Me and My Phone and The Small Muscles of my Eyes

I listened to podcast Design Matters the other day as I was walking to the Boston Public Library and accomplishing the amazing feat of returning a book before it was overdue. In the episode I heard, Debbie Millman interviewed Tiffany Shlain about her book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week.

At one point in the interview, Tiffany Shlain asked if anyone felt good after scrolling on Instagram for twenty minutes. Or maybe she said no one feels good. I forget. She said she wished a screen would pop up when people were on social media that would read What do you really need?

I check my phone more than I check my fly. It’s getting to the point where I check my phone (and by check I mean, I look on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Gmail for any new messages or likes) almost as often as I exhale. Or at least it feels that way.

My relationship with my phone feels obsessive and unhealthy, and I say I’m going to stop, but I say this while I’m looking at my phone, and then, well, nothing changes.

Unplug from my phone from Friday night to Saturday night as Tiffany Shlain does? My initial reaction is one of great hope, but quickly, so quickly!, my brain tells me this is an impossible idea. What if someone needs me? What if someone offers me a job and I miss it? What if people start to think I am not reliable? Not accessible? What if they all go away?

Increasingly I live in a state of disconnect with my breath, my body, the ground beneath my feet as I connect ever more deeply to the doorway of screen and the illusion of creating relationships with people on an intimate level.

I am connected to the world through screen, through my phone, my computer, my iPad. Sort of. Usually when I am online my breath is shallow. I am on hold. I have a terrible feeling that maybe one reason I stopped doing yoga is because I can’t check my phone during class. I want to erase that sentence because it is so awful to write, but it is what it is.

Bodies form themselves around phone use. The head forward posture affects the cervical spine, affects the tightness of the muscles of the chest, making the heart space less accessible. The single-focus of eyes to screen tighten and fatigue both the small muscles behind the eyes and the neck. The phone makes us tight. Tight means less blood flow, less oxygen to the brain, less flexibility. Less freedom of movement.

What if I am less alive because I am on the phone a hundred times more than I am sitting in meditation, connecting with a higher power who is not trying to sell me anything that costs money?

I live with the illusion that I am connected when I am on the phone. I can SEE my phone in a way that I can’t SEE any higher power, so it’s an easy sell for my brain: pick up your phone; look at it; you’ll feel so connected, so stimulated and numbed.

In massage school, we learned about the energy body. Supposedly there is an energy field, shaped like an apple, all around us, originating from our heart. I can feel it, and so I believe it. There are days when I have no energy field. Those days are rough. I feel like the sun with no light—but it’s not that I feel like the moon. I feel like the sun with no light. Lousy. Like Popeye with no muscles or a magnet with no pull.

People can have energy fields that fill stadiums. You’ve met people like that. One time in the 80s I walked into a bar and Bono and Larry Mullen and The Edge were just standing there and the energy that came from their bodies was palpable. It made a wall around them while it drew people to them at the same time. It was wild. So much energy and there were just hanging out! Maybe you are a person like that. People are just drawn to you. There is something about you, they can’t put their finger on it.

It’s your energy.

A person’s energy is the thing that lets you know someone across the room is looking at you. You turn, for no discernible reason, and you see someone watching you. You had felt them before you had seem them.

One reason I am addicted to my phone is that I get this ache all around me—it’s like I’ve built an energy body around me that is dependent on dopamine hits from my phone. It’s an energy body that is never satisfied and always wants more, more time on the phone, more likes, more new ideas, more pretty pictures. More and more and more. It’s a hunger energy, and it’s the opposite of powerful and nourishing.

When I am craving my phone I feel like a radio tower that is aching for a signal. The problem is that the signal is external and is ultimately about consumerism.. The opposite of that kind of signal is one that comes from a higher power or a sense of love. That is a feeling of being full, completely present, on purpose.

All of this is to get myself to commit to myself to unplug one day a week.

This post is one big reminder to self: don’t live on auto-pilot.

Try harder.

See how happens.