137: Reclaiming your life from digital distractions

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Canning Crystals the podcast. I hope that you're all well. As you know by now, my name is Mart Tweedy. I am your host. And this week I actually had a couple of days off. Can you believe it? I was in Northern Ireland last weekend and we had to change our flights unexpectedly. So we had an extra day out there in Belfast. Obviously very unexpected. So I think I just started to panic. I went into sheer panic mode. But then I remembered it was also a bank holiday, so I thought, well, you know, nobody's going to get hurt from me staying here one extra night, are they? So, I decided to turn off my phone notifications. Wild, I know. I didn't even open my emails actually. I didn't even watch TV in fact the entire time we were away. And you know something? It was absolute bliss. It honestly made me think about what people must have done as little as 20 to 30 years ago. Because when I was growing up, my mam, for example, she never had a mobile phone back then to scroll mindlessly through. Or, you know, 900 TV channels to flick through. In fact, I vaguely remember growing up with one of those TVs that you had to get up and press the button in on the front to turn the channel over. Can anyone else remember them, or am I just a child from the 1920s? I think there was only like 4 main channels. I remember how wet everyone got in 1997 actually, when Channel 5 first started, even if it was absolute dogshit. And I mean, it still is to this day if you watch Channel 5. Jesus Christ, it's just full of shit, isn't it? But my point is that I just think as of late especially, I'm reliant so much on technology to have meself a good time, when in actual fact I don't need technology to enjoy meself. So Johnny's dad's fortunate enough to have quite a big house, and one of the least visited rooms is the living room, because to be quite honest, the majority of the time that we're there, we're either in the kitchen or the conservatory bit. And on the last night, we sat in the living room and his dad actually came out with, "Oh, this is weird. I've never ever sat here before," all just because he was sat on the other couch to what he usually sits on. And he's lived in that house for over 20 years. So the whole time we were there, you know, we went for walks, we visited some sites, we played board games, we cooked nice food, and we just chatted more than anything else. It was so refreshing because every night when I finish work, all we do is, you know, we eat, we do baby bedtime, and then me and Johnny would usually sit in front of the TV and find something to watch on Netflix. It was almost a little, you know, a kick up the backside that we don't have to sit in silence beside each other to enjoy our evenings and relax when, you know, we could be doing other things. I recently read a book about this, in fact, called How to Break Up with Your Phone, which which is A 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life. And although I read this book and I took it all in, I took all the teachings in and everything like that, I absolutely enjoyed the book. Go and read it if you haven't read it. But I remember that I kept on saying to myself, well, you know, I can't do this because my business is all on my phone. I post Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, I schedule emails, I converse with my academy, I listen to podcasts, I listen to subliminals. I have all me diary commitments at the palm of me hand, all within me phone. So how am I supposed to break up with it? So my mam came over the other day, and in between talking to me, I kept noticing that, you know, she was picking up her phone. And I said, are you expecting a call? And she said no. So I asked what she was doing, and she was literally just pulling Facebook down over and over again, scrolling through the same posts over and over again. So I took her phone and I went into her iPhone settings on that screen time thing, and I told her on average she was spending 8 hours a day on her phone. 8 hours a day. So she thought I was lying at first until I showed her. So one day she even picked up her phone over 650 times. 650 times in an 8-hour period. Now, What's quick math here? Is 8 times 8 64? Yes, 8 times 8 is 64. Is it? Yes, it is. I just had to pause the episode just to double-check. I've got baby brain, please forgive me. Um, so she on average picked up her phone 80 times in an hour. How is that even possible? That's literally more than once per minute. Don't understand that. But it's almost like, you know, I said to her, those 8 hours a day, that is a third of your life. And she said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, you're only alive for 24 hours a day. Obviously 8 hours a day is a third of your life. You sleep for another 8." And she just looked at me all funny, and I don't think she got it. But what I'm trying to say is, you know, there used to be an advert in the '90s, you might be able to remember this, but it said, "The devil makes work for idle thumbs." I think it might have been someone like Virgin Mobile maybe, or one of the other phone providers back then. But honestly, it is so true. Just out of habit, she'd been picking her phone up, unlocking it, quickly scrolling Facebook, and then locking it again, over and over, all day long. Even though I was just sat next to her as well. Even though she was apparently watching something on TV while she was doing all this. I just feel like our phones have become indispensable. So, our phones obviously serve as our primary communication tools. But they also double up as entertainment hubs and personal assistants all in one. The convenience often comes at a cost, such as constant distractions that impede our productivity and our creativity and ultimately even our well-being. So this book talks about how breaking up with your phone doesn't mean abandoning it entirely. Rather, it's about establishing those healthier boundaries and kind of taking control over your time and attention. So the book mainly