Welcome to all the new readers! Every Tuesday morning I send a brief update from the 1,000 hours of nothing.

Since January 2026, I have devoted my two hour daily commute across London to Phone Free silence. What are the tangible benefits of spending so much time doing absolutely nothing?

I normally say: having more control over otherwise automatic phone use and generally feeling better. Profound, lifechanging… but blah.

But last Thursday evening a weirdly specific benefit emerged.

It was Hour 245 of Phone Free Commuting, and I was on the 19.06 out of Waterloo.

After so many hours of doing nothing, thoughts just come and go.

This isn’t like watching clouds cross the sky - more a bad suburban sitcom.

The journey started with a little burning feeling as I remembered something really stupid I said at work. Then almost immediately a sudden impulse to check work emails, as if pulling refresh on Outlook would somehow reveal my status within my tribe.

My hand went to my pocket entirely automatically, but very fortunately I was wearing a high vis vest that says Phone Free Commute. In a full carriage, it’s enough to stop me. After all, I don’t want to look stupid.

The work-burning feeling soon passed. (I very much doubt it would have done so if I were on my work emails.)

Unexpectedly, a commuter said hello. She found the vest funny, and she said she would read the articles. We talked politely for a couple of minutes.

But then disaster. The conversation ended and we didn’t know what to do. I had no social shield without my phone. And she could hardly pull out hers after talking to a man so anti-phone he was dressed like a total idiot. We both stood helplessly for a few seconds. We had at least fifteen minutes of journey ahead of us with no obvious out.

Perhaps too suddenly I turned to look out the window, as if resuming some important business. At my back I sensed her relief and gratitude.

The streets around Vauxhall were getting dark. It made me think about arranging a drink with my friends sometime. I thought about WhatsApping but then oops no phone.

I closed my eyes, and listened to the rumble of the train.

And then it happened. A wonderful thing. I got a little flush of energy. An abrupt and sudden burst of optimism. There were so many things I wanted to do with my life, and I would do them. It was mixed with confidence all my plans would succeed and a devil-may-care attitude to the future.

This feeling had erupted a few times over the Phone Free Commuting year, beginning in the second month. I had never really known how to describe it. Once I called it the feeling of having drunk the lucky potion from Harry Potter.

But this time it hit me: this wasn’t entirely new.

I had felt this way before, in a very different time and place.

Two thirds of the way through any holiday, I always knew exactly how I wanted to change my life.

I was suddenly filled with all sorts of new plans and schemes. I will wake up early and write (I’ve always wanted to write). I will go to the gym. I will take up a hobby. I won’t worry so much about work and get things in perspective. I will be present.

I will change A LOT. And it will be easy to do so.

Towards the end of every holiday, we always bought (and still buy) a fridge magnet from wherever we are. For my wife and kids, it was just a way of remembering the place. Secretly though, I would cast a little spell on it to remind me to do all the things I wanted to do when I got home. The fridge magnet would transmit my holiday optimism into my normal life.

But it never worked. Things just went back to normal. I would tell myself I didn’t have the time to do the things amid a busy routine. (But my huge screen time would make me a liar.)

And then a few months later I would go on another holiday. And after four or five days the stress would die down. And the cycle would repeat itself. Until the fridge was full of lovely but entirely unmagical fridge magnets.

Until this year that is, when I started having confusing bursts of optimism on the train - lo and behold it was Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood! An emotion designed for a Cornwall gift shop appearing willy-nilly throughout the year in the Underground.

The Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood is just the tip of the optimism iceberg. But my overall improved mood across the year is considerably harder to describe, especially as it ebbs and flows with all sorts of factors: sleep, exercise, what’s going on at work, whether my daughter’s gerbils have covered the floor in wood shavings again. It’s not unalloyed bliss.

It’s more like an increased likelihood that I will view the world in a glass half full kind of way.

No more than a tendency, but invaluable. It has been enough for me to write regularly for the first time in my life.

