I Finished a 21 Day Digital Detox and was Shocked at what Happened
Experiment Pt. 3 Conclusion
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Am I going to cry in front of these strangers? I’m one of four women here. There are also four men, one an online friend, eight of us total including the facilitator. Small enough of a gathering that the spotlight is expected to fall on me at some point. I don’t care for this feeling, virtual reveal, so many missing data points in expression with a zoom call. Do most empaths recoil from them? I feel pressure to offer up my spontaneous, inconvenient tears in the effort to be genuine, yet it is against my self-protective nature with people I don’t know or anyone deemed emotionally unsafe; most people. What will the strangers do? Silence, or worse, polite acknowledgment that I will take as condescension. We’ve been asked by the leader in this gathering: Give yourself up to the process of collective commune. Join in the group consciousness and merge fully. Pause before speaking to allow spaciousness, but only reveal the authentic. I find out after entering the chat that we’re contemplating ‘the future of consciousness’ and I find this topic and the conversation that’s happening around it too intellectual for the emotionality I’m sitting with. I would rather draw a picture of it. So here is what I would draw to express the future:
I already know I won’t be able to deliver in this meeting. Does my assumption make it so? I could feel my emotions rising uncomfortably before I even logged in to the ‘group interconnection’ call with a lovely sounding professional facilitator. I had clicked out of the ‘Join meeting’ screen two times before forcing myself to make three times the charm. During the hour long exchange, where I awkwardly chimed in a few times, the leader did eventually notice and ask me about my suppressed tears; I admitted I was withholding, feeling off-kilter for having them. At least she was attuned, but I wanted out, this experiment officially over in my mind. How uncomfortable was I willing to get to try something new, to feel something new, to become someone more like I was ‘supposed to be’* before bad things happened in my life? I wanted to be more spontaneous and open to whatever came my way, like the offer to join this call. I just wanted to find my essential self. *(BS, but an important story to root out limitations and desires).
What is this essential self? While it may be impossible to define over time, a kaleidoscope of selves shifting in and out of the forefront, we can align ourselves with our authenticity, our essential nature, by embracing the now. That slippery state of full-bodied presence where we find ourselves calm, curious, and connected to what arises (thank you to my therapist for defining these ‘three C’s’).
Let’s ground in it. Where are you right now? In your kitchen, bathroom, a vehicle, or office? It doesn’t matter, there you are, real as can be. Are you tuned into your environment? What colors are around you? And the smells, sensations on your skin from being there, the sounds that shift and the ones that remain constant? Take a moment to notice. Externals. What about inside your body? Where are your toes, your navel, your shoulders, your tongue? Tense or relaxed? Welcome to now, can you stay a minute, focused on your breath, stay awhile? We face what is happening inside our body in real time, the only ‘real world.’ And yet it barely exists for so many! There are spontaneous emotions that wrap around our sensations whether they are fully conscious to us or not, disconnected as we are. For those that dare, there is always something to learn by noticing the body. But it’s become awfully hard to stay ‘here.’
The world could not be busier. Noisier. Flickering, colorful lights to make one blink & twitch. Demands. Competitions. People and stories to give your attention to. Even that which we don’t have ears to hear is buzzing incessantly, reverberating our cells at the subtlest level. Nerves. Pressure. Oscillation and overstimulation. It’s too much for me. I fall back into fantasy. Ever the child walking with a book open in front of my face. I dissociate, or maybe lean on its modern cousin and scroll. I cry out on a psychic level, but I probably won’t tune in with my body. Maybe later, too busy. Too painful, can’t stay with it, what to do with all this emotion?
What a hellish day 10 of my 21-day digital detox experiment revealed was the last ditch attempt of a high-jacked brain to gather as much dopamine as possible in the face of novelty withdrawal and discomfort. Sleep deprivation compounds the cravings of addiction, a feeling of narrow short-sightedness that favors the path of least resistance, over and over. Is that a foundational revelation for the state of our modern world? Not even needing more ‘rest’ (which we absolutely do), but actual sleep? Are we just exhausted, irritated, not clearing our brain’s glymphatic system at night, addicted to finding momentary relief from mounting burdens? How many people are working how many hours in a state called survival? Depression correlates to sleep, the bodies bid to say ‘this isn’t working, the way you’re living, the story you’re telling yourself. Just go back to bed until you figure it out. Sleep perchance to dream, rise anew.’ And yet we get stuck and call it normal.
