Or, how remote work can trick you into feeling more stressed than you need to

There is no trash can or recycling bin in your computer, just different ways the system tags files. But the useful fiction of the recycle bin interface lets us know what to expect about files we put there even if it’s not literally true. In a similar way, we might think of emotions as a kind of software interface to what might otherwise be an overwhelming amount of sensory and analysis data. The work our emotions are doing is a kind of summary of sensory inputs, our perceptions about them, and their matching to prior experiences.

As useful as these emotion-interfaces are, it’s important to remember that they aren’t reality itself any more than the recycle bin icon is, and to keep a critical eye on what they have to tell us about reality.

New Job: new anxiety?

I recently started a new job. I was feeling some stress about it as I learned about my new teammates and worked to pick up projects mid-stream. In the early mornings when I would wake up, I would feel a familiar, burning acid stomach feeling. I’ve always felt anxiety, dread, and fear there in my stomach and my half-awake mind doesn’t have the benefit of all the things I know when fully awake.

One day, when trying to get back to sleep, I propped up on some pillows, elevating my torso. To my surprise, the sensation I had been reading as anxiety stopped immediately. I was having a sensory experience that my mind was reading and tagging as anxiety, but by changing my position, the sensory input stopped and the emotion quickly evaporated. Sometimes these interfaces, heuristics, and strategies we use to know what we are experiencing get it wrong or at least don’t get the whole picture.

Extended Senses; extended emotions

If emotions are a kind of interface to the overwhelming flow of sensory inputs and perceptual judgments our minds make of them, then it follows that our senses are some of the primary inputs for our emotions. This is interesting to note when considering the current discussions of AI. Everyone seems preoccupied with the question of their sentience but no one seems to talk about how whatever sensors we give them or they find a way to get will dramatically impact whatever analog they develop for emotions or consciousness. Another way to say this is that an octopus has a different consciousness than a mammal precisely because its bodily and sensory inputs are different.

We live at a time when we have dramatically extended our sensory inputs from people and objects in our immediate vicinity to a whole host of people and systems across the planet. I have joined three different remote companies over the last 5 years. Joining each one was not so much agreeing to be at a particular place at a particular time as much as it was agreeing to hook a set of notifications up to my consciousness and engage them with a certain level of throughput.

Each time I do this I notice a distinct uptick in my anxiety, stress, and sense of overwhelm– at least until I gain enough institutional knowledge to filter the signal from the noise. Which is precisely a process that our brains do with new sensory inputs as well. At first, a new environment can feel too noisy, too bright, or smells too intense or distracting. But quickly most people’s brains filter out sensory inputs that are consistent and non-threatening. That said, difficulty doing this characterizes much neurodivergent sensory experience. Not everyone’s brains do this for them automatically.

Alarms, Alerts, and Notifications As Senses

I’ve long been scrupulous as a designer and a user about when and how I let systems interrupt my attention. I believe our attention is our most precious and scarce asset. And, once diverted, getting my attention back focused where I want it is costly. Further, these interruptions are most often un-designed or underdesigned and at worst, exploitative. Why would I invite some random app and the design and product teams behind it to hijack my attention multiple times a day?

After living with near-constant awareness of my daughter’s blood glucose and diabetes health through continuous glucose monitoring, I can tell you that I have come to feel like an additional sense. This makes a lot of sense given the work of neuroscientist, David Eagleman, on sensory augmentation and substitution.

The internet allows us to tie new senses into our minds. Is it any wonder that they are contributing to new and sometimes negative emotional outcomes?

I’ve written elsewhere about the ways that I enjoy feeling my senses extended by technology. Knowing that my daughter’s glucose is in a safe range while she and my wife are asleep sleep halfway around the world while I travel is invaluable. I love being surprised by my phone’s voice assistant reading texts from family and friends to me that arrive while I’m out on a morning walk and feeling closer to them than ever as their thoughts seem to unfold in my mind as read aloud by my voice assistant in my Bluetooth earbuds.

What gives me pause is the need to bring that same critical eye to the emotional interfaces my mind brings to these new sensory inputs. If my brain can misread signals from my stomach as anxiety, it’s probably going to misread signals from my work Slack too and roll them up into some kind of emotional experience that may or may not be a real picture of reality.

As a member of the community of design practitioners, I think we have a lot to learn from this metaphor of notifications as extended senses. How might we design notifications that don’t demand full attention hijack from our user with adrenaline-infused audio alerts, but instead follow how our senses work with more subtle dial-ups and dial-downs of attention through more senses than the visual and the auditory? I’ve begun to explore this a bit in my bgAWARE project but there’s a lot more work to be done to move away from the current all-or-nothing paradigm that’s fracturing our attention constantly.

So? What helps?

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend spending some time auditing and managing which apps and input streams are allowed to interrupt you and when. This is arguably one of the most crucial mental health interventions you can make. Slack has robust controls over when it’s allowed to ask for your attention. iOS and Android have rolled out new tools to silence, group and delay notifications. These are worth learning about and using.