And this optimism is combined with a recurrent feeling of playfulness, a sense that life is a game.

This - of course - is very necessary for the wearing of high vis on public transport.

Phones are the natural enemy of Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood. Phones make nah.

I noticed years ago that if ever I had an exciting idea about a new thing to do - signing up for a run, learning the piano - I could reliably kill it by scrolling a bit. Nah, I would think.

But this year I came to believe that phones don’t just make in-the-moment nah. They radiate a Cloud of Nah, an All-Pervading Field of Eeyore that seems to take weeks to clear.

My suspicion is that the Cloud of Nah had all sorts of deadening effects, causing me to view work and other problems in a negative way, and meaning I was less likely to have the energy to carry on with any plans that survived in-the-moment nah.

And perhaps worst of all, it repeatedly thwarted the one project that could clear the Cloud: tackling phone use itself.

One day it felt like a great idea to read a book on the commute. Or try out a new restrictive app. But after a while I thought nah. Or even if I got through the early stages of nah, it turned out there was lots of nah to wade through before I reached the other side. (My estimate for doing so was about four weeks, which is eerily consistent with Anna Lembke’s recommendation in Dopamine Nation.)

Over the years I tried and tried again, but long before I’d cleared the Cloud of Nah, I would have dismantled or declared dead whatever habit or restriction I put in place and gone back to square one.

Phones begetting pessimism begetting phones. Quite the trap.

As the train got near Surbiton, I found myself interrogating my newly named optimism.

Was Holiday Fridge Magnet Mood just caused by reducing phone use, or was it increasing meditation? Over the years I have alternated between success and failure in both - and this has convinced me both play a role. I now think of them as connected opposites.

Phones fill my head with glum stuff, the cares of the world and the deadening effects of comparison. They also seem to tire out my mind - even if what I look at is benign, the refreshing seems to be exhausting.

And tiring out my mind seems to make it pessimistic. It’s reminiscent of my mind late at night: glass half empty, or if I get to 3am, downright panicky.

And now, through doing the Phone Free Commute, I get what I would call regular mental rest. The rest that previously I had only achieved a few days into a holiday.

The train gets into Surbiton. I take off my high vis vest, tootle my way home and write this quickly before my mood changes.

If I wait too long, writing an article about phones themed on fridge magnets might seem like a stupid idea.

Next week: my shameful history of failing to form habits. And yet more nothing.

If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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Curious about what on earth is going on? This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of nothing on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here. My free archive is available at phonefreewill.com, sorted into sections ranging from practical through to humiliating.

I’ve often been jealous of the people who write about putting down the phone and then start noticing and appreciating things.

I want to notice and appreciate things. I’ve spent well over two hundred hours commuting across London without a phone (wearing high vis no less) - I should be the king of noticing and appreciating by now.

But with the occasional exception (read about that here), I fail each and every day.

A comment made by a reader - - stayed with me. The underground is an incredible engineering operation. I must spend around fifteen minutes each day walking through the quarter mile of mazy tunnels that is the Bank/Monument complex. She asked whether, with my attention free from my phone, it was possible to appreciate the extraordinary labour and ingenuity that went into it.

The idea appealed, and I read up about it. There are some amazing stories about how Bank/Monument was built. At one point, the engineers had to buy a church’s crypt and rebury thousands of bodies. The two directions of the Central Line are stacked on top of each other - and follow a winding trajectory - purely because the engineers had to follow the path of medieval streets metres above.

I filled my head with stories like these, put on my high vis, rolled up my sleeves and got ready to start appreciating. I was already dreaming of an article like “The Bank/Monument Complex Is Like A Cathedral To Me Now”.

But when I got there, it was the same as it always was. It’s just an underground station. All the reading in the world, all the time in the world… I cannot summon awe and wonder when I’m there.

The most likely thing is that I’m just crap at this.