Women have recently been found to need more than the ol’ gold 8 hours a night, reminding us that, oops, sorry ladies, essentially all medical studies and bodily knowledge are based only off of a man’s physiology. Never mind the fact that women have monthly rhythms slowly following the moon and not daily ones ‘rising’ quickly with the sun, God bless testosterone. Lest I remind you that a good 25% or so of a woman’s fertile life is spent actively bleeding and dealing with the bodily yearnings and fluctuations around that. God forbid she experience actual pain, which is also staggeringly common. No…I’m not bitter…(insert murderously blank face here). Rest, please, for the love of goddess, rest if you can! Men and women, your feminine needs your care. She can’t be hurried, can’t be pieced together in the digital abyss, and she sure as heck can’t be ignored. Autoimmune disease numbers don’t disagree, with 4 out of 5 sufferers being women, clearly at odds with their own bodies due to unnatural exposures and demands, a world that doesn’t regard their nature. Doesn’t regard Nature. Nothing is sacred anymore.
I digress… Let’s continue along with my personal experience; we left off at an intense and terrible day 10 social media cleanse.
Day 11: Resetting my nervous system outside. What could be more beautiful than the scent of the outdoors, the woods. My favorite smell in the world, deep pine adrift on the breeze, intensified by the moisture of the rains, petrichor mixing its subtle delight. Give me nothing else and I am complete. Why am I not living in a tent outside for the hospitable 6 or so months of the year? I consider it seriously. I’ve been doing things all wrong for so long, all rigid, autopilot life. Why am I not breaking into spontaneous dance anymore? Why is it so hard to laugh each day? All of this started, this experiment, when I asked spirit in meditation, what is my biggest obstacle in life? The answer: lack of imagination. Like a slap in the face. So simple. And for whom is that not true? Plato’s cave comes to mind. Entranced by the shadows, lacking the full world as it stands by so near, just behind, where all possibility lies. Screens have become those shadows. Yet we are nature, play is built into our purpose. When we stop playing, we stop being fully human. The pain of colorless servitude tries to call us toward something through rage and sorrow, a faint and forbidden whisper, a return to sanity and a world as yet unseen.
The book Your Brain on Nature by Dr. Eva Selhub and Dr. Alan Logan describes our 2-million-year-old relationship to nature, the ways we’ve adapted to survive and thrive in it (as if we can separate ‘it’ vs ‘us’). The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and Instagram in 2010. A new addiction is a powerful addiction; where is rock bottom? What chance do we have to push back against the forceful psychological manipulation built into these platforms? They’ve hacked our old, but maybe, still clever brains. Let’s find our way back to the ancestral guidance of open air and green spaces if we are to have any chance left for homeostasis.
How bad are things really with a life spent staring at screens? According to the book:
Alarm bells have been ringing as researchers show not only a plateau in IQ scores but, even worse, that the Flynn effect (a 20th century research finding of IQ increasing 3-5 pts per decade) is reversing. Large studies from different developed nations have reported a decline in IQ beginning in the late 1990s (in concert with the dawn of digital mania), such that a decade of IQ gains has been wiped out in the years 1998 to 2004. Even the good Dr. Flynn himself has reported on the reversal: his 2009 study indicated that British teens have experienced an IQ drop from the 1980’s high point. The act of texting and checking email removes 10 available IQ points. Albeit temporary, interruptions of this nature also destroy creativity and lead us down dead ends. For example, a single e-mail interruption will cost a worker an average of 24 minutes from the task at hand. And in the course of a 40-minute study period, a simple texting exchange (less than 3 minutes duration) will slash a student’s word recall in half.
…Cognitive psychologist Alain Lieury found that so-called brain-boosting video games actually produce a decline in memorization scores. …Scores of empathic concern- the ability to exhibit an emotional response to someone else’s distress- have dropped 49 percent since 1980.
