healthmedicinet

Day 5, Monday

I seemed to have weakened my hold on this practice, as I found myself walking outside my bedroom after going to bed on Sunday, at 2 a.m. to check my phone’s activity. This felt particularly shameful and counterintuitive — I was supposed be having deeper REM cycles, not stumbling through my apartment with my eyes half-closed to check my texts.

After going back to bed device-free, I was happy to wake up to my alarm clock on this dark Monday morning. It was hard enough to get out of bed without the added distraction of having my phone within arm’s reach. Sure enough, I arrived at work at the time I always aspire to (9:30) but rarely am able.

I usually spend Monday nights watching “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” and not being social. But knowing that my phone-use would have an expiration time, I felt inspired to go out and interact with the humans I’d otherwise be texting. This felt like progress!

Day 6, Tuesday

I slept incredibly well. In the morning, I noticed that, for the first time, I didn’t have an impulse to reach over and check my phone immediately upon opening my eyes. I was into that!

I’d come to find that waking up to countless texts and emails was sometimes exhausting, but putting my phone away five minutes after checking missed activity helped managed the anxiety level. 

I bought the book The Empathy Exams to replace before-bed phone time. I recommend this essay collection!

The more I started to recognize the merits of unplugging at night, the more I recognized the trouble with my phone habits during the day. At work I’d usually have my phone charging right beside me, not unlike while I slept at home. My phone lighting up throughout the work day was almost as harmful as at night, I came to see, as it prevented me from being able to do tasks in an uninterrupted fashion.

Day 7, Wednesday

By this time, I was used to sleeping with my phone in the living room — so I kicked things up a notch. I tried keeping my phone in my bag for the entire day, even while at work. I was on email all day, so I was still reachable, but I wanted to liberate myself from another channel of communication, and this was an obvious way to do it.

Other than a friend getting antsy about what Barry’s Bootcamp we should sign up for over the weekend, I emerged completely unscathed from a day of no texting. I wondered why it took me so long to do this, and — even more frighteningly — why I have a phone at all. 

Okay, so I need the map function to get around the city, but that should require no more than an hour of daily phone use. New goal: to use my phone for only an hour a day. Now if I could only try to institute that before 2017.