discusses how it's crucial to understand the extent of our devices' impact on our lives. Because when you think about it, phones can affect our mental health, they can reduce productivity, they can impair our social interactions as well. And the endless notifications, the social media updates, instant messaging, that can create a constant state of alertness and that makes it difficult to switch off and focus on tasks at hand. So research has shown that excessive smartphone use is linked to anxiety, depression, and even sleep disturbances. So recognising these impacts on your own health is the first step to making a change. You know, if you're playing a board game, for example, like last weekend we played this board game called Confident, or is it Confidence? Anyway, it's one of those. In each round, you're asked a question that has a number So, you, what you do is you put the highest range of your guess and the lowest range of your guess, and anyone within that range wins a point. But if you're the person with the smallest range, you get 3 points. It's a pretty simple game, but we played it for about 3 hours. But we were all chatting between rounds. We were all talking about why we put our answers. And it was amazing to just be living in the moment, not distracted by our devices, not distracted by anything else going on in the world even. And we just played the game and had fun together as an extended family. Can you imagine that board game causing anxiety, depression, or sleep disturbances? Absolutely not. You're not comparing yourself to other people. You're not seeing how others are living their lives and comparing your journey to theirs. You're not mindlessly ending down a rabbit hole of information about some random conspiracy theory. You're just there in the present moment. You're just enjoying the company that you're with. It's game-changing, honestly. It almost felt like Christmas Day, in fact. You know when you get together with loved ones and you just all absorb the day's energy rather than getting stressed about random trivial things? That's exactly how it felt while I was in Northern Ireland. And even on the plane home back to Newcastle, now it's only a 40-minute flight, but I found meself turning me iPad on to keep me baby occupied whilst I downloaded a game in the airport so that I had something to do in flight mode. And I caught myself in that moment and I thought, nah, I'm just going to enjoy the flight with my partner and my baby, and I'm just going to sit and chat. Did it feel unnatural? Yes, 100%. But did I enjoy it more than I would have if I just buried my head in my phone? Of course I did. I mean, don't get us wrong, 10 minutes of the flight was spent in the teeny tiny plane baby change toilet where there's not even enough room for you to have a wee, let alone swing a cat. #ThanksEasyJet. But for the other 30 minutes, we played a little game between us, we chatted about the weekend, we played with baby, and just took in what was actually going on around us. So I wrote down some steps for myself once I got home, and these steps can be used for, you know, pretty much any goal that you want to achieve, not just breaking up with your phone. So the first that I wrote was to get familiar with and evaluate my phone usage. So if you want to do this too, just start by tracking how much time you spend on your phone each day. You'll be surprised. If you've got an iPhone, you can go into your settings and go into something called Screen Time, and it will automatically tell you. Many other phones probably also have built-in features that provide insights into your screen time as well. But identify the apps that consume most of your time and reflect on whether or not they actually add value to your life. So for me, Instagram was one of the apps that came up with the most usage, and that's not too bad because I know it's predominantly work-related. Because I barely use me Mart Tweedy personal Instagram anymore, if I'm honest, because I just don't get the capacity to do so. So getting familiar with what's currently going on in your phone usage is the first step, and this is something that I advise people to do in the Manifesting Money Masterclass, for example. The first step is to evaluate where you are right now with your finances. So it's universal, it's not just in relation to breaking up with your phone, it's to basically help you understand your current position because that's crucial for achieving any of your goals. When you want to make a change, it involves a thorough assessment of where you're going wrong. So by identifying and recognizing your weaknesses, it provides you with an opportunity for targeted improvement and assessing your resources such as financial status and support system, that allows for realistic planning. So just get familiar with how much you use your phone and what you physically use it for. That's the low-hanging fruit for you to grab. If you know that you're using your phone for 2 hours every day when you wake up to scroll Twitter, then there's an easy fix for you straight away. Get familiar with how you use your device. The second step is to set yourself some clear goals. So define what it is that you want to achieve by reducing your phone usage. Is it, you know, that you want a bit of extra time with family and friends? Is it because, you know, that you're comparing yourself to other people and your anxiety is at an all-time high? Define what it is that you want to achieve, whether it's improving your productivity, enhancing your mental health, or even spending more time on a hobby. Having clear goals will help keep you motivated. So for me, the motivation came from last weekend in Northern Ireland. Just being around people, enjoying meself, having fun and laughing. I can't remember the last time that I felt that carefree. Not thinking about work or about anything in the future and worrying meself over it. Just being present and in the moment. It was absolute bliss. This experience highlighted the importance of disconnecting from me phone to reconnect with the world around