…In a 2011 study of over 4,500 adults followed for several years, total screen time was associated with a higher risk of death. And the risk increase was not small: it was 52 percent higher versus those with the least screen time…Among those who logged the highest amount of screen time, being physically active reduced their risk of dying from any cause by a mere 4 percent (to 48 percent higher risk of dying!) compared with those who exercised and had the least screen time. (references are available on the book’s website using the link I included above).
That’s pretty stark. A death cult of tech marching on unselfconsciously. What can we do besides throw our phones into the nearest (aptly labeled) hazardous waste recycle bin? Turn to nature to soothe our weary, and now apparently, stupid souls. Exposure to nature is proven to lower blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol. It increases attentiveness and calm and can even fill in the health gap between low and high income individuals when attributing the mental and physical benefits of immersion in a greenspace. Simple ways to increase nature around us include outdoor walks (marked benefits are seen in as little as 10 minutes a day), visualizations of natural scenes such as beaches and meadows, keeping plants in the home/at a desk, using essential oils from plants, exercising outdoors, having a pet (cats and dogs help the most), tending a garden, and even simply following a Mediterranean or whole-food plant-based diet. A picture of nature on the wall is also better than nothing; start where you can if this interests you. I do really recommend the book and you can read it for free on the hoopla app with your library card if you’re in the U.S.
Day 18: This experiment is winding down. Something is shifting. I’m holding on to peace and contentment for longer periods, not missing the apps at all. I’m more often joining the timelessness that my children experience, at least in fits and starts. Today I’ve scrapped my schedule, even the loose version I hold when able to get away from rushing around, but I’m often still holding a checklist of what I’d like to get done. Why not stop counting the hours? Let’s see how long my son wants to play with Brio blocks. A good while passes, it feels like a record for a 2-year-old. I stretch my body alongside him and it feels great. I let my mind wander and it rehashes the group integration zoom call from yesterday that I didn’t enjoy. But the rather odd experience stuck with me, there’s something meaningful to contemplate that wasn’t apparent on the surface. An internal process, a lesson rising out of that undefined shared time. Not to resist resistance. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling constricted, it just happened. But I could choose not to react to that reaction and confound it. The double-edged sword of feeling a negative feeling, then feeling bad about feeling that feeling. Instead, acceptance. Practice and not just theory. I finally gave myself that permission. It felt soft and profound, I’d like to carry it with me.
Nothingness. I want to allow space. Silence and space to allow all to arise. What feels like a luxury and operates like a necessity. Without this space, nothing can change. I can busy myself in theory, policy, arguments. It is highly stimulating. Yet we grow numb and impatient, deeply anxious. It’s like trying to rush the fruit to ripen; all we can do is wait and name our longing, trust our careful tending. This screen experiment may have only changed one second of my days. But do you see, that is all that is needed, a tiny pause. A disruption of minuscule proportions that allows a shift. Notice something. I am staring at my phone. I am opening up the app. Do I want to be doing this? A momentary hush. Possibility.
Day 21: I made it to the end quietly, and it’s been revealing. Like sloughing off layers I didn't need. I’ve experienced more synchronicity in the last weeks than I have in many years. I take that quite delightfully as a sign that I’m living in natural alignment and flow-state. I can feel the difference. A license plate in front of me that bears the amusing word I thought in my head a minute earlier, a number 5 balloon floating away at a park that I noticed right as I asked myself “How many days until that important thing? 5!” A tiny white feather stuck to my clothes. A dragonfly has suddenly been a recurring visitor throughout my days, more than I have ever seen before, a symbol of change, transformation, and magic across various cultures. I will take it to heart and allow the thoughts to lift and carry me in moments of limitation so that I may continue to find and expand this path. Because in the chrysalis the caterpillar effectively dissolves, a formless congealment of parts not yet redefined. Is this painful for it? My process is painful for me. My ‘watcher’ noticing the things I’ve refused to see.
My goal is to be more present in my body, my life and my community. I’m reading Women Who Run With the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes and feeling myself inspired by so many of her words. Having a chat with one of my closest friends, she gushes about an author, poet, psychoanalyst, and myth teller that she can’t get enough of. She sends me a link; No kidding, it’s Estes. I smile. Of course we found her at the same time. Heeding transient internal pleas. I want to run wild. I want to find the wisdom of the animals, the wolf. I already know how to be a ‘lone wolf’ even among others and it’s so imbalanced. The pack offers nurturing, purpose. We must learn to move together. Being overly domesticated, I know that setting down my phone is only a beginning to this most important process Dr. Estes describes, accessing the wild woman.