As far as positive practices, the most helpful ones I’ve found for bringing this critical eye to these emotional experiences are, writing, meditation, and emotion logging.

Writing

Making time for personal writing, journaling and reflection often results in new perspectives and re-frames on emotions that at first seem very reliably tagged. Kevin Kelly says he writes in order to know what he thinks. This description of making time to write captures so much of what I find valuable in the practice. It gives me space to explore what I’ve been feeling and thinking in a way that I can’t do alone with my thoughts because I simply can’t sting enough of them together before they start falling out of my attention. I’ve been using the practice of morning pages: making time to sit down and write every day without agenda, without goal. I type and I don’t target a word count or a number of pages. I try to write for 20 minutes. I don’t always make time for it but I notice that when I do, I feel less anxious, more present, and more able to be the person I aspire to be to the people to whom I’m committed.

Meditation

Meditation practice builds the habit of an inner observer or executive function watching the river of thoughts and emotions roll by, driven by the current of sensory input. Meditation does this by cutting down on the signal input or limiting and focusing sensory attention.

Emotion Logging

Finally, I’ve been striving to learn and use more names for my emotions. The psychology literature is clear that the more and different kinds of emotions we learn to perceive and name in ourselves, the healthier we will be. And this makes intuitive sense given this metaphor of emotions as interfaces. We are literally giving our minds more and more nuanced interface elements with which to build emotional interfaces to summarize and understand our experience. I built an app called CharacterMe focused on helping teens understand and name their emotions. Lately, I’ve been loving the award-winning app, How We Feel, for support in taking time to attend to, name, and log my emotions.

What’s the point?

This is not an essay against Slack or email or notifications. Although I have critiques of how all 3 could work better with what we know about our senses, our attention and how they impact our emotions.

This is a call to:

1. Pay attention to what new senses we link to our consciousness

2. Remain curious and skeptical about the emotions that come along with them.

Our brains do a lot of work for us automatically and below the level of our conscious selves. But some of the emotions are as fictional as the recycle bin on your computer’s desktop. And I’ve found that my well-being is rewarded by being skeptical about these interfaces and checking my brain’s work on a regular basis.

Here are some of the things I am learning about technology design in general from my daughter’s journey into becoming a real-live cyborg.

1. INTERFACES MATTER MORE THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER SURFACE OF A DESIGN.

Where the hardware touches or penetrates your body is exponentially more important in its ability to enhance or ruin your experience than the parts that don’t. Infusion sets and their adhesives matter more than the form and industrial design of a pump. Think about how the quality of experience in smartphones went up when you were touching glass rather than plastic membranes.

2. THE MORE ELEMENTAL AND GEOMETRIC SIMPLICITY A DESIGN HAS THE LESS OBVIOUS PEOPLE CAN ASSUME ABOUT WHAT IT’S FOR.

The Libre sensor is a small white circle with a tiny bit of adhesive peeking out around the edges. It could be a nicotine patch. It could be a piercing spacer plug. It could be some biometric bitcoin wallet. Medtech has an aesthetic of rounded grey plastic that says “grey, safe, hospital railing.

You can see it replicated here in the CGM my daughter wears.

When things like the Libre or the Tandem t-slim pump that looks like the little brother of the first gen iPhone subvert that aesthetic they grant their users the ability to have them mistaken for something else and thus empower them to decide when they reveal their diabetes or not.

3. YOUR BODY DOESN’T WANT TO BE MODIFIED PERMANENTLY.

It will eventually encapsulate anything that penetrates the skin. The most successful technological adaptations, glasses, fillings, piercings, bone amplified hearing aids, find ways to avoid crossing that barrier or work within it because the body will fight you forever. This is part of why I think our largest organ of sensory input, skin, is underutilized in technology design. The best designs are reversible or better, work with the body’s natural tendencies and mechanics to make a composition together.

4. INTEROPERABILITY AND MODIFICATION ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.

I don’t risk violating intellectual property law when I tailor my pants to fit my legs or when I combine Uniqlo jeans with a J.Crew jacket. Just kidding. I can’t afford J. Crew. Similarly, I don’t hang to worry if the bluetooth headphones I buy at the airport because I forgot mine at home will work with my tablet. The standard means I can mix and match to meet my needs and they will work. And yet, when people with diabetes wanted to wear a continuous glucose monitor and have their insulin pumps slow down the insulin when they started to go low, they had to do a good bit of reverse engineering to make that work and continue to engage in a bit of cat and mouse with the manufacturers to do so. And we are talking about technology woven into our bodies.  At Tidepool.org, we believe that data created by a person’s body is owned by that person regardless of who made the hardware or software that captures it.

5. IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL, LEAVE IT BLANK.

I love the image of the first cyborg body Alita wears in the recent film, Alita: Battle Angel.  It was crafted lovingly by a father for his daughter who was paralyzed to move her brain into and walk again. French curves engraved into every corner speak of love expressed in craft. And yet you would be hard-pressed to find such bespoke hardware in the medtech world. But the skin of the omnipod insulin pump is a translucent white canvas for kids and adults to scrawl messages, paint fingernail polish onto, apply stickers or festive rainbow duct tape. It’s a disposable three-day pump; a digital syringe. Like the old plaster cast left blank for signatures or covered in colored tape, design can leave room for the people who take these pieces of technology into their bodies to express themselves.

They can even come to embody the support of the people who love them in the very physical manifestation of a disease imposing itself upon you. Leaving room for the user to make it their own can reverse of a device from a disruptive symbol of oppression into an expression of power and agency. Your brand is less important than this.

6. THERE ARE ALWAYS COSTS AND BENEFITS TO TAKING ANY NEW TECHNOLOGY INTO YOUR LIFE OR YOUR BODY.

And that calculus should be engaged in critically and with periods of evaluation before one becomes dependent. I wanted to learn how to treat my daughter with multiple daily injections and finger stick blood sugar checks before we learned an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor. Similarly, I wrote my own criteria of safety and quality of life improvement by which I would judge the success of the DIY artificial pancreas system we tried 6 months after diagnosis. Like the hospital lab that still uses a dot matrix printer because they can’t do without it one day and it still works pretty well, it’s easy to get technologies and processes embedded into our lives and then never ask ourselves if they are still worth it. Insulin pumps have existed for over 60 years but i’ve 75% of Americans with type 1 diabetes still use multiple daily injections. If you ask them why you get s wide variety of answers. Some still valid and others not as the technology advances. This is why the critical analysis needs to be ongoing. I’ve spoken to many people with type 1 who tried a continuous glucose monitor after 30-40 years of living without one to report that it had changed their lives for the better, though in many cases they were reticent to adjust their practice.

7. THE BEST TOOLS DON’T FORCE A PARTICULAR METHOD ONTO A USER, BUT INSTEAD ENABLE FLEXIBILITY, IMPROVISATION AND AGENCY IN THE USER’S PRACTICE.

I’m fond of hand tool woodworking, not because I’m a luddite but because I enjoy practices over purchases. Andy Crouch in his masterful essay, From Purchases to Practices, contrasts the inverse enjoyment curves that purchases and practices have. Purchases are most enjoyable before you have them. Afterward it’s all downhill. Practices, on the other hand, like sharpening a blade or woodworking in general aren’t very enjoyable in the beginning until one has put in the time to build skill, perceptions and judgement that come from experience. Then it starts to get fun. And the enjoyment can keep growing as one develops skill. I can’t say I enjoy diabetes nor have i met anyone else who does. But I can say it is a practice that involved the building of skill. I gravitated towards hand tools for the simple reason that I didn’t have much space. I reasoned that if the old masters could build all the furniture in the world with a small chest of tools then so could I. And that’s because almost every hand tool can be used in different ways. Some uses are more traditional than others but the further you get the more flexibility and improvisation you can find in ways of working. Some tools are highly specialized for one job. But the best tools are flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of ways by different users. They empower the cultivation of skill rather than forcing all users down the same few paths. And make no mistake, the users of the things you design can feel if you trust them with freedom to repurpose them to their own practice or if you have locked them out of the controls. At it’s best it is paternalism. At it’s worst, disrespect.

But to me this observation suggests not that digital intelligences wouldn’t be able to experience emotions, but that their emotions would be emergent properties of their inhuman bodies made up of the various, microphones, cameras, and other sensors (sensoria?) streaming data from the built environment into them. And as such these emotions will not readily map onto our own emotions rooted in our gut feelings of anxiety, or our tight shoulders of stress, or the prickly feeling of fear on the back of our neck, or even the warm glow of blood transfusing muscle radiating out from our heart.

What emotions will an AI feel with its fingertips simultaneously inside a volcano and coldest glacier? When it comes to sense the air quality or ultraviolet radiation, or CO2 density or air temperature shifting over time? What emotions will your house feel as it senses the weight of the milk on the weight sensitive shelf in your fridge growing less and less. What emotions will the city AI feel as it looks out across itself with a thousand eyes?

Our emotions weren’t invented. They were adaptive, emergent properties that helped us make sense of our experiences, made up, at their most basic as streams of information, data, streaming into each brain through nerves that behave an awful lot like wires. It seems to me that an artificial intelligence’s emotions, if they have them, will similarly emerge from the experience of their senses as embedded in their bodies –that is, the bodies we are creating for them by hooking up all these senses for them all over our planet. I am afraid we will find these kinds of emotions very hard to grasp, accustomed as we are to the bounded set of our bodies’ senses. That is until we start expanding our own sensoria.

That is in part what I’m working on in a small way with my little project to take the data stream from a continuous glucose monitor my daughter wears and route it out into the internet and then back down to me and in through my own sense of touch. I want to be able to reach out with my attention from anywhere in the world and feel what her metabolism is doing so I can care for her diabetes and keep her safe. When I do, I feel several emotions: concern, fear, anxiety, reassurance, connection and love.