Unplug to Recharge!
I had a chance to catch up with my wonderful dentist the other day before he made me a new crown. He was in a great mood because he’d recently enjoyed an especially fun and relaxing vacation with his three teenage sons at a place in the countryside that had a small lake with canoes and lots of other outdoor sports. The best part, he told me with a big smile, was that there wasn’t any internet or cell service. With no screens to hijack his sons’ attention, they sat outside with him to watch the evening turn to dusk, leisurely chatting, and simply savoring each other’s company. In just two nights and three days, his family experienced a level of quality time that would never have happened if they’d been able to get online.
My dentist’s story made me especially happy because this week I’m launching Quest’s newest featured resource, the Quest for Eternal Sunshine Tech Detox Day Guide. Since my birthday last December, I’ve been spending every Sunday offline, and I’ve become passionate about sharing the benefits of experiencing life without the constant influx of information and distractions that our screens generate 24/7.
I became deeply concerned about the dark side of our ever-increasing engagement with technology last fall, when I saw Tristan Harris in conversation with my cousins, Trudy Goodman and Jack Kornfield, at an InsightLA event. Harris, who studied the ethics of human persuasion at Stanford University and worked as a design ethicist for Google, became well known after starring in the groundbreaking documentary, The Social Dilemma. Now he is a passionate activist, doing everything he can to pressure tech businesses—some of the largest companies in human history who are in a constant race for profit and growth—to align themselves with what is best for humanity. In 2018, he co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, whose mission is to drive a comprehensive shift toward technology that supports our well-being rather than undermines it.
The alarm Tristan is sounding is akin to Rachel Carson’s eloquent warning about the dangers of pesticides in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, and Al Gore’s warnings about climate change in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. It feels imperative that as many people as possible wake up to the detrimental effects of being so immersed in a digital world dominated by a small number of powerful tech companies, so we can wrest back control of our lives before unhealthy patterns get even more entrenched.
Doreen Dodgen-Magee, a psychologist who focuses on how to balance life and technology, wrote in a 2018 Washington Post article (before COVID upped our dependence on technology even more dramatically), “The research is clear: Americans spend most of their waking hours interacting with screens. Studies from the nonprofit group Common Sense Media show that U.S. teens average approximately nine hours per day with digital media, tweens spend six hours, and even our youngest—ages zero to eight—are spending two-and-a-half hours daily in front of a screen. The average adult in the United States spends more than eleven hours a day in the digital world.”
Dodgen-Magee explains how essential it is to make conscious decisions about our relationship with technology if we want to avoid negative impacts like anxiety, depression, shorter attention spans, a decreased ability to focus on one task at a time, and a zero tolerance for experiencing boredom. “We now rely on the same devices that drive so much of our anxiety and alienation for both stimulation and soothing. While, for many of us, these changes will never roam into the domain of addiction, for others they have.” She cited a poll reporting that 50 percent of adolescents and 27 percent of parents believe that their use of their devices had become addictive.
Taking a full 24-hours away from technology helps us gain more awareness about our often-unconscious habits and attachments while giving our brains and nervous systems a much-needed rest. It reminds us that recharging ourselves is more important than recharging our phones and helps us establish healthier boundaries with our devices every day so that we can experience more calm and peace in our lives.
Please check out our new Quest for Eternal Sunshine Tech Detox Day Guide, which is filled with great information and lots of ideas to help you relax, connect with nature, and ponder who you are and what you love. We want to help make your screen break a treat, not a chore!
