How to live a well-lived life instead of a well-scrolled one

It’s almost been a month since you signed up to Reclaim your brain, and we’re now reaching the final stages of your coaching plan.

Have you been making progress? Remember – as Catherine has mentioned (and Rhik has proved) – no-one’s journey is a straight line. Feel free to go back to previous weeks’ tasks if you need to. This newsletter is a shame-free zone!

A couple of key things from the last few weeks to remember: you can’t waste time on apps if they’re not on your phone, and you can’t use your phone if it’s not constantly within reach. Be honest: have you deleted everything you need to yet? And did you get an alarm clock?

If you’re ready to continue, let’s jump into week four. Catherine will be helping you reflect on your progress and find more joy outside of your phone. Meanwhile, Rhik is finally starting to hit his stride – but can it last?

– Max Benwell, Reclaim your brain editor

Hi!

I’m Catherine Price, science journalist, coach of this newsletter series, and author of the “How to Feel Alive” newsletter and the book How to Break Up With Your Phone. Welcome back!

This week is our last official week of the challenge. We’re going to use it as a chance to reflect and make a plan for how to sustain a healthy relationship going forward.

I’ll also offer you a new, easy practice designed to help you increase your daily experience of joy and delight.

Last week, we worked on rebuilding our focus by experimenting with taking deliberate breaks from our phones. We then added attention-building practices such as meditation, reading, and just doing one thing at a time.

We’ve also been working to notice your phone cravings, and created physical boundaries between you and your device.

You’ve deleted your most problematic apps, exercised your muscles of attention, and repeatedly asked yourself what you want to be paying attention to.

Keep doing what you’ve been doing – and start a ‘delight’ practice

This is an idea I got from the poet Ross Gay, who spent a year writing an essay each day about something that delighted him, and then compiled a selection of these pieces into The Book of Delights.

A delight practice is quite simple: you make a point, as you go about your everyday life, to notice things that spark a moment of delight for you.

These could be anything – a beautiful cloud, a pretty flower, or even something funny or absurd. When you encounter it, you raise a finger in the air – and you announce, out loud and enthusiastically: “Delight!” (The out loud part is important, even if you are alone.)

If someone asks you what the heck you are doing, tell them about this practice and invite them to join you.

This might sound silly, but our brains are going to notice and pay attention to bad, scary things more than they are going to take note of the positive, because anything that sparks anxiety or fear could theoretically represent a physical threat that could kill you.

There’s actually an evolutionary benefit, in other words, to being high-strung. A delight practice is a great way to begin to retrain your brain to focus on the positive aspects of life.

The practice of noticing and labelling delights is even more effective (and fun) if you do it with other people. So invite someone else to join you – and if you don’t regularly see them in person, consider starting a delight text chain together (this is actually an excellent use of your phone) in which you share photos and anecdotes of things that delight you.

Note that even young kids can participate – I’ve done this with my own daughter since she was about five – we keep a “jar of delights” on our dining room table and try to add a few each week and it is, well, delightful. (I even have a group “delight” chat with readers of my newsletter – feel free to join us!)

No human relationship is ever perfect, and the same is true when it comes to our relationships with our phones.

There are always going to be times when you backslide, and that’s okay. The important thing to keep in mind is that you now have the tools to notice when this is happening – and to get yourself back on track.

You now have four weeks’ worth of Reclaim your brain newsletters you can revisit, take notes from, screenshot and share with friends – whatever helps you stick to your plan.

Next week, I’ll check in with you one last time to see how you’re doing and share some additional resources that might be useful. See you then!

To scrolling less and living more,

Catherine Price

PS: Are you finding this challenge helpful? Share it with a friend!

Last week, Rhik’s attempt to get off his phone made some progress as he met a woman he’s romantically interested in. For his next step, he turns to a pedometer

I’m dog-sitting with my friend Tom. Let’s chew the fat, I say, the way people did before phones. “About what?” he replies. I hadn’t thought this far ahead.

What was the hundred years war? I eventually manage. How could a war last a hundred years? Tom offers to look it up. I throw up my hands. I was trying to revive the lost art of conversation. “This isn’t a conversation,” he says, already on his phone. “It was a series of Anglo-French conflicts in the Middle Ages. They actually lasted more than a hundred years.”

The decline of conversation is often blamed on Google, and the ability to fact-check anything in seconds. But Tom actually uses DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t collect user data. Results aren’t quite as relevant as Google, he explains, but inconvenience is a small price to pay for privacy. I’m not so sure.

Keeping the mantra in mind – “what gets measured, gets managed” – I decide to start my day with a walk in the park. Instead of scrolling in bed wasting the morning, I want to walk 10,000 steps a day: 45 minutes in the morning, then 45 to close my working day.

My offline friend E has, in his words, “reinvented the mixtape”. He hands me a digital radio, which he has pre-loaded with 5,000 curated songs on a memory disc, to be played at random.

This is light years away from Spotify where, in the face of unlimited choice, I often blank and play the last album I listened to again. The thing about convenience is, it’s sometimes nice not to choose.

Knowing my phone is out of reach, my senses wake up differently. The objects in my room swim into clarity, and I have a strange feeling of being returned to my life.

But it’s not a fairytale. Many of the objects in my room look tired, unglamorous. I have the heavy sense of being a person in a place, anchored to circumstance. This is the lumpen reality beneath the infinite fantasy of our phones. I don’t love it. My screen time creeps up again.

I have lost no work checking my emails twice a day; in fact it’s made me more productive. I don’t want to check in twice a day with texts though.

Part of the joy of messaging is repartee, the back and forth banter. I can’t conference call my friends to do this. But checking in feels administrative. I still can’t think of a way to be on my phone less, without losing the sparky daily contact with my friends.

I’ve been speaking every day on the phone with Almond, my new dating interest. I’m not as funny as on text. I also don’t have to be, which is a revelation.

Things are going well. My social media use has dropped to about 90 minutes a day. Morning walking has replaced scrolling. I buy a pedometer, and determine to leave my phone at home.

We haven’t had smartphones very long, yet it’s impossible to remember who we were without them. I find that amnesia disturbing. This loops in friendship, relationships, work and leisure, but most far-reaching of all, our sense of ourselves.

As Coach Catherine promised, this now becomes the question underpinning everything. Who am I without distraction, and what is my life for? I honestly have no idea. And so I devise one final, make or break experiment, that will give me an answer.

Next week: Rhik goes to a cabin in the woods in a last-ditch attempt to escape his phone demons. Meanwhile, read his full diary entry for this week here.