The Waters We Swim In

On modern anxiety, the pull on our attention, and what the alerts cost our closest relationships

A different kind of anxiety

Not all anxiety announces itself. Some of it arrives not as a racing heart or a sleepless night, but as a low hum underneath the day. A sense of being slightly stretched, slightly behind, never quite arrived in the moment you're actually in. You sit down to read with your child and some part of you is already elsewhere. You have a conversation with your partner and feel, even as you nod, a faint tug toward the phone face-down on the table.

Many of the people I see would never describe themselves as anxious. They're capable, composed, getting through a great deal. But they recognise the hum. They describe feeling perpetually half-present, as though their attention has been quietly subdivided and parcelled out before the day has even begun.

I don't think this is a character flaw, and I don't think it's only in their heads. A great deal of it is the water we now swim in, a current so constant that, like any current you've stood in long enough, you stop feeling it as motion and start mistaking it for still water.

The pull is not an accident

It helps, enormously, to understand that the constant pull on our attention is not a personal failing and not an accident. It is designed.

We live in what's often called the attention economy, where a great many of the services we use are free to us because our attention is the product being sold. And the tools built to capture that attention are extraordinarily good at their job, because they are engineered to be. The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris has described how apps borrow a mechanism called intermittent variable rewards, the same principle the psychologist B. F. Skinner identified in the 1950s and the same one that makes a slot machine so hard to walk away from. You pull the lever, and sometimes there's a reward and sometimes there isn't, and the unpredictability is precisely what keeps you pulling. As Harris put it, several billion people now carry a slot machine in their pocket. The reward is just a message, a like, a piece of news.

The red badge, the buzz in the pocket, the little number that climbs: none of these are neutral. They are drawn from a deliberate toolkit intended to pull your attention away from whatever you were doing and toward the screen. Each one is a small tug of the current. When you feel pulled mid-sentence, you are not being weak. You are being successfully drawn by something built by very clever people to do exactly that, and a swimmer is not weak for being moved by a tide.

What it does to the nervous system

The trouble is that our attention was never meant to be divided this finely, this constantly. Even a notification we don't act on, even one we only anticipate, levies a small tax on the very attention we were trying to give to something else.

Something similar happens to the body. A nervous system that is forever half-braced for the next interruption doesn't fully settle. Water only goes still when nothing is disturbing its surface, and ours is never quite left undisturbed; there's always a part of us scanning, waiting, ready to be summoned, so the surface never fully calms. We may not call this anxiety, but it has the shape of it: a baseline of mild vigilance that never quite switches off. And because it's so constant, so woven into ordinary life, we stop noticing it as a state and mistake it for simply who we are now, how it feels to be a busy adult.

That is the private cost. But attention is not only a private matter. It is also the currency of our closest relationships, and that is where the hum does its quietest damage.

The child reaching for a face that's elsewhere

In the 1970s the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick ran what became known as the ‘Still Face’ experiment. A parent plays warmly with their baby, then, on cue, holds a still, blank, unresponsive face for a short while. The infant notices almost at once. They work hard to win the parent back, smiling, reaching, calling out, cooing. And when the face stays blank, they grow distressed and eventually withdraw. When the parent returns to normal, the babies recover. It's one of the most reproduced findings in the field, and very unsettling to watch.

It's worth being careful here, as Tronick himself is: this was a brief, deliberate laboratory procedure, not a portrait of ordinary distracted parenting, and no loving parent reproduces it by glancing at their phone. Children are robust, and moments of mismatch, followed by repair, are a normal and even necessary part of healthy development.

But the experiment does show us something true about what children are built to seek: a face that is with them. The thing a child reaches for is responsive attention, the sense of being met. When that attention is routinely turned a few degrees toward a screen, a child feels the difference, not as trauma, but as a small, repeated experience of reaching for a parent who is present in body but just slightly elsewhere in mind. None of us can be fully available all the time, and we shouldn't try to be. The question worth sitting with is only whether the device has quietly become a third presence in more of those moments than we'd choose.

The third presence in the room

Between partners, the same dynamic has a name. Researchers Brandon McDaniel and Sarah Coyne coined the term technoference for the everyday intrusions and interruptions of technology into our relationships: the phone checked mid-conversation, the scroll during a shared meal, the glance at a screen just as the other person was about to say something important to them. Their work found that people who reported more of this interference also reported more conflict over technology use and lower relationship satisfaction.

What makes technoference so corrosive is how small each instance is. No single glance is a betrayal. But relationships are largely built, and eroded, in small moments, in the tiny reachings-out that one partner makes toward the other all day long: a comment about something out of the window, a sigh, a half-told story. Each is a quiet bid for connection. And each one can be met or missed. When the reliable answer to a bid is the top of a bowed head and the glow of a screen, the message received, over and over, is “not now”. Nobody intends it, but it accumulates anyway.

Two people can share a sofa every evening for a year and arrive, without a single argument, at a surprising distance from each other. It's the drift of two small boats on the same water, never pushed apart, only never quite rowed back together, until one evening they notice how far the current has carried them.

Not a failure of willpower

The natural response, when we notice all this, is guilt. We resolve to try harder, to have more discipline, to simply put the phone down. And then we don't, and we feel worse, and the guilt becomes another strand of the currents we swim in.

I'd gently suggest that willpower is the wrong frame. These tools were designed, by teams of talented people, specifically to defeat the ordinary person's willpower. Blaming yourself for losing that contest is a little like blaming yourself for getting wet in the rain. The self-reproach doesn't change the behaviour; it just adds a layer of shame on top of it, and shame tends to send us straight back to the very thing that soothes it fastest, which is, of course, the phone.

What tends to help is not more severity with ourselves, but a bit more design of our own. If the environment is doing the work of pulling us away, then the environment is also where we can push back: the phone in another room at dinner, notifications stripped back to the few that genuinely matter, a protected half-hour that belongs to a person rather than a screen. These are not acts of willpower so much as small changes to the conditions, so that being present doesn't require winning a fight every few minutes.

Tending our attention

There's an older idea worth holding onto here: that attention is a form of care. Where we place our attention is, in a real sense, where we place our love. To attend fully to a child, or a partner, is one of the most ordinary and most profound things we do for them, and it's precisely this that the hum of modern life keeps fragmenting.

The low hum of modern anxiety and the quiet distances that open up in our families are, I think, two faces of the same thing: an attention that is being pulled in a hundred directions by design, until there isn't quite enough of it left for the few people who need it most, or for ourselves.

If this is familiar, it isn't a sign that you're failing as a parent or a partner. It's a sign that you're a thoughtful person living inside a system built to fragment your focus, and noticing the cost. And noticing the current is the first thing any swimmer does before choosing where to swim. That noticing is where change begins.

At Rollswood Therapy in Welwyn, Hertfordshire, and online, I work with individuals and couples on exactly this: the anxiety that modern life quietly generates, and the work of turning our attention back toward the people, and the life, we actually want to be present for.

Sources

• Attention economy and persuasive design; intermittent variable rewards (Tristan Harris; the mechanism described by B. F. Skinner, 1950s) — notifications and feeds engineered to capture attention. Overview

• Edward Tronick, the Still Face experiment (1975) — infants' distress when a caregiver becomes briefly unresponsive; a laboratory procedure, not a model of everyday parenting. Gottman Institute overview

• Brandon McDaniel & Sarah Coyne, "Technoference" (2016) — everyday technology interruptions linked to more conflict over technology use and lower relationship satisfaction. Penn State summary