No matter by which culture a woman is influenced, she understands the words wild and woman, intuitively.
When women hear those words, an old, old, memory is stirred and brought back to life. The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghosty from neglect, buried by over-domestication, outlawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her, we know she belongs to us and we to her.
… There are various names for this locus betwixt the worlds. Jung called it variously the collective unconscious, the objective psyche, and the psychoid unconscious- referring to a more ineffable layer of the former. He thought of the latter as a place where the biological and psychological worlds share headwaters, where biology and psychology might mingle with and influence one another. Throughout human memory this place- call it Nod, call it the home of the Mist Beings, the crack between worlds- is the place where visitations, miracles, imaginations, inspirations, and healings of all natures occur.
Though this site transmits great psychic wealth, it must be approached with preparation, for one may be tempted to joyously drown in the rapture of one’s time there. Consensual reality may seem less exciting by comparison. In this sense, these deeper layers of psyche can become a rapture-trap from which people remain unsteady, with wobbly ideas and airy presentments. That is not how it is meant to be. How one is meant to return is wholly washed or dipped in a revivifying and informing water, something which impresses upon our flesh the odor of the sacred.
Day 22: I log back onto my social media accounts for the first time in 3 weeks and read my 77 notifications on substack. I am down to 4 hours a day of screen time on average, compared to close to 6 hours before starting the experiment and consciously working on it. It feels anticlimactic. It’s even kind of morose, that these sites have been so important to me. This was the Shangri-La I dare not enter lest I be so consumed? It felt more like walking into a renovated McDonald’s: empty, synthetic, devoid of meaning. There are real and wonderful people represented here. But the facsimile can’t replace the real thing, not even a little. I want what is real. I go to the fridge, pull out a container, move to the sink and wash organic strawberries, one after the other, consuming them, feeling their texture, really noticing them, savoring the taste like I had gone a lifetime without. What is real?
That night I have a powerful dream, strange, wonderful, and remarkably beautiful; it feels fitting to end my three weeks in the same way things had started, dream symbols to guide. But this one is so different than the alligator in a good way. Telepathy between ‘the teacher’ and me (the student). They're taking the form of an old friend and one time mentor/manager from my post-high school job. When I knew him, care for animals had been his teaching, a vegetarian diet to offer compassion for all life including the Earth. In the dream, there was a small dog that passed out in the room and I revived it, he was impressed. Yet I fell into a daze of exhausted fatigue afterward; I became the one collapsing on the floor. I needed care. I could sense others around me. Upon coming to, I found a tiny bath drawn. I undressed, not caring who saw me, admiring my youthful body as I knew it before children. But this time there were tiny marks above my pubic bone. I added bubbles to the bath and a young girl the size of a doll got in. I examined the marks closer, cuts, like little pockets with tiny things in them. The first one had a transparent decorative tray the size of a Barbie toy, sweetly adorned with a little serving dish. The second has what looks like a large peppercorn, but as I turn it over in my fingertips, there is a tiny pink flower painted on it. A little spice and nice? The third pocket contains a teeny yellow star, like a cutout paper lantern. A gift unto me; Gifts to share. let it be so.
Day 27: I’ve been changing. It’s not fully perceptible to just anyone, but it’s there, like little guides I carry inside. I stop checking my screen time to see if I am ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ I notice when I want to pick it up in a moment of loneliness. I either pause for a new action, or allow this too in my strange modern life.
