Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my relationship with my phone. I find that if I have an excellent relationship (or a terrible relationship) with something, then I tend not to dwell on it so much. But my relationship with my phone is ambivalent, and those are the most fascinating relationships.
My phone provides me with many good things. I can text with family and friends from another country and time zone. I can find profound discussions of pressing topics in podcasts. I can laugh about memes or funny videos. I can find inspiration on various social media platforms. I can meet new people.
But I also found before that I’m a little addicted to my phone and need to check it every few minutes. There’s also the question of how good it is for my mental health that I can watch horrific things happening in another country. It’s a privilege that I can ignore these things, even for an hour. But bearing witness to trauma without being able to do anything about it is a recipe for learned helplessness and depression. Even without traumatic content, there’s the question of attention training. My phone trained me to seek a new stimulus in decreasing time intervals, so my sustained attention suffers. Studies show that I’m not the only one experiencing this effect.
So, I’m back to turning off notifications throughout the morning. What I’d like to do is try to spend the morning without any connection to the internet. I have many excuses for why that won’t be a good idea. I use the internet for research–from finding sources to brainstorming ideas with the AI.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to put my phone away more. To walk without listening to a podcast, to read a physical book (or on a Kindle in flight mode) without looking up words or checking a particular stat. For example, I use the focus feature to silence all notifications except from close family all morning. The idea isn’t that I would never use the internet or the phone. From a practical point of view, there’s no difference between someone who doesn’t know how to read and someone who just doesn’t read. In the same way, not using the internet isn’t something I aspire to do. But I’ve been trying to find more times to be offline.
I would love to tell you that my brain has been 39% sharper since I started using the focus feature. I haven’t been experimenting that precisely with this. But it’s easier to sit and read for an hour now than a month ago. I look for the phone less and can focus on the book I’m reading more. But that could be just having better tools. I still feel overwhelmed most of the time, especially when I look at my todo app, which currently contains 622 items– down from 707 items last week, so I’m actually quite impressed with myself. But that’s a topic for another post.
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