But to be more charitable, maybe I’ve trained a failure of imagination in myself.

When I learnt to meditate, I repeatedly and deliberately paid attention to something that was real, present and in front of me - sounds, my breath, a sight. I did this day in, day out and soon enough my mind got used to it.

That always felt like the opposite of the phone’s mental training. The phone is about the abstract, about the other. About faraway lands, the past and the future. It takes my mind all over the shop.

It’s just a chunk of metal and glass, but never in human history has an object been so dissociated from its physical form.

By spending more time training to be present and less on my phone, I believe I’ve tipped the scales. That has meant increasingly when I’m at home with my family, I’m at home with my family. Fewer mental invasions from work or world worries, or overthinking and negative self-talk. It’s not like I choose to be present in these moments through an act of will… it’s more like my mind settles naturally into it.

It’s quite the prize. But it has meant that when I’m confronted with walls in an underground station, no matter how hard I try, I just see walls in an underground station.

I will though concede an occasional curious moment. Every now and then when I’m commuting through London I have the sensation of being a very young child. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until recently. Here’s my suspicion.

Through being present on the Underground I am looking at everything afresh. It isn’t wonderful - it just is what it is. The last time I looked at the Underground afresh was the first time I saw it. I lived in Essex, and we would occasionally come into London when I was a kid, to go to the Natural History Museum or wherever.

The Bank/Monument complex is no cathedral. But just occasionally walking through it is like listening to a song that reminds me of my childhood.

Almost enough to make up for the queues.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

But for once, the strangest thing hasn’t been putting on a high vis vest.

It’s the wall of phones.

It’s always been the case that pretty much everyone is on the thing, but I’d somehow got used to it. It took a break to help me see it afresh. And wow it’s a lot of phones.

I’ve been doing this now for 233 hours across over eight months. And after all that time, I can see the carriage in two ways.

One person using their phone is unremarkable. They look like they are bored, and filling the time by entertaining themselves. Or catching up on a chore. Or messaging a friend. All very understandable. They remind me of me.

But as a collective mass, as a sea of phones and faces seen over months… that looks and feels very different.

Just occasionally, like a magic eye picture, a very different carriage comes into view.

I once listened to a podcast about a bird called the Northern Wheatear.

It’s absolutely tiny, weighing less than a packet of crisps. It spends the first few weeks of its life hopping about, doing whatever little birds do.

And then one day, with no influence from its parents and with no-one to follow, it suddenly decides to up and fly from its native Alaska all the way to sub-Saharan Africa.

The journey is ridiculously further than it has ever flown before. It takes about three months, because rather than flying direct (across the US and the Atlantic), it chooses to go West, flying across the whole of Eurasia.

It seemed unimaginably absurd to me. I had a mental image of a bird living in Alaska, bobbing about, with maybe a nagging feeling it was getting a little nippy. And then thinking, I know, here’s something out of the box… maybe I the forest that I live in is really on a great ball, and different parts of the great ball have different temperatures. So maybe I’ll fly for months on end. I won’t stop when things become warmer and therefore better, I’ll keep flying until I reach a very specific place that I can imagine perfectly, even though I’ve never seen it. And you know what? I’ll take the long way.

Of course, logically it can’t be that way. It can’t be that the bird just has a moment of inspiration.

It must be some sort of inherited biological programming shaped by natural selection. Just as the bird has evolved to have wings, so its brain has evolved that when it reaches a certain age it migrates.

We have a dog called Jumble, and he loves us very much.

If he sees us after some time away he goes crazy. He tries to get as close as possible, jumping up at us, and wrapping himself round our legs. Even as he does this, he wants to be even closer, making a low growling noise which seems to indicate his frustration at not being able to occupy the same physical space as us.

We cuddle and stroke him and we look in his eyes and we see deep love reflected back at us. This love must be consciously generated by Jumble.

