low phone diet: 14 days // halfway point update.
14 days ago I began my "Low Phone Diet" (LPD) the idea being to radically reduce my cell phone usage. This has been a big change for me in the way I experience life.
Here is the LPD Protocol:
- Keep the phone off all the time - not just silent or airplane, off
- Three times per day, you can turn the phone on for 20 mins. (these should be spaced as evenly as possible the idea is morning / afternoon / night)
- If a phone call goes past 20 minutes, you can finish the call. No using the phone for other stuff during that time (texting or browsing apps etc). After the call, turn off the phone.
At the start of this experiment I felt excited and nervous. The excitement was to pay more attention to the real world around me. The nervousness was because I felt like I would somehow cause a trainwreck at home or at work by leaving my phone off during a critical moment.
Idea vs. Reality
In my head, the problem was that everybody else might get mad at me for some reason.
In reality, the problem is me being addicted to my cell phone. Apparently I am just always trying to stare at the cell phone no matter what is going on.
With my phone off most of the time, nothing bad has happened in the first two weeks. I have not missed any shifts or pissed off anybody. I haven't gotten lost without GPS and haven't had any emergency calls to make. My conversations IRL are better than ever for not having my phone to distract me.
At first I even felt my mind restoring some kind of natural neurological equilibrium.
Not looking at a screen all day had a way of making me feel more normal, less prone to anxiety or random trains of thought that go nowhere. I was just experiencing the flow of life, pure as it comes.
That effect faded after the first few days as I started to use my laptop a lot more, filling in space where the phone had been. This is not good! I will need to a "Low Technology Diet" that includes the laptop to take it to the next level.
Overall getting the phone out of my moment-to-moment life has been a great thing. Everything has changed. I am paying more attention to things that matter. This feels like a valuable mindfulness exercise and one that has more lessons yet to reveal to me.
