How Your Body Feels About Your Phone Habits
I've been noticing lately how much of my relationship with my phone lives in my body before it reaches my mind. The tightening across the shoulders when a notification comes in. The way my hands grip the phone more firmly than the moment requires. The slight brace before I open an email I wasn't expecting. It took me a while to name what was underneath all of that. It was fear, and it was grasping, and once I could see it, I couldn't unsee it.
I’ll start by saying, I am super grateful for everything technology has done for me and will do for me in the future. AND, things are light and shadow. I can see and experience the great benefits while also having concerns.
I use the word concerns intentionally. I do not want this newsletter or even this topic to be about fear. I want it to be about awareness.
In yogic philosophy, one of the guidelines we often talk about is non-attachment or non-grasping. Put another way, “holding things lightly.” I think about this concept a lot when I think of personal conscious technology use.
From the very literal physical grasping of our tech devices in our hands, white knuckling it while we respond to the latest ping or ding or vibration. The tightening of our shoulders as we do this, sending them up to our ears. Our hunched over forms, shielding our hearts as we react to something that feels like an emergency, but really isn’t.
I also think about it with ideas, beliefs, and ways of being. We have entered into a time when we feel like and believe we have to have an opinion on the latest everything. We grasp on to what other people will think, how we will be perceived, and if we did the thing “right.” We are encouraged to always be available and ON. We think we have to be a part of everything or we experience FOMO or FOMS. We are over-managing our images, to the detriment of our internal selves.
Why? Because of fear, attachment, and grasping. The constant state of stress our devices leave us in, makes us more prone to fear. Fear makes us more prone to rigidly grasping or attaching to something, particularly the way things should be, or need to be or “are.”
Let’s take FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) or FOMS (Fear Of Missing Something), fear is literally in the acronym, so I don’t think I have to go to far into that. But where does this fear come from? It's different for each person, but at its base it is about control. When you are fearful, you are more likely to move into control. It’s ok, that’s totally human. When you move into a controlling state, yep, you guess it, more stress, more attachment, more grasping, more dysregulation.
When we are in fear, we are also easier to control.
Why is this important? These things are a recipe for division, attachment to division, and other-ing each other. We essentially go into primal survival mode, and suddenly, the person who took "your" parking space becomes your enemy because of x,y,z reason that has to do in some way with your survival. Yikes, right?
This is happening in small and big ways throughout our lives. Often below the level of our awareness in super sneaky places.
So the questions I invite you to ask today are -
Where am I in fear or urgency about something that is not urgent?
Where am I grasping in my tech use? Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually?
What is something that I can change about my personal tech use, that would support me in stress reduction?
What do I want and or need to be available for? In what way can I release always being "on?”
What is essential?
Stress is a common part of modern life, some of it is out of our control, some of it is not. Identifying where your phone is stressing you out, that you might be able to shift or a change is a great places to start.
If this resonated with you, the newsletter goes deeper on conscious tech use and embodied living. You can subscribe below.
