How TikTok changes everything and how to fight back
Is a positive mindset enough to boost motivation and productivity? It’s time to take The Sniff Test.
Rob Dance is a popular poster on LinkedIn. He shares the story of a young relative diagnosed with ADHD. This was via an online quiz on social media.
Rob notes the more people diagnosed, the more viral the post becomes. There is an overwhelming incentive to tell people they have ADHD.
These quizzes are simple to manipulate and can tell people they have almost any condition. Ever made a spelling mistake, then you’re dyslexic. Are you often unhappy, then you’re depressed and if you’re easily distracted, you’ve got ADHD.
How can we fight back?
The Difficulty Diagnosing ADHD
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder effects 5% of children and 2.5% of adults, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. It’s worse in boys than girls by a factor of more than four-to-one according to ADHD UK.
Symptoms include fidgeting, lack of focus and acting impulsively. To be officially diagnosed these symptoms must appear before the age of 12, have an effect on school work and relationships, and not be explained by other conditions. If you have a problem and we can’t explain it, you may have ADHD.
Boys are more physical than girls. Generations have been sent outside to let off steam, while girls are happy doing indoor tasks requiring focus. Google for ADHD symptoms and they read a lot like the differences between boys and girls.
85% of primary school teachers are female. Not all will relate to boys as well as they do to girls and some may struggle to control the more energetic members of the classroom. How easy might it be to blame this on the pupil instead of the teacher and the teaching?
The Rise of Therapy
A Mental Health Foundation study reveals that 1 in 6 adults are in therapy. The most common treatments are cognitive behavioural therapy to help face problems and develop coping skills, interpersonal therapy to improve relationships and psychodynamic therapy, which explores the unconscious roots of problems.
The Foundation says a quarter of us have a mental health issue each year and 1 in 6 have depression. Foundations require funding just as a social media posts need likes and there is an incentive to find cases. Nonetheless mental health is the biggest single cost for the NHS.
There is clearly an issue here. If our smartphones aren’t directly to blame, as they’re just the hardware enabling searches, messages and content, what about the software on our phones?
The TikTokification of Everything
I use Google and Bard for search, WhatsApp for messaging and LinkedIn for content. But TikTok is the king of content, rising to 100 million users far faster than any other content app.
Despite having a billion active users, TikTok lags more established apps. Yet this is not what matters. TikTok videos are short, averaging just over 30 seconds, but daily usage of the app is higher than all others in the US.
This is the statistic forcing other content apps to copy TikTok. This means everything is entertainment and any pretence of educating or informing is rapidly disappearing.
You are Collateral Damage
Entertainment is about emotion rather than logic. There’s no time to think as you’re shunted to the next 30-second video. You fall back on coping mechanisms evolved over millennia.
TikTok has another trick that others are copying. Where LinkedIn and Facebook connected you with a community, TikTok identifies you by your responses. Rather than prioritise posts from people you know, you are shown anything from anybody that is similar to your revealed preferences, gleaned from your likes, how much of a clip you watch and what you post.
This causes problems for online marketing. Community-based applications were a great way to reach a customer segment using job title or place of work. But when we’re defined by the triggers we respond to, it makes it harder to find ideal clients.
As a consequence you go for quantity over quality and artificial intelligence is great at this. Customer care goes out of the window, but in truth the big companies never worried about individuals.
I attended a seminar with the former Head of Product for Netflix. We discussed A/B testing, where some people are shown one thing and similar people another, to figure out what works best. You might notice that the same film has a different thumbnail depending on whose account you’re viewing.
I asked what happened to the thousands of individuals receiving tests that didn’t work, who are unaware they’re being experimented on and who might unsubscribe due to changes in their experience. The executive shrugged as if to say “collateral damage”.
How to Win at TikTok
To appeal to emotions you must have a cause. Talking about your business, your hobby or your opinions no longer works, because the algorithms don’t associate you with communities built that way. Having a cause means having an enemy.
Primary causes include climate change, the evils of government and mental health. Secondary causes, but still carrying weight, include genetically modified organisms, exercise and personal development.
If all you care about are vanity metrics, the number of likes and followers, you can stop there. If you want to reengage a community you must somehow go deeper with your audience, deploying logic. As you’re not going to do this on TikTok, the app will fight any attempt to redirect traffic elsewhere.
What passes as logic is little more than extended emotion. If leading scientific journals have shut down debate, it’s going to be hard for others to reopen it. You cannot persuade people that you don’t reach.
Individuals need Agency
The very idea of logic sounds boring. It’s how we overcome emotional reactions and is about stripping them from decisions. This is a definition of dull.
