my phone is making me dumb

is yours too?

a blurry picture I suspect I took when I did not have time to finish writing the notes in class so I vowed to add them later (probably never did)

I sat down to write about my dream last night and this came out instead. I figured I would share it with you, because it even surprised me how much I had to say about this!

First, I want to say that I had a pretty significant and visceral realization last night. I was getting a massage, something I had not done in a while. It was alright, but what was noticeable to me was how much I felt like it was giving my mind a break by just not using my phone, not letting myself be stimulated. It got me thinking about how embarrassing it is to consider how hard it feels to focus now. How I feel like I hardly read anymore because my attention span is so fried. How it really is challenging for me to intentionally disconnect myself from technology. I was thinking about how one of the primary “value adds” of some of my favourite forms of self care are that they just unplug me and keep me away from my phone for a few hours: time with friends, going to othership, doing pilates, getting a massage… these things, above all else, simply take me away from distractions and connect me to myself.

I then thought about how perverse this is: how much I want to be growing and learning. Getting smarter, sharper, healthier, and how I am blunting my brain with this hopeless consumption of a bunch of thoughts that do not belong to me, that I will surely forget tomorrow, if not in the next few minutes…

It felt embarrassing to sit with just how misaligned this behaviour is.

I recently started to leave my phone at home when I go places; it is the most effective way I have found to moderate my ability to distract myself with it. And in those moments, when I am sitting in a café, trying to write, and I get bored or the thought stream slows and a stretch of nothingness opens in the absence of new ideas clawing to get out of me, I watch my hand reach into my bag! Yes! My hand reaches into my bag for my phone (which is not there!) as though it is a phantom limb, there to pacify my mind when I am bored or uncomfortable with the mental silence and space that emerges when I am trying to sit with something and really focus.

back when i was smart

This brought to mind the times when I felt like my mind was the sharpest, when the world stored on my phone felt boring in comparison to what my mind was engaged in.

It feels clear to me that I was my mentally smartest/sharpest when I was studying mathematics. I remember how much of a lifestyle shift I would go through in university when I began studying for exams. It was like I became a new person. When I was in high school, studying used to be pretty reasonable. You read the material a few times, you did some practice problems, and you were pretty much set. This changed when I started journeying deeper into the world of applied mathematics, though. It only took me a few midterms of getting absolutely humbled to realize that the way I needed to approach the metabolism of information in this new “type” of academia was entirely different. I needed to digest concepts instead of just inhaling them. I needed to understand instead of just memorizing. And to have the mental bandwidth to really do that, I needed patience. I needed attention! I needed a healthy, sharp, unstimulated mind. The biggest change I needed to make, then, was that I had to learn how to really focus when it came time to study.

I had a whole set of rituals for it. I would wake up early, pack my food for the entire day, wear a million layers because it was always cold on the fourth floor of the library where I would station myself for the next fourteen hours. I would get there as early as possible to make sure I got my favourite spot. I would arrive with all of my notes and problem sets printed and stapled, ready to begin the dive. I would write out my own version of the notes, highlighting and underlining and repeating examples and problems until my mind finally started to understand these complex mechanisms that felt like pure gibberish at first.

I remember that in the early days of my exam studying, transitioning to this level of immersion in dense information was extremely painful. My attention would do anything to squirm away from the task at hand. It would thrash against the limitations I had set for myself. I would set these two-hour long timers which turned my phone into a useless brick as I dove into the material. At the end of those sprints, I would get up, walk around, get some water, maybe have a snack. Perhaps check my phone, without a real interest in what I would find there (because it seemed boring when I was stimulating my mind with real concepts and information!)

And then I would repeat the process. I would put in 10 focused hours on my best days. But when first transitioning into this routine, four, or even two, was incredibly challenging. It was like I was completely transforming the way my mind applied itself, consumed things, understood them. It was almost like… I had developed a new mind by the end of the process.

I would eventually reach a sense of flow with the material, where it felt like I was in dialogue with it. I would think about it, dream about it, wonder about it. Eventually, I would actually be enjoying it.

I would go swimming in the middle of my study day as a break — it was the most efficient workout I could fit in at the time, and I found that the (again: unstimulated!) 30-60 minute block where it was just me and my mind, and my unconscious processing whatever I had just learned, really solidified and synthesized information in an almost dream-like way. When I returned to my notes after swimming laps for the better part of an hour, it was like my mind had flushed the material I had consumed earlier into all of the right places, and there was a clean slate to consume new stuff through.

I remember that, towards the end of my studying stretch, I would always be kind of sad to close up my studying for the course. Because right as the exam would be approaching, I was finally starting to really get it. The studying was starting to not feel like work. Less painful, embarrassing, humbling, and more fun: because I was finally starting to understand the material! Writing this out now, it makes me wonder if I had just cleansed my brain of all the garbage I was letting into it before those days of intense learning, and this sense of euphoric connection to the material might have also just been stemming from experiencing a cleaner, more present mind?

can i be smart again?