But deep down, we know that there is some sort of biological programming here too. We humans have selectively bred dogs, and we have chosen not just physical traits but also mental ones.

And if we could guess one biological fundamental to the unnaturally selected dogs’ brain, it is surely to love humans.

Does Jumble consciously love us, or is he acting out programming like the Northern Wheatear?

Let’s face it, given the evidence, it probably is biological programming.

But I’m not putting in all this effort into having a dog to think that way. So I’m going to go for conscious.

But I’m not consistent. Every time we get out a dustpan and brush, Jumble goes bananas, yapping and barking and attacking the broom.

In this case, I choose not to think of it as a conscious choice. It is too bonkers. This is definitely some sort of biological thing.

So loving me: conscious. Going crazy at a broom: biology.

My choice. He’s my dog after all.

Science says humans are animals too - evolved from apes - and therefore with brains that hold inherited programming, like a dog or a Northern Wheatear.

But it doesn’t feel like that. Because we know what it’s like to be inside a human. At any given moment, it feels like we can decide to do whatever we like afresh.

Years ago, I was ordering my kids’ school meals on the stupid, stupid online system, thinking what a great father I was for navigating such a glitchy awful website just so my daughter could be fed.

And I had a weird telescoping moment.

Wait a minute, I thought.

I devote a lot of my time and energy to my children. I’m very proud of doing that. But isn’t that exactly what my biological programming would want me to do? To pass on my genes and ensure their success?

But the urge to look after my children doesn’t come from a separate part of me. It comes instead as a thousand seemingly original ideas, ranging from a conviction that Bluey would be better for them than Cocomelon to the nagging feeling that I should probably battle with ParentPay once again to check that the jacket potato order did actually go through.

Still biological programming surely - but perceived as lots of individual original conscious thoughts. Huh.

As an animal I need to eat. But it’s not like the thoughts about eating are separate from my other “rational” thoughts. I don’t get a flashing light on my heads up display like Terminator saying “Food levels down to 30%” interrupting my otherwise higher reasoning day.

No, instead I “create” an entirely original thought saying “I have never tried that new Double Big Tasty. I wonder what it’s like. I should get it before they stop doing it.”

And thanks to a thousand different independent consciously generated thoughts like this, I stay fed.

For years this feeling that all my thoughts arose from biology was an unresolved suspicion. But something changed irreversibly after looking in a mirror after a lot of meditation (read more about that here). The feeling that there was a conscious “me” originating the thoughts fell away. I was just left with a biological brain that came up with everything - including the sensation that the conscious me was the author of it.

And though I still shudder occasionally to have lost my authorial self, there’s been a big plus side.

There’s now no division between my biological impulses and my conscious thoughts. The former generates the latter.

Good news! I was not the author of the decision to eat cheese straight from the fridge, without a plate or a knife.

And yay! It’s not my fault that I interrupted a pleasant Saturday to think about whether Clive from work hates me.

And above all, it’s not my fault when I use my phone all the stupid time.

Not my fault, but still worth fixing.

In doing so, my chosen method is to train to ignore the succession of thoughts pulling me to the phone. Each one seems individually convincing, but if I keep giving in to them I’ll spend my life on the thing.

Learning to ignore thoughts is not easy, and at this point ordinarily I’d witter on about mindfulness, and setting aside a bit of my day each day to practise. But let’s change the record shall we?

The train carriage isn’t just where I practise. It’s where you can go to see humans with nothing to do. I’ve seen thousands of people over hundreds of days, and each of them must be experiencing individual thoughts and impulses. But all of those thoughts and impulses are ending up at the same result: use the phone.

So I don’t need to watch myself over the years to see the pattern. The train carriage is where I can go to see my own mind multiplied many times over.

What is this great undercurrent so strong it sweeps all before it? Why does the human brain inevitably reach for the phone in any given spare moment?

Dogs are halves, looking for their other half. They’ve evolved that way. And humans complete them.