This is why blindly following a process becomes monotonous and people make mistakes. Hence businesses automate and want AI to run routines. If that’s your job, good luck.
To remain engaged people require agency or control in their life. The less they get at work, the more free time they need to find it outside of the office. Highly motivated executives in control of their own destiny will work long into the night, while the janitor prefers fixed hours.
Agency requires people to motivate themselves. This requires self awareness and the application of appropriate methods.
How to be motivated
Positive thinking is a popular way of teaching people to motivate themselves. We do this naturally and when grandad tells you to buck up or a friend asks you to calm down, they’re really saying pause for reflection and overcome your emotions.
An alternative is to assign agency to a higher power. Matthew Syed highlights in “The Greatest” the disproportionate number of religious believers among top athletes. Assigning a result to God’s will enables you to believe that you’ll win next time and stay motivated to train after a defeat.
A third piece of popular advice is to set goals. Give yourself a realistic timeframe to complete them, seek help and use family and friends to provide encouragement.
Do these methods work?
Explaining our Coping Mechanisms
Each of us has coping mechanisms to make the near 35,000 decisions we take each day. If we thought about everything we’d be overwhelmed. Worrying is thinking and this is why worriers feel weighed down by the things they must do.
Coping mechanisms reinforce behaviours and resist change. The top performers in sport are typically those who learn to love the pain and grind of practice, while the rest stay home in their comfort zones. It’s ever easier to do this when social media content allows us to self-diagnose reasons why we can’t do something.
We have different coping mechanisms. I’ve never needed inspiration to start work, but work ethic becomes inefficient if you’re doing the wrong things. I must prioritise, while other are good at this, but find it hard to get going. Setting goals is not going to help them.
There are many ways of classifying personalities. I use a four-step process assigning coping mechanisms based on reactions. You might recognise yourself in more than one.
There are multiple means of motivating yourself or being more productive. I’ve chosen one for each type.
The Controller must be organised before working. Decluttering the desk, putting things in place and compartmentalising work all help motivate this person.
The Pleaser needs a reason to start and keep going without seeking permission. Keeping a record of continuous success is strong motivation to persist. Social media leverages this in things such as Snapstreaks.
The Computer relies on data and facts to make decisions and is naturally less emotional than the other types. As a result, there is a tendency to delay decisions and put off tasks until every conceivable angle is covered. The Eisenhower Matrix is one way to enforce prioritisation and I really should use it more.
The Distractor is a multi-tasker who is slow to start and to finish, because there’s always something else to do. The Pomodoro Method, especially in a community setting when like-minded people report back on their progress, works well to maintain focus.
I’ve ignored to-do lists and rewards. To-do lists tend to grow and it’s demotivating not to complete them in a day. We improve by working on tasks that often cannot be finished quickly. Time boxing to ensure you work on what is important as well as urgent is more effective than a list.
Rewards are poor motivation. They work for one-offs, but once tasks and rewards are repeated the latter become entitlements. This applies equally to annual bonuses and free lunches. The secret to success is to develop the habit of doing, rather than the dopamine dependency of reward.
Living with ADHD and TikTok
Brain health expert Daniel Amen recommends three simple habits. When consciously making a decision, take three seconds to ask yourself if it’s good for your brain. He notes second graders score 90% on a test of what this means.
Amen also recommends positive thinking. Each morning he tells himself it’s going to be a great day and each night he reflects on what went well. This latter technique is called the gratitude method.
Sleep is critical for mental health. If you lie awake worrying about tomorrow, then plan your day the night before. One tactic is to regularly spend your desired hours in bed and don’t worry about sleep quality. Your body learns to take what it needs.
Hobbies are important. Mike Rucker, in “The Epidemic of Mental Disorders in Business” notes how people dividing their time between work and meaningful hobbies, are more productive than those with a so-called work ethic who never stop. A meaningful hobby requires a change of focus, such as exercising or doing crosswords, and does not mean binge watching Netflix.
Of course, you’re allowed to take time out. If I exercise tonight I might reward myself by watching “Top Boy”. Life must be fun and you have to compromise on what you do to maintain relationships. It can seem as if self-help gurus spend 24-hours a day on themselves, interacting with others only when it suits.
If you are worried about the time your child spends on TikTok, then use the family pairing feature. This allows you to see what they see. Talk about why you are doing this and the methods you use to disengage your emotional brain from meaningless habits. Most of all, set an example.
I started out assuming positive thinking was great for the already motivated, much as rousing speeches work for the committed but not the doubters. But experts in the field consider it a simple habit for everyone to trigger positive behaviours. Getting your child to ask why is this person sending me this quiz, may be all the habit-forming they need to stop self-diagnosing excuses for a lack of motivation.