The last couple of weeks I noticed myself reaching for my phone more and more throughout the day. My digital foot traffic looked something like this. Unlock phone. Swipe right to Gmail app – refresh page for new emails. Scroll up to Instagram app – check out stories and then the endless browsing would commence. What irked me the most is that the max time I would spend browsing Instagram stories, posts etc would range from about 8 – 10 minutes. But here is the thing. This would be three or four times an hour. Its not even the amount of time I spent “checking” it was more the number of times I actually picked up my phone that made me realize this has to end.
I remember in 2015 I picked up a book at the library by Sheryl Turkle – Alone together. The title caught my eye. This was when we were just beginning to scratch the surface with what technology was doing to us as human kind. Flash forward 7 years later and the screen horse has long left the barn.
We fear using words such as addiction, compulsion but if we were brave enough to call a spade a spade, we will see how we are more addicted to our devices than we care to believe. I spoke to the Co-founder Joe Hollier of the Light Phone – a phone that is bringing the humane back to phone use last week- and my take home message was that we need to get back to a place where we are the ones deciding how our phones will engage with us and not the other way around.
So two weeks ago, I set out on a experiment to “strip my phone.” I had no idea how it would work or what I would experience but all I knew was nothing changes if nothing changes. So one lazy Sunday evening I went through my phone app by app and deciding what was a need and what was feeding my compulsion to check.
I started with the low lying fruit – apps I had downloaded mindlessly for art, learning a language which I never even started a year ago – those type of things. Then I was left with the big ones. Instagram and Gmail. Before I deleted these two I made sure I could access them on my desktop – I mean – I needed to go easy on my compulsion. The apps I left on my phone are the ones I call “Functional day to day tools of life.” Some examples – Banking app, clock, my GPS and Pandora podcast. The jury has returned a verdict folks and here it is :
1.) My feelings of anxiety and restlessness have drastically gone down. Our constant checking is doing something to our nervous system folks. I do not have the expertise to speak on the impact to our flight or fight system and what not but all I know is I am feeling less pressured on a day to day basis. I am sleeping deeper. I am not worrying why the post I worked on so hard has only 5 likes and the one I barely spent time on has been liked 100times. I am not replaying the video I saw an hour before I went to bed. I am just sleeping because there is literally “nothing to see here.”
2.) My decision fatigue has gone way down. There is such a paradox in living in the information age. On one hand our lives are so enriched. We are so knowledgeable, we have accumulated a vast array of parenting hacks and styles – from gentle parenting to healing generational trauma, heck we can bake anything by logging in credits and time towards our You-tube University degree. Yet here we are; paralyzed with decision fatigue. The secret sauce I have learnt is take one thing. Just one thing and implement it. If you pay really close attention, most of the information we obtain from industry experts – they are for the most part saying the same thing in different styles and wording. Often we get caught in the container and packaging that we are missing to recognize that the cereal box is all fancy though its all Oatmeal inside. So the past two weeks I have been able to make simple decisions and execute. My close friends and family know how I am a huge procrastinator – however recently I have had more mental energy / space to think one thought at a time and and decide what next.
3.) I am more in control of how much and how long I stay on social media. Joe Hollier – Light phone told me during our conversation that during creation of apps in Silicon Valley – “The stickier the better.” In short – the more we can get peoples eye balls and index fingers to “stick around” the more successful an app is. I have found that since I did this phone stripping thing – it is usually only towards the end of the day that I log on to social media. What I have noticed is I spend waay less time and some days I have eveen forgotten about it. Maximum time I have spent in my evening Instagram browsing are about 20 – 30 minutes. There is just something awkward about browsing social media on a laptop or desktop PC. It is just not as fun nor does it draw you in as much. The stories are not as juicy for some reason.
4.) I have found myself writing more. Writing has always been my passion work. When I am not writing is usually when I know something is “off” The last few weeks I have engaged with my blog more consistently. I have had more time to think deeply about things. I have had space to create before I consume.
5.) I have engaged with human beings at a deeper level while out in the community. I remember last week at a doctors appointment. I was just sitting looking around. Can you imagine how awkward it is nowadays to “just be sitting around?” It feels like you are a creep. An older lady came in and she saw my eyes not glazed over a device and she sat right next to me and we started chatting. She shared about her life, her two grown kids and I shared about our families journey to Canada. Forget connecting with humans in the community, I am connecting on a much deeper level with the little humans I have been entrusted with as children to raise. I am not meeting their excited experiments with an “Oh that is nice.” I am laughing more deeply. Like a deep belly laugh when our six year old tells a silly knock knock joke. I think partially it has to do with shifting from that continuous partial attention (C.P.A) mode that finds me when I am in between scrolls to a deeper present attention.
So what next? What does it mean for a business owner / content creator who needs to be online and engaging with their audience to establish business growth? I really do not know. Is this sustainable? I even do not have the answer to that. But what I do know is I am learning to take one day at a time. Embrace one week at a time and so far – I like it here. Will you join me? My next post will go over some nuts and bolts of the how – even though really it is not much. It is more a mindset shift of realizing nothing changes if nothing changes.