Humans themselves seem equally incomplete. I have spent many hundreds of hours in silence now, and there’s not one moment that has felt fully satisfactory. Not one moment that hasn’t felt like it should lead to something else.

We are the animals who look at everything with dissatisfaction, and want it to be checked and improved. We are the people who look at a spear and say “not good enough” and keep making it better, and before you know it we have built cities, fractional reserve banking and Surbiton Station.

We are relentless in our restlessness. And maybe this is the underlying biological driving force behind our constant use of the phone.

The phone is omnipresent and infinitely malleable. As such, it can be anything our biological brains need - a check on social status and a check on fear levels. It can simulate the sensation of everything from good company to reproduction. And of all the biological drives it short circuits, none is more powerful than the simple act to check, fix, check and check again. Nothing is more human than that.

Maybe over thousands of years natural selection shaped us to be incomplete because the relentless drive it gave us was so successful.

And around two decades ago that process reached its end. We invented an omnipresent, omni-capable device that offers to make us whole.

In the same way we complete dogs, phones complete us.

Well, almost.

Think of Jumble, wrapped around our legs, rubbing his face into us as hard as he can. And still making that frustrated low growling noise.

I can’t say with certainty what drives our phone use - after all I’m just a man in high vis with too much time on his hands.

I don’t know why Jumble goes crazy at a broom. But thanks to knowing a little about his brain, I do know the right move isn’t anger or judgement.

Just patient training.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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If you ever want to read more, all my posts are free (and neatly categorised) at phonefreewill.com.

This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

The last of these hopefully more practical Summer pieces before I take a month’s break.

I write these articles from the perspective of 216 hours of phone free commuting, which itself followed 18 months of meditation.

So my experience of sitting with my thoughts is very different from when I started out.

These days it is far easier. The technical term for my current practice is what Sam Harris would describe as non-dual mindfulness. Combined with forgetting to do that and just thinking about what I fancy.

It wasn’t how I started at all. I’d really recommend this article about why I started and what it felt like, but equally a more nuts and bolts telling might help too.

I started meditating to tackle my addiction to technology.

The two tools I found invaluable in that were my phone and a fitness watch.

The latter first. I needed a timer for the sessions, and one I could start easily and quickly wherever I was. My very cheap watch offered a five minute timer in two taps.

I would focus on the sounds around me. Or try to - actually I would forget entirely what I was doing almost immediately. When I emerged blinking into remembering, I would celebrate and return my attention to the sounds. Then the cycle would repeat before the timer went off.

It felt deeply pointless and often very unpleasant. The thoughts that arose were mainly anxiety about work. An overthinky mess of “Does Clive hate me because of the formatting of that email?”.

I did it daily for weeks without result. I only held onto the habit thanks to my trusty phone. I used an app called Beeminder. I would record each and every day that I meditated, and if I didn’t, the app would fine me. I was doubly conscious of the threat because it operated through a widget on the front page.

And that wasn’t the end of my phone’s involvement. If the sounds around me were difficult to use for focus, I would use my phone for Tibetan Singing Bowl gongs on Spotify.

It was about five weeks before I noticed any effect. I’ll write more about that another time, but when the gains did come, they appeared unconnected to my meditation.

The first clue, curiously, was a decline in Sunday Blues.

When I began, most of my understanding about meditation was from a course on Calm I had listened to by . (I’d say his stuff is better than the app - find him here).

Jeff talks about exercising “muscles” in the mind. Thanks to this analogy, I was able to keep going without an expectation of immediate relaxation. If I’d had this goal, I’d have quickly given up - as it palpably didn’t work.

I also learnt from Jeff Warren that the object of focus was unimportant. It was only fodder for developing concentration and to act as a contrast to the thoughts that arose.

It helped that I had come into this battling my phone addiction. Because of it, I had a curiosity about my mind rather than an expectation of calm. Also, in building my concentration, I imagined I was rebuilding my