It’s Monday morning. My mind feels clear. My body grounded.

Yesterday was my weekly reset day.

Here is what this means:

On Sundays, I don’t use my phone or laptop all day. It’s a day without screens, without social media or email.

It’s a day to reset my brain.

(Note: I sometimes make an exception if I have to briefly communicate with someone via WhatsApp or look something up on Google. But it is a very intentional minute to use the phone for a specific purpose in that moment.)

It helps me to destress my mind, body and eyes. It helps me to come back to a base level of my own inner creativity, uninfluenced by other people’s creations.

That’s what I miss the most sometimes - when I look back at my years as a teenager and my early twenties, when I was writing and doing photography for the pure pleasure of it, not comparing myself to other writers or photographers on social media. Simply creating from my own inner well of inspiration. And even when I started my first blog in 2011 and then my travel blog in 2012, I wrote and created mainly undistracted from what others were doing.

I consumed much less and created so much more.

Oh, the times.

Every once in a while it really hits me on a cellular level - just how much time we modern humans spend staring at and communicating through screens. Hours upon hours we interact in a digital world that we can’t really touch or smell.

These days, spending more than a few hours at my laptop every day stresses out my nervous system. After several days of screen interaction, my mind feels more scattered and overwhelmed easily, I feel internal tension in my body and my eyes start burning when I look at my laptop screen.

I’d say those are pretty clear signals from by body to chill the fuck out.

So I am applying concepts of mindfulness to my digital life and taking intentional breaks to let my mind and body breathe and recharge.

This also means on a daily basis:

• I try to not engage with my phone for the first couple of hours in the morning.

• At best I charge it in another room overnight, so no phone use in bed.

• I have basically all notifications turned off, except phone and WhatsApp

• My biggest time and energy sucker is Instagram and so I keep regularly deleting it off my phone for a while. Like I did a few weeks ago.

• Only 4-6 hours of laptop work a day with lots of breaks in between.

By now I’m sure most people have watched The Social Dilemma or read the books Digital Minimalism and Essentialism. I see more and more people get off social media or finally become more intentional about their use of digital devices.

This week, I am going to also take a reset day on Wednesday and see how it feels to have a break in the middle of the week.

It’s interesting to notice how little connected I feel to my body when I am using my digital devices. But life is an embodied experience and so I want to spend as much time in my body as possible, as much time interacting with the real world and humans I can touch, as much time using all my senses.

I am grateful for what the digital world and its technologies provide me with AND I can appreciate it even more when I take breaks from it all.

Here are a few resources to dig into regarding screens and the stress response in our bodies:

• The Effects of Screen Time on Health

• Screens and the Stress Response

• Screen Stress Series - Unwired

And here are two studies:

• Visual and psychological stress during computer work in healthy, young females—physiological responses (2018)

• To Each Stress Its Own Screen: A Cross-Sectional Survey of the Patterns of Stress and Various Screen Uses in Relation to Self-Admitted Screen Addiction (2019)