I am starting to wonder what would happen if I did a stimulation cleanse now, and made my mind that healthy, that attentive and resilient once more. I must say that I am glorifying this process a little bit. It wasn’t just a stimulation fast, it really was quite stressful and intense at the time. Through some combination of having to solve really hard, intellectually demanding problems and metabolizing so much information in such a short period of time with a clear end goal (passing the course, lol), I was kept in a sort of persistent state of fight or flight for a couple of weeks straight. This is not something I would exactly advise for anyone trying to sustainably learn something for more than just a ten day sprint (I always got sick after exams and slept for like 10-12 hours a day afterwards… sometimes having nightmares? as my body came out of this trance-like focus state).

But what I am curious about is what it would look like to do this kind of deep learning and mental sharpening healthily, consciously, now.

Part of why I am writing this all out is because it feels like fiction to me. Because I feel so far from my ability to do this. I know I have it in me, of course. But I am a little bit shocked at how fried my brain feels, probably like much of the modern world’s (though not everyone, because the people sharing their 100+-books-read-this-year-lists seem to certainly be finding a way out of this trap). And that makes me sad! Remorseful. Frustrated.

I always say that the best thing that my degree gave me was this sense that I could do pretty much anything. That probably nothing else I did would ever be as hard as getting through some of those courses. Several years later, this holds true. It turns out that most of life’s actual challenges are indeed not nearly as humbling as a stochastic processes course.

What these brutal study-exam-stress-stretches did show me, though, is what I am actually capable of when I really apply myself. They pushed me to limits I did not know I could reach, and taught me things I initially retreated from in fear. Part of this awareness, of what I can actually do with several days of focused work and intention, is the pain of knowing how much I am not doing that anymore.

And, as I laid on the massage table, realizing that part of why my body was craving this was because my mind just needed a break from being able to even reach for my phone, I felt a shudder of awareness of just how much dumber I am making myself from having my phone around me all the time. Dumb sounds like a harsh word, I know, but I also think it is the right one. Because when I think of the ludicrousness of allowing my phone to pull me away from any moment I am in (especially the uncomfortable ones!) to stimulate me with just about anything that happens to be there, I really question how exactly I have been letting this happen persistently for so long.

I am a sensitive person. I feel things deeply. Really deeply. I need to be careful about who I am around because if I am not vigilant, I will just absorb their emotional experience as my own. And here I am, carelessly carrying around this constant, unrelenting hyper-regulation device that allows me to feel the most intense experiences being felt by humans all over the world, instantly, at any moment in time, not even consciously! Any time I touch it, I risk falling into a portal of distraction, despair, rage or confusion, that takes actual work to get out of. How dumb is that?!

Whenever I take breaks from my phone, I feel how much cleaner my mind is. How much it feels like it is my own experience animating my awareness, instead of having all of this gunk to clean out that doesn’t belong to me. Gunk that I allow in by reaching for my phone in a moment where I probably don’t want to feel what I am feeling myself.

~ moderation ~

Anyway, I won’t bore you by continuing to make this an anti-phone manifesto. Obviously there are good things to this device, such as this whole career I have found myself in, and the ability for you and I to be connecting in this moment via these pixels. But I feel an urgent urge to restructure my relationship with this thing. I want to be the girl that can sit on the fourth floor of the library for ten hours straight and digest a whole complex numbers course in a day or two. Not because I want to channel my life force towards becoming a complex numbers expert (respect to those who do, though) but because I want to feel that feeling, that rush of deep understanding and confidence and intellectual adrenaline, where I am amazed at what my brain can do. Because having the stamina and focus and dedication to do such a thing would make me a superhuman, compared to what I feel like I can do with my attention now. And what a privilege it is to have a functioning brain that can do these things! That is what really gets me!!! Like: I have this supercomputer in my skull that can learn and store the whole of human history if I choose to feed it that, and instead I am simulating it with someone’s half-baked thoughts that really should never have had the right to enter my mind. No more.

At least, that is my intention, for this year. To really figure out how to relate to technology in a way that is truly, earnestly additive. I love sharing here. Really, I do. I love connecting with people, with those who enjoy my work, with my clients. I love watching the odd video, listening to music, reading things that are interesting to me. But whatever this time is that I am spending half-numbing my experience by just picking up my phone and spinning the roulette wheel by letting it decide what to put in my precious, powerful mind is just not something I can allow myself to justify anymore.

Also, scrolling is boring. A good book, an interesting article, a juicy writing session, a plain old BOREDOM SESSION, is actually way more interesting than scrolling on your phone, or doing whatever else we do to keep ourselves pacified, spiritually speaking. So, feel free to join me in this intention to become more conscious on the phone-front, and let us ascend to the heights of focus and discipline that my fourth-floor-studying-self once stimulus fasted her way towards out of pure necessity. We can do it. At least, I feel like I need to do it. Otherwise, what am I doing with this precious life I’ve been given?

Oh, and I guess I’ll tell you about that dream I had some other time.

links to learn more about my work:

• 1-1 Clarity Coaching: figure out what you truly want out of life and start taking action towards it. A good time to explore this with new year / fresh start energy ripe and available for us to harness!

• Men to Kings: 1-1 coaching for men based on the four key masculine archetypes: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, to cultivate balance, alignment and direction in your life.

• Creative Liberation: my course to help you unblock yourself, act on your ideas, and share your gifts and creativity with the world.

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Let me know how your phone makes you feel + if you’ve found any effective moderation tools you’d like to share with those in need (moi):

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