us. So it made us realize that by setting clear achievable goals for reducing my phone usage, I can create more opportunities for all of these enriching mindful experiences that truly contribute to my overall happiness and well-being. So what I did next is I created meself a device-free routine. So I established specific times and places, you know, where phone usage is off-limits. Straight away, I said that about a year ago, I wasn't going to look at me phone first thing in the morning I wasn't gonna wake up and check emails. And guess what? I've started doing that every morning as of late. Checking me bloody phone, getting sucked into reading emails, scrolling socials, checking messages, watching videos on TikTok and YouTube. And I'll just be laying in bed past me alarm. So I said to meself, the bedroom is off limits for my phone completely. When I get into bed on an evening, I'll write me gratitude list for the day and I'll read a book instead. Talking to Johnny in the process. If he wants to watch TV, that's fine, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to distract myself by getting sucked into it because then I tend to be up for hours and then I have a shite sleep and then I wake up the next day feeling like crap. So not only is that going to improve my sleep quality, but it's going to improve my relationships by being able to talk about the day as well. You could even set a rule to avoid checking your phone during meals. And that's going to help you foster better connections with family and friends that live in the same house as you. Because too often we sit in front of the TV with our food and we will stick something on that's easy watching like Gogglebox or Taskmaster, whatever it is, and before we know it, we'll have sat there for an hour eating and sitting in silence. Yes, it's fun to watch TV shows, I get that, but I'll have finished me meal in 10 to 15 minutes. So I'm really sitting there an additional 45 minutes sucked into watching that show when I could be just doing other things. So it's all about creating yourself a device-free routine that encourages real interaction and even engagement with those people around you. And by implementing these tiny little small changes, you can then gradually reduce your dependence on your devices and you can create more meaningful and fulfilling experiences in your daily life. Now I know that this is going to sound a little ironic, but there are numerous apps designed to help you reduce your phone usage as well. So there are apps such as Forest, Moment, and Digital Wellbeing. They can all help you set limits on your app usage basically. They can track your screen time and they can even block distracting notifications during work hours as well. I'm an absolute nightmare for this. If I get an email whilst I'm writing me book, for example, I end up dealing with that email, then I end up looking at me inbox and replying to other people, and before I know it, I'm about an hour into the 4 hours that I've set aside to write me book, and I've barely done any writing. So I've started using this app called Forest, which is an app that helps you to stay away from your smartphone, and it also helps you to stay focused on your work. And I usually hate working in silence too, so I'll put the music channels on in the background on TV. But then I'll get distracted by watching an old music video that I haven't seen for years or something like that. I'll end up dancing around the kitchen usually, and then I get sucked in and change the channel and end up watching TV. We have so many distractions around us, so apps like that really help us to just stay on track and stay productive. And apps like Forest, for example, also plant trees for the minutes that you stay off your device too, so you're also saving the environment as well. And then ironically, again, I've just told you to download an app, but also when doing so, you can declutter your phone. So remove apps that aren't essential to your daily life or apps that even contribute significantly to your distractions. Keep only the apps that are necessary for your daily tasks and your well-being. So you can also organize your apps into folders to make them less accessible. That's going to reduce the temptation to check them impulsively. You know when I did a podcast episode before about easing the resistance to manifestation? So it was all about like, if your goal is to go to the gym first thing in the morning, ease that resistance by packing your gym bag the night before, or prep your meals the day before so that you're not tempted to go and get a takeaway or a pizza or whatever. Remember that episode? Well, I'm telling you to do the opposite here. If you know that you get distracted by going on specific apps, hide them in folders because that's going to enhance the resistance because you'll be less likely to go on them if it's harder for you to access them. It's like saying to yourself that you can have a slice of cake, but you're going to have to bake the cake from scratch first. You're more likely to say, "Oh well, I'll just have a piece of fruit anyway because the piece of fruit's here and it's ready to eat," just because it's easier. So turn off non-essential notifications. When I started getting hundreds of Instagram messages a day, I started turning me notifications off because I was just ending up on Instagram every minute of every waking day. And I mean, yes, I still go into me DMs sporadically, but I'm not notified about them every minute of the day. I'd like to think that if someone had a genuine business query or an order query, that they'd email like normal, so I don't feel bad for doing this. Because every ping and every buzz demands your attention and it interrupts your focus. So by controlling which apps can send notifications, you can then reduce the frequency of those interruptions. So another effective strategy is to designate specific times for checking your messages and emails rather than responding to notifications as they come in. For example, setting aside a few minutes every hour or even designated