Reading Time: 3 minutesPut Your Devices Down Each Day This Week
Simple Instructions:
- Think about the places or times in your life where you use your phone or mobile devices just because you are bored. Some examples: sitting in the bathroom, waiting in line, walking down street, on the subway, or sitting in traffic.
- Pick the scenario that is most common in your life. Each time you are in that situation this week, intentionally leave your device (face down) on your desk or in your bag or pocket.
- You do not have to do this practice in all areas, just the one you choose as most prevalent for you.
Watch this video for an explanation of this Well-Being Practice from Whole Life Challenge co-founders Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck.
Why Is This Practice Important?
In our modern life, we participate in two worlds — the one in front of us and the one online. The slicker and more attractive technology becomes, the easier it gets to slip into our online life without thinking. Sure, there are things only a digital existence can offer, but the ease with which we enter that digital world can erode our connection with the world right in front of us.
Many of us have grown up in or grown used to a world where we never need to be bored. Because boredom is so easy to relieve, we forget that it can be a good thing.
Boredom is the space in which your imagination thrives, it’s the place where your thoughts and feelings make themselves known to you, and it’s where you notice things about the world that you didn’t already know.
For this week’s Lifestyle Practice, we ask you to find the places in your life where you routinely turn to devices to alleviate boredom and instead practice staying in the world in front of you.
This practice can help reconnect you with yourself, your thoughts and feelings, and everything around you. This week, check in with your own internal news feed, see what’s trending, and what some of the “comments” are. That’s some of the most important “media” you can consume any day.
For More on This Practice
Could you go a week without your phone, email, Facebook, or even text messaging? Sometimes the thing we try to avoid is the thing we need the most. Andy’s podcast guest this week, Joe DiStefano, found that a “digital detox” was exactly what he needed to break out of stress and stagnation.
Listen to the podcast to learn why Joe believes that escaping from our digital prison can be one of the most important things we can do for ourselves.
He graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy as well as a degree from the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, and feels food is one of the most important parts of a life - it can nourish, heal, and bring people together.
Michael believes health and well-being are as much a state of mind as they are a state of the body, and when it comes to fitness, food, and life in general, he thinks slow is much better than fast (most of the time). Stopping regularly to examine things is the surest way to put down roots and grow.
He knows he will never be done with his own work, and believes the best thing you can do for your well-being starts with loving and working from what you’ve got right now.
