I’m not here to fight with you over cutting one of your obligations. If you’ve already tried that and still feel just as strapped for time, that’s what I want to talk about today: The psychological way technology has manipulated us into feeling even more time poor.
Social media, streaming services, email, and AI have amplified our celebration of productivity and demonization of idleness. When we finally have downtime, we don’t know how to be, so we reach for our phones. We think social media will cure our loneliness and Duolingo will make us fluent. But instead of genuine rest or meaningful activity, we get stuck in an endless coil of continuously spawning content.
Here’s my hypothesis: we’re not just busy because of packed schedules. Social media has trained us to feel behind and is the very thing keeping us behind.
The Digital Treadmill
You can never reach the bottom of an Instagram doomscroll. Never see the last post on Reddit. Never find the final suggested YouTube video.
But social media isn’t the only offender. Email creates another endless loop too.
As soon as you’ve sent a reply, another message appears. It’s a to-do list that grows like a weed. Busting through barriers. Competing with your favorite plants. Filling any available crack or crevice.
If tomorrow you suddenly couldn’t access email on your phone, how would you feel? Terrified? Out of control? Anxious?
It’s no wonder we’re afraid to let go. At best, we’re afraid of missing out and at worst, we’re afraid of losing what we’ve worked so hard to build.
The same way that checking email makes us feel a false sense of accomplishment, checking social media gives us a false sense of connection. They might make us feel better temporarily, but the relief is fleeting.
These quick dopamine hits are like scratching a mosquito bite. It feels beneficial in the moment but it ends up making the itch worse.
If we slowed down long enough to face the self-loathing, loneliness, and purposelessness we’d see that the solution we’re using to take the edge off of life is adding to the problem. It encourages us to keep driving, pushing, and forcing because that’s what we see modeled online.
Disappearing Time
There’s another insidious way that streaming services, social media, and digital communication platforms mimic flow.
Flow is an optimal performance state we reach at the sweet spot between a task being too easy and too hard. It occurs when we feel stretched to our limit and up for the challenge.
When we’re in a flow state, we lose track of time. When we look up from our task, an hour has gone by and it feels like no time passed.
Digital platforms mimic this time distortion. By never reaching the bottom on social media and automatically playing the next video on YouTube or Netflix, we don’t have built in stopping points to tell us how long we’ve been checked out.
But the no-time feeling on these platforms doesn’t come with the same deep satisfaction of flow. We surface gasping for air with nothing to show for our attention.
It leaves us feeling robbed of time. The nights when I’ve broken my one episode per night rule have been the nights when I’ve been the most likely to experience bedtime rebellion and feel resentful about my lack of free time. It wasn’t that I had less free time on those days, it’s that I lost myself in front of a screen.
We deserve better than that.
There’s a Different Way
It takes courage to go off script, but the good news is you don’t need to become a digital hermit to see results. Creating more space in your life starts with noticing where you’re stuck on the digital treadmill and taking the necessary steps to get off.
Use these questions to understand your patterns:
What are you really seeking when you reach for your phone?
You might be looking for connection, purpose, rest, inspiration, entertainment, etc.
2. How could you fulfill that desire offline?
If this question makes you uneasy, don’t worry, that’s to be expected. We turn to digital solutions because they’re immediate and easy. But remember: it’s like scratching a mosquito bite. It feels satisfying in the moment but amplifies the itch later.
3. What’s at stake if you did nothing? (How does seeking connection/purpose/rest online affect your real relationships, meaningful work, and spiritual path?)
Instead of reaching for your phone to fill every possible moment, practice being present.
Get more comfortable being boredom. (The dentist’s waiting room is a great place to start.) Resist the urge to reach into your pocket, even if you can only manage 30 seconds.
Create intentional barriers to mindless consumption. Here are some articles I wrote with practical approaches:
Phrases like “Time is Money” have conditioned us to believe we need to fill every waking moment with activity. By taking these steps the steps in this article to reconnect with what matters most to you, you’re already breaking the spell.
I’m still relearning to trust spaciousness and experience the passage of time differently, but the effort had paid off in giving me more peace, creativity, meaning, and calm.
If you want support in changing your relationship with technology, the first step is taking the 2-minute Digital Wellness Assessment. You’ll get immediate insights and personalized suggestions from me in your inbox within 5 business days.
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