periods throughout the day that can help you stay updated without constantly disrupting your workflow. And this method, which is often referred to as batch processing, that allows you to maintain your focus on important tasks without that temptation of constant digital distractions. So by creating a more controlled environment for your interactions, you can significantly enhance your productivity and ensure that your attention is dedicated to more meaningful activities. Obviously, engaging in activities that promote mindfulness and presence, that can help you to reduce your screen time as well. So whether that be through meditation or reading a book or spending time in nature, these activities can help you break the cycle of constant phone checking, and that's going to improve your ability to focus on life more. Additionally, reconnecting with hobbies and passions that don't involve screens that can significantly aid in reducing your device time as well. Activities like painting or playing a musical instrument or cooking or even exercising, they not only provide a fulfilling alternative to digital distractions, but they also stimulate creativity, and that's going to counteract everything that you are going through by using your devices constantly. So by dedicating time to these offline activities, You can then create a balanced lifestyle that prioritizes personal growth and enjoyment over the compulsive need to check your phone. These activities not only enrich your life, but they also help establish healthier habits, and that's going to foster deeper connections with yourself and the world around you. Now, drastically cutting down on your phone or device usage, it can be hard, and it may lead to, you know, a bit of a relapse, if you can call it that. I know I tried to do this cold turkey last year and probably ended up on me phone even more so than ever at one point. So instead, you could just gradually reduce your usage by setting small achievable targets. We know that small and steady wins the race. So for example, start by reducing your social media time by, I don't know, maybe 15 minutes each week, or even just set yourself a limit of 30 minutes a day on social media. You can do this on your iPhone really simple by going into your screen time and selecting app limits. You can probably do this on other devices too, I'm sure. But you might even want to share your goals of reducing your screen time with friends or family because ultimately their support and encouragement is going to provide you with that accountability that you need to stick to your plan. You might even find that they too are interested in reducing their phone usage and you might be able to just do it together. You might even want to join a club or a group that focuses on a particular hobby or an interest that you have. Like maybe a book club or a sports team or an art class. That's going to help you to cut down on device time, but it's also going to introduce you to new experiences and other social connections as well. Because reducing your device usage, that can lead to numerous benefits. You'll more than likely find an increase in productivity as you spend less time distracted. Your mental health will probably improve because you'll have reduced exposure to the often negative and stress-inducing content found on social media. And additionally, your relationships will probably strengthen because you'll become more present and engaged with every single person around you. So really, breaking up with your device is more of a journey towards reclaiming your attention and living a more intentional life. And when we understand the impact of excessive phone use or excessive device use, setting clear goals, creating those phone-free routines, and gradually reducing your usage that's going to significantly diminish distractions and improve your overall well-being. So the goal isn't to eliminate phone use entirely, but just to create more of a balanced relationship where you control the technology and not the other way around. Does that make sense? So I'm just asking you to, you know, embrace this change and you'll find more time for the things that truly matter in your life. So I hope that you all enjoyed this episode. If you did, please go ahead, leave me a review or a rating wherever you're listening from. Let me know that you enjoyed it by tagging me with a screenshot of yourself listening in on your Instagram. And most of all, if you truly love the pod, please do me a solid, tell a friend about it. Someone last week said that they had only found me about a month ago and they'd since listened to every single episode. I mean, That is dedication. Big shout out to you. All just because their best friend said, you know what podcast you'd enjoy? Can he? Crystals. He's since joined my academy. He's done two of my courses, and he said that his whole outlook on life has changed. So honestly, just telling one person about how much you love the pod can really help others in ways that you can't even begin to imagine. If you are listening to this pod on the episode day of release, which is Friday the 31st of May, 2024, do not forget tonight, 6 PM, I will be going live to go through my free money mindset workshop. I'll be emailing every single person that's signed up to the Academy about an hour before the event, so just make sure that you check your inboxes. Might go to spam, so make sure that you're checking your spam inbox as well. But it'll be hosted on YouTube, so even if you can't watch live, don't worry, you'll also get the replay link. But it would be so good for everyone to attend live, as then we'll get to chat together and we'll get to work through our wealth issues live. If you've not yet saved your free seat, you can head to cannycrystalsacademy.co.uk/workshop. And on that note, I hope that you all have an amazing weekend ahead. Switch off from your devices at some point, maybe once you've watched my masterclass, and see what it does for you. And I'll see you all next Friday for another episode of the podcast. Thanks very much for listening, guys. Bye!