A speaker at a cabin by a lake explains why unplugging from devices matters. Constant work keeps your left brain in overdrive while your right brain atrophies. He's planning a longer retreat in Vietnam to uninstall Outlook, Teams, and Slack and let his creative side recover.
So I'm often talking about the importance of taking time off and decoupling. And as you can see, I'm sitting in an unusual environment here because I've borrowed a cabin in the woods on a lake, um, as a place for me to To get away from basically everything, digital devices, other demands, and do some careful thinking. And so why is it important to unplug? Well, it's important to become a whole human, right? To actually also have time for self-reflection, for contemplation, for Or being, as I often say, quiet with yourself, writing, reading, maybe sleeping in, doing things that are good for you and your soul that you don't necessarily get to do when you're running through your day-to-day and taking care of your family and taking care of your business. But you have to think about it in this way. So essentially, our brain It has some plasticity, right? We use left side of our brain for logical thinking and right side of our brain for sort of creative thinking. And if we're only using the right side of our brain— that was the left side. If we're only using the left side of our brain in our business life and we're kind of working that muscle a lot, but we're not working the other side of our brain, it becomes uneven. There's an unbalance. Yeah. And so we tend to lean towards that and become more and more focused on the logical and the rational structures. So by giving that side of the brain a little bit of a rest, we give this side of the brain an opportunity to create balance and come back and be more creative, more open, more curious about what's happening, because this side of the brain has that opportunity. So that's part of my whole human approach, essentially giving the opportunity to have a whole brain and not just a very strong left side or a very strong right side. And that's one of the reasons that I go away and unplug on occasion. This time it's in a cabin. In a few weeks, it's going to be a couple of weeks in Vietnam for a holiday. without any digital devices, without any Outlook or Teams or Slack or whatever else I'm using. I uninstall those things off my phone and I try to be completely non-digital for a number of weeks to give my brain a rest and give my brain an opportunity to see new things in new ways. I hope you found this helpful and As usual, if there's anything else you want me to talk about or write about, let me know by responding in comments or an email or send me a text message, and I'll respond once I get back online. Thank you.
