Curbing the phone scanning habit

in unexpected ways

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl

Viktor Frankl wrote this, and then decades later, along came cell phones.

These past few weeks, I’ve reverted to compulsively picking up my phone to check email and texts—and the weather. (I scroll weather forecasts like they’re Instagram.) I’ll do this even when it’s inefficient or physically ridiculous: I recently found myself googling a restaurant to make dinner reservations during an outdoor interval run. I realized things were bad when my morning journaling time started to become 80% phone time and 20% staring at a blank page. Desperate to get back to a better start to my days, I cracked open The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad of

The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad

. It’s a book full of journaling prompts with beautiful lead ins, which have shaken things up for me in the best of ways.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

My favorite journaling prompt so far said to set a timer for five minutes, do absolutely nothing, and then write about it. During those five minutes, I noticed I’d be focusing on something mundane but pretty, like the way a light spring rain makes string of pearls along the telephone wires, when my pulse would speed up out of nowhere. And with the increased heartrate came a pull to my phone. But because of the timer, this urge felt like it was happening in slower motion, and I could curb it until something else in the real world caught my attention again. Later that day, I noticed myself being able to avoid picking up my phone for longer.

I’ve had other opportunities to practice doing nothing during my three-year-old daughter Noa’s night wake ups. Over the past eight months, what we thought was a “sleep regression” turned into “troubles,” which turned into “the new normal.” One night a week or so these days, she’s up for hours at a time in the night. Laying with her while she tries to sleep has given me lots of chances to observe what goes on inside when I am not picking up my phone. Which I’m often tempted to do, but in the middle of the night, my heavy eyelids won’t let me.

Noa is so earnest during these wake ups. She’s not playing. She’s not talking, or at least not much. She’s trying to sleep and can’t. We try to keep it low pressure: I play meditations, and I scratch her back until my forearm gives out. We do nothing for hours.

Emerging from our bonding over the “troubles,” Noa has started giving me a stuffed animal to sleep with each night. It’s been an unexpected comfort, so much so that I’ve started sleeping with it whether I’m in her room or mine. What I need most when I’m tempted to pull out my phone, I’ve noticed, is creature comfort. A hug. A stretch. The five deep breaths I never want to take. Or, lately, a well-loved stuffed animal tucked under my chin.

Look for the next Creative Sort on Friday, May 23