“If you’re baking bread (or anything) on automatic pilot, you’re not there, you’re off experiencing some nonsense, you’re not there experiencing it. Feeling it. And that goes for the most profound to the most banal. Most of us isn’t in the act”-Documentary on Gurdjieff’s movements, 2003
The best way I’ve found to change isn’t to just take something away and hope we can avoid it, but to add in something challenging, rewarding, pleasurable that fills the hole that would be left. I am gifted a void. It is not altogether comfortable. How do I integrate it with my body? I exercise in the gym, rowing, feeling my muscles pull and learn to adapt to added pressure. All muscles can be strengthened with practice, like the ones needed for acceptance and restraint. I meditate in the sauna, beads of sweat pooling under my breasts, ideas percolating from my depths. So much of what lives on these pages is born there. People are said to go to bodies of water for healing, inspiration. It is equally true that moving the water that’s already inside of us can reveal her secret wisdom, drawn to the surface and releasing an essence to be named.
To the unbound, essential, and deeply famished wild feminine in all of us, I can feel a state of emergency where the only acceptable action is to put down the screens and face our deepest selves head on. There are no accidents in time. We can’t go back, can’t wish away all the mistakes. But we lose our chance to change our fate if we won’t pull ourselves away from the digital vacuum; it’s sucking the life out of us. Where is genuine community, chosen family? Where is the village to dance and sing our humanity back to life? When we get tired of our own repetitive madness, our withering capacity for care, joy, physical work, and our own limited actions, when we finally do something about it, we have little tolerance for BS in the world at large.
We must review the stories we tell to ourselves, about ourselves and others. We stop accepting our extinction as a given, passive victims in the action. Maybe you don’t agree that the Earth is dying, you don’t believe the scientists that forecast terrible hardships, many of which have already come to pass, huge levels of extinction and ecosystem collapse. You don’t think the intensifying natural disasters will reach your city, even indirectly with food shortages, calls for aid, and refugees. I won’t claim to know what happens next, but I’m called to make peace within and without, physically and spiritually.
A few weeks later, now: I don’t want to sit back, watch shows*, do nothing. Maybe I want too much, maybe this is suffering a grandiose naiveté. I’m ok with that, it’s taken me far in my little way, the urge to persist and do better. I’m going to tackle the rift between the sexes on a personal level, I’m going to work on my avoidance attachment and examine my dark feminine. I’ll keep having the important and honest conversations with my spouse. No conflict equals no change, we are micros of the macro. I’m making connections in my community, talking to other parents at school, elders at the gym, and neighbors on my street; these are no small matter, the village once held us all in unison.
And I’m going back to work. I’ve been a SAHM for almost seven years. It’s been a passion, a whirlwind, times of great joy and stress, a sacrifice in many ways. Meaningful and fortifying. I’ll be a mom forever, but I would also like to be more again. Some countries pay mothers, understanding the importance and difficulty of the work. I’ll save the story of mothering in the USA for another day. It would be wonderful to get paid to write (shoutout to my three paid subscribers, you’re the best!!), to know my work has value to others, but I’m not willing to play the game, work the buzzwords, hack the algorithm. I’m here for art and self-expression. I’ll keep writing of course as I’m able, it’s something I can’t go without. But I’ll start working a job part-time, the one I wanted in fact If I could pick anything, manifested quite flawlessly (much to my astonishment), and I’ll be serving the public directly. It’s not for everyone, but it means a lot to me, maybe you caught my essay on working at Trader Joe’s once upon a time. So my new adventure awaits.
What about you? Would you risk your own digital detox revealing the things you’ve been running from in order to move past them? To enhance your creativity and zest for life? What are your wildest dreams? What kind of world do you wish to see or to create for the next generation? I’d love to hear what you think! -Val
*except Twin Peaks every October
The song “Dress” is a favorite of mine. 50’ Queenie, Man Size, Rid of Me are other great songs from her punk era. I love the album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. She is the only artist to win the coveted Mercury prize twice: for the album above and for Let England Shake. I also love her albums Is This Desire and White Chalk. Her music is so different through time! I read her book of poetry called Orlam out of which her current album - I Inside the Old Year Dying - and tour sprang. It has darker themes, set in her native Dorset, England dialect. Interesting stuff. Sheela-na-gig = classic early PJ! To Bring You My Love was the first album I ever purchased of hers. Enjoy your meanderings through her catalog, Valerie! And thank you for your interest.
Aww, thanks! The concert was, in a word, SUBLIME. I was truly transported, and completely forgot about time/space at one point I was so transfixed! What an exceptional artist. Been following Polly Jean Harvey for a long time, admiring her unique arc of creative genius.