Five Hours Without Screens: Difficulty Level, Impossible
Jedidiah Jenkins (a person I cannot find without searching for “Jeremiah Johnson” first on Instagram) posted a little five-part series about how to get off your phone during the month of May, and one of his tips was to light a candle and spend that time without screens. I did this to round out my week of following a content-creating neuroscientist’s tips on how to get off of our phones, which resulted in my reduction of screen time from 7 hours to just under 4! This is exciting, by the way.
The changes that made the biggest differences for me in terms of how long I spent on my phone each day included:
- not opening it first thing in the morning
- turning on my do-not-disturb feature (honestly I’m not even sure how I did it) which blocks me from all apps except for messages and clock from 10pm to 7am
- only checking socials 3 times a day (including for work), and
- not opening it while I eat.
- I also happened to turn off all notifications, including messages, for my home screen, and
- turned off the lift-to-turn-on feature, so even if I pick it up, it won’t light up and trigger my stupid little lizard brain.
Sometimes I hear people say things like that they shouldn’t have to rely on a third-party tool (like Brick) to control their stupid little lizard brains (omg imagine if I wrote brians, lol, imagine a stupid little lizard named Brian). But to that I say: your brain chemistry is worth so much and is so powerful and inscrutable that there are billion dollar industries based on hijacking it–and it shouldn’t be your frontal lobe’s responsibility to figure out how to overcome the entire attention economy.
I’m old enough to remember what it was like before we were on our phones all day. I remember picking my skin late at night instead of going to sleep, or doing a whole face of makeup just to wash it off, or sitting in bed while studying abroad in France and planning to tweeze every hair out of my legs and seeing if they wouldn’t grow back. Or I would have the most unhinged intrusive thoughts about random people I knew which often included convincing myself why and that they didn’t like me. This week I discovered that I’m still capable of all of this, so it’s not like getting offline automatically results in some golden nuggets of wisdom or reflection or blissful contemplation or even particularly nice thoughts.
There’s a competing ideology (think Atomic Habits) that asks us how we can make our tech addictions serve us: can we scroll while we walk on the treadmill, for example, or watch TV on our little special screen while we wash dishes? Then there’s another idea, [re]introduced to me by the Cyber Celibate, Tiffany Nguyen, which asks: how little can we do at a time? I do remember one Lent, a long time ago, where I gave up multitasking because I had developed a nasty habit of checking my email while stopped at red lights. Not only are the actual productivity benefits of multitasking suspect, but also, what if our lives were about something other than productivity? I think after 5 years of keeping myself constantly mentally busy that I kind of forgot about the concept of spacing out. I think of doing nothing with my brain as an undeserved luxury, or maybe just a nonstarter–I don’t even consider it an option. If I’m not listening to an audiobook, I’m watching a YouTube video or going through my saved videos on Instagram while I drive to work, brush my teeth, cook dinner, and do virtually every task of every day. But recently I’ve found myself choosing to sit in silence on my hour-long commute, or just listening to instrumental music on the radio. I think my brain can’t really take it anymore.
Here’s a noncomprehensive list of things I did in 5 hours with no screens on a Saturday and a 3-day weekend with just 2.5 hours of phone screen time per day:
Watched Glen Powell’s leftist dipytch (The Running Man and How to Make A Killing; it’s really more of a Venn Diagram when you include the movie Hitman in this: Glen Powell killing people on the left with Hitman, Glen Powell starring in social commentary films about modern wealth inequality on the right with The Running Man, How to Make A Killing in the middle).
Finished setting up my raised garden beds.
Mended my torn couch cushions, brushed all of the cat hair out of the carpet runner on my stairs.
Rearranged the furniture in my kitchen.
Pet my cat with both hands and got to just think about how silky her fur is and how delicate her head is.
Laid in bed and listened to an audiobook and marveled at the school chimney I can see from our bedroom window and the birds that fly around it, making it look like an artsy European print at a home goods store.
Wrote this blog post!–something I haven’t done in about eight years.
Read one book and listened to another one and they each made me cry for basically 18 hours in a row.
Started updating my built-in bookcase.
It felt like I was emotionally defrosting, and honestly, it felt sort of similar to when I stopped drinking for a year. I wonder if I’ve been using scrolling as my main means of numbing out to whatever the current reality is, be it boredom or terror or exhaustion or frustration.
If I’m not constantly doing at least two things at a time, and certainly if one of those two things doesn’t involve a screen that tethers to the outside virtual world, maybe I can: a) actually decompress, as opposed to just constantly compressing forever; b) focus on what I’m actually called to do in my life instead of just always getting distracted by the next possibility; c) grow a brain.