A book on mindful phone use gave me a month a year back! (check my maths below )
Our phones are designed to addict us but Catherine Price’s book, ‘How to break up with your phone – a 30-day plan’, gave me the focus to turn my smartphone from a temptation into a tool that I use far more consciously. Her book is succinct, hugely readable and full of mindfulness. ‘The problem isn’t smartphones themselves. The problem is our relationship with them. We’ve never stopped to think about which features of our phones make us feel good, and which make us feel bad. We’ve never stopped to think about why smartphones are so hard to put down, or who might be benefiting when we pick them up. Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself a chance to stop and think.’ ~Catherine Price In the words of Annie Dillard, ‘How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives’ What do you want to spend your attention and energy on? *As the pandemic took hold in 2020, I found myself scrolling social media and checking news apps a lot more than usual and this quickly became a new habit, or perhaps more accurately a compulsion. I’m sure I am not alone but I really didn’t like it. My settings showed I was spending more than 2 hours a day on my phone. Apparently, this is about average for Brits, although recently I read a BBC article claiming that people now spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on their mobile phone apps! Having worked my way through Catherine’s book, I’m now sitting at around 1 hour’s phone use a day and that feels a much healthier balance for me personally. By my reckoning that’s one hour a day that I have claimed back, so 365 hours a year. Let’s say I am awake and in fully functioning mode for 12 hours a day? 365 hours would equate to 30 ‘awake’ days. A month a year! I’m intent on choosing more consciously how I spend that time…
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AuthorI'm Claire - and I (re)learn something every day from practising and teaching mindfulness... Archives
March 2022
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