Creating a life that's worth putting your phone down for

Lessons from parenting applied to adult life.

Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash

Hey you,

I want to talk today about that gnarly topic of the effect of screens on modern life and the way we live, work and create today.

I have been chatting a lot about this recently with my good pal

Claire Venus

and she is going to be diving into the topic too over the next couple of weeks, so why not check her out if you’re not subscribed to her already?

Let’s start this opinion piece with a story involving my teenager. Like most parents, my husband and I seemed to be in a constant battle with our son about his use of screens; what he was using them for and how long.

We’ve had so many different sets of rules and boundaries but enforcing them and monitoring them were so exhausting. There were ongoing arguments, so many discussions and also for me, so much internal dialogue about my anxieties of raising a kid who, despite our best intentions, seemed to be in danger of growing up to be a person with no real interests and passions.

It was also very clear that too much screen time vastly affected his ability to be calm, kind and pleasant to be around and that this behaviour was making everyone unhappy including himself, because he didn’t want the negative side effects either. But he also seemed to want to spend as much time as possible online despite this. Frustrating!

During one less heated conversation, where I tried to have a more curious discussion about his behaviours and attitudes to his screen use, the answer revealed itself; he seemed to have completely lost the ability to engage in other activities or to plan other things to do. he just didn’t seem to see anything else as fun anymore. The easy entertainment and numb-ability of TV and games seemed to have blotted everything else out.

We talked about things that he used to enjoy doing (and still did just to a lesser extent, such as reading, cooking, birdwatching, playing boardgames and running) and we decided to try something new.

Instead of restricting screen time, we would add in other things. There would be a different kind of agreement, not about the time he spent online and what he was doing there, but about the amount of time spent engaging with the world in other ways. He can now access his devices with no real restrictions (other than nothing after bedtime or in early morning before school) but he just needed to commit to other activities alongside.

What we were doing was helping him to create a life that was worth putting his phone and iPad down for.

I must admit after all of our various ‘systems’ over the last 3-4 years, I didn’t have a huge amount of faith that this would work, but a month later, the difference is significant. He’s spending his time very differently and whilst there’s still a bit too much screen time in my opinion, and he doesn’t always behave well, the atmosphere in the house is much better, there’s less friction, he seems happier and more relaxed as a person and he’s enjoying how he spends his time more. He’s sticking to the programme of alternative activities and is often choosing to do more offline activity that we expected of him and even actively suggesting spending time together as a family which has been nothing short of joyful for me. He’s also reading a lot, getting through a book a week easily.

And all of this got me wondering.

Adults, like teenagers, have unhealthy relationships with their phones and other digital devices. Since the rise of the smartphone, social media and messaging and 24/7 email, many of us have allowed this aspect of our life to slowly take over - and if you don’t believe me, stop reading this and check out the average screen time report on your phone and then consider and add in the other ways that you consume digital content over a week, shows on Netflix for example or time spent on YouTube, time on your iPad and laptop..

This usually makes people feel uncomfortable. It’s almost always more than we thought.

Did you do it? How did it feel? Once I realised I was spending 15.2 days a year on instagram (that’s just 1 hour a day people), it was enough to get a grip. I deleted the app and now I just install it quickly every day or so to post, catch up for 5 mins with other people and then delete once more.

I dare you to pick your screen related guilty pleasure of choice and work out how many days a year you are doing that - you’ll be amazed.

Many of us are in a daily battle with ourselves, much as we were as parents with our son, to limit our screen time, only to discover that it’s very hard to do because everything has been designed to keep our attention, to give us little hits of dopamine.

We delete addictive apps only to reinstall them. We swear off a certain game, only to find ourselves playing it again days later.

We promise ourselves that on that weekend away or holiday we will have a digital detox and come offline - but often we don’t.

Even during time we should be working on our businesses, or writing and creating, we allow ourselves to use or phones to procrastinate. We tell ourselves that or online lives are important to our business or creative work when deep down I think most of us are starting to realise that’s not wholly true - and that it certainly shouldn’t be getting in the way of the work itself.

And I wonder if what was true for my son might be true for us too; in order to REALLY get control of this, we need to create lives and work that are worth putting our phones down for.

In my recent article about the concept of Vorfreude, I talk about the satisfaction of not just anticipating joy, which is what vorfreude means, but how when you do start to engage with this idea, you realise that you have to plan the joyful things in order to anticipate them. They don’t just spontaneously appear.

Without planning, our evenings and weekends can easily get wasted. We can be so tired from all the working and caring for others that we do, that an evening of surfing and scrolling becomes inevitable as we haven’t taken time to plan to spend our free time in any other way. But if we only have a few hours to devote to our own joy and wellbeing a week, is this really how we want to spend them?

Tonight I already know that I am going to:

• Make homemade pizza and enjoy eating it with my family

• Play a couple of games of Ticket To Ride

• Go to bed at 10pm with a cup of camomile and a book I have just started and can’t wait to read more of (All The Broken Places by John Boyne since you ask).

Not only do I get the vorfreude of this, I get to enjoy it in the moment AND there will be little to no time for me to be on my phone or to watch TV. Without this kind of planning my evening could easily look different.

At no point when I am planning little moments of joy for my day and week, do I decide that scrolling instagram or looking at the BBC news app will be one of them.

No one’s perfect lazy Sunday morning reads; Get out of bed, make coffee, eat pancakes, spend two hours doom scrolling social media and obsessively checking my email.

By being intentional and planning your free time, you can largely avoid such things.

It’s easy to ignore social media when you’re engrossed in a good book and your phone is placed in another room.

You can’t watch Netflix if you’re enjoy pottering about the garden or on a walk.

The need to check your phone is not as strong when you’re having fun playing a board game with your children or enjoying a deep and meaningful with your partner or bestie

And surely no-one prefers an hour on their phone to one spent immersed in their favourite craft or hobby.

So that’s our free time. But what about our work?

In work time, it can feel harder to be mindful of our digital habits, as many of us use our devices to do our jobs. A certain amount of social media and messaging is essential. It’s also much easier to get distracted in the name of ‘research’ than it is to do the hard work of, well, work!

With the addictive nature of social media, our perceived need to check emails and messages, we need to create systems that enable us to take a break from them if we want to do real, deep work. We can’t just leave it to chance.

In work life, our attention and time is our most valuable asset, it’s the best thing we have to offer ourselves and others and we really need to appreciate that.

I use the freedom app to help me with distractions and really recommend as a way of removing access to websites etc that have a hold on you.

But it’s not all dealing with distractions. We also need to create a working and creative life that’s worth putting our phones down for.

We need to be brave enough to do work that feels so good and important and right for us, that hiding in scrolling and surfing becomes a nonsense. We need to get into a flow state as often as we can.

We have to work towards creating working lives that we enjoy so much we simply become engrossed in them. Indistractable.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. How can you create more of a life worth putting your phone down for? Where are you currently allowing screens to take over? And just what DID happen when you peeked at the screen time calculator in your phone settings?

With love,

Sarah x

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