3 min read

It's time for a digital detox—here's how I do it

This weekend, I'm not offering Reiki sessions at all and I won't be on the Internet 🛜 digging deeper grooves into my main samskaras.
It's time for a digital detox—here's how I do it
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl / Unsplash

It's time for LESS. 💕

This weekend, I'm not offering Reiki sessions at all and I won't be on the Internet 🛜 digging deeper grooves into my main samskaras:

  • Doom scrolling
  • Scrolling social media (even though I work in social media. Especially because I work in social media!)
  • "Checking the news"

I'll also avoid the holiday posts because my mother has been gone for nearly 19 years. My heart goes out to you if you're grieving the loss of a mother, child, aunt, grandmother, elder, or matriarch. 🫂  

I'd tell you it gets easier, but it doesn't; grief moves with you. It changes shape. You change. You grow. You evolve. The grief also evolves. It's a dance, it's part of life, and there's nothing I can say to make it better. Losing my mom was where my healing journey began. For that, I am grateful. But I say this ~19 years; I've come an awfully long way.

For you, if you have fresher grief, take care of YOU. Be gentle with yourself. And don't give up.

I'm setting the following digital detox parameters:

  • No social media, however, I can park social post ideas for posting later.
  • Leave my damn phone ALONE.
  • Live like it's 1994: listen to music, read actual books, and play real instruments.
  • Detox from the news. (Once a journalist, always a journalist)
  • Creative ideas full of value and meaning are OK to work on—but only while seated at my desk at my computer.

I have a twitch in my eye and a cramp in my scrolling thumb. I read a book last Sunday on my iPad and I don't think I've fully recovered from that. Reading on my iPad or Kindles usually doesn't bother me, so this alerts me to having spent too much time looking at tiny screens lately.

My chiropractor is a saint, but she can only do so much.

I've got a meditation course I'd like to complete and get online, which—at the surface—doesn't sound like a proper digital detox. However, when I add up all the time I spend scrolling short-form video apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook "for inspiration," I realize another samskara:

I justify my time spent online by telling myself I'm looking for inspiration and keeping up on trends.

I'm not; I'm the person people pay to find the trends and make them. I'm not at the bottom anymore waiting for things to come to me; I'm at the top now.

I need to make sure I'm spending my time creating instead of consuming!

This samskara probably dates back to 2008 when we first made online videos at 98.7 The Peak (RIP) in Phoenix! We had one guy on air who learned how to edit video when no one else was. Then we'd make pointless videos to entertain our listeners before "engagement" was a thing. And corporate killed off our station anyway.

I want my online time to be spent with a purpose now.

Then, I want to return to my real life—a life where the yoga mat comes out, real homemade food is made in the kitchen, and real books are cracked open and read by a lamp like it's 1994.

I mean—we have AI tools now that can summarize 5 books a day for me. (I'll probably still read some of them anyway, but this will quickly catch up my 300+ book reading stack! 📚) When I am online, I want to get the most out of that time. I want a return on it.

This is my digital detox for one weekend. You can do this, too!