March 4, 2022: National Day of Unplugging
It’s been about three hours since I turned my phone back on for the first time in just over 24 hours. At 5:09 PM on March 4th, I turned my phone off to observe the National Day of Unplugging. I haven’t spent this long without my phone turned on and within 50 feet of me since backpacking with my dad in 2014. That weeklong trip marked the seventh summer in a row where I spent a week in the woods backpacking without my phone or any screened technology (except a digital camera). Of the many lessons I learned on these trips, the benefit of being away from technology was one of the most potent.
As soon as I turned off my phone yesterday, I tucked it in my backpack and forgot about it.
This was liberating. I was able to put my entire focus on the people I was with and be present in the moment. I think about this in my normal life anyway, but with some physical separation from my phone I was able to experience the urge to take out my phone and check something and realize it’s not an option.
This weekend I was in the Boston area with some of my friends and was where I spent my 24 hours unplugged. My favorite part of the 24 hours was traveling to and being in a city without a phone. How novel! When was the last time you traveled by car somewhere without your phone in the car with you? I am hooked.
I found it much less difficult to be in a city without a phone than I expected. I did rely on my friends’ phones at a particular restaurant with exclusively electronic menus and ordering (thank you, buddies). Throughout the evening, I had some interesting conversations with my friends about the relationships we have with our phones and other screened devices. I learned more about their Screen Time stats and most of them were actually aware of these numbers - I saw a range of an impressively low 2.5 hours a day all the way up to 7 hours and 56 minutes. Take a look if you haven’t - you can see your numbers in the Settings app if you have an iPhone. I found it interesting how much we know about our habits and how they affect our wellbeing and how sometimes we don’t change a thing despite this knowledge.
After dinner, we went to one bar. It was fairly crowded and I noticed very few people were on their phones. This makes sense, especially when comparing the exciting vibe of a cozy dive bar filled with young people freshly released from mask mandates with that of a subway where everyone is in their own world. It got me thinking a lot of what ifs. What if we all went about some of the monotonous things we do in our lives without a phone to lean on in moments of feeling bored, uncomfortable, lonely, and instead were looking up at the world around us.
When I woke up this morning, I didn’t do the usual phone check to see what happened overnight in “my world.” I didn’t play the Wordle and share the results with my group chat. Unlike many mornings after opening my phone, there was no swing in my emotional state with seeing either the bad news or the friend who didn’t text me back yet or in reading too much into what someone said or not getting the Wordle in 4 attempts. Noticing this, again, got me thinking. Our phones have a lot of influence on our emotional wellbeing and can sweep us up into a spiral if we don’t have this awareness. Unplugging helped me realize this.
As sunset arrived, I was excited to turn my phone on. It’s kind of wild - and a bit of a rush - to see the volume of notifications that happen in a relatively short period of time come through all at once. All of those instances during the day that we are alerted and potentially interrupted to look at something either we or someone else deems important. In the past few weeks, I took some time to adjust my phone notification settings to remove some of the “clutter” that comes in during the day. The goal was to pare down alerts so the only notifications coming through are ones I have deemed important. For example, I no longer receive notifications from apps with deals trying to get me to open the app or news alerts. iPhones also have a feature where you can receive a summary of notifications from selected apps at set times during the day. I choose to receive things like news and select app notifications like Strava in those summaries rather than throughout the day. It turns out that most things can either wait or are not important at all.
The only downside I found with unplugging this time was music. On my drive back from Boston, I listened to the radio for the first time in months and all of the ads that come with it. At a certain point I realized I actually don’t need to listen to something all the time, and it’s actually okay to turn it off. So I did. Driving in silence is refreshing too. Once the radio was off, I realized I was happier with what I was doing without my phone turned on. I wasn’t thinking about anything outside of what was in front of me. That’s cool.
