The Unfiltered — No Capacity
What I noticed after three weekends of turning my phone off, completely.
For three weekends in a row, I have been turning my phone off completely.
Yes, completely.
Friday evening, around 6-9pm. Back on Sunday morning, around 6-9am.
So, roughly 36 to 39 hours, every weekend.
Some things I have noticed:
The first weekend was hard and uncomfortable.
By the second one, my body started looking forward to it.
By the third, I did not want to turn it back on.
My sleep got deeper.
My attention span came back.
I could actually be with the people in front of me, instead of half-listening with one hand on my phone.
I’ve been reading more.
I’ve been spending more time in nature.
I sat outside one Saturday morning and did absolutely nothing for forty-five minutes and felt no urgency to move.
The thing that surprised me most:
how deeply uncomfortable the stillness was at first.
We have built lives that have NO CAPACITY to sit still and be with ourselves.
The minute we are not doing something, we reach for our phones.
The phone is not the problem, though. It is the symptom.
The problem is that we have outsourced everything the body was designed to do on its own — regulate its nervous system, tolerate boredom, notice hunger, feel a feeling all the way through — to a device that is engineered to interrupt every one of those processes before they complete.
We have built lives around a technology that ensures we never fully rest, never fully digest, never fully arrive.
Three weekends in, the discomfort is gone.
I genuinely look forward to it.
And, what is left is the quality of my attention, the clarity of my thinking, and the spaciousness to actually hear my own thoughts and feel my feelings.
If you have not done this yet, do it.
If this hit, I’d love to know: have you ever done this? Or, if you have not, what is the first thing that comes up when you think about turning your phone off for 36 hours straight? The fear, the excuse, the list of reasons it is impossible? Let me know in the comments. I read and reply to every response.
If you’re ready to address the actual terrain rather than layer more inputs onto a system that hasn’t been cleared, I’m currently taking a very limited number of new 1:1 coaching clients. Book your client intake call.
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Amen!
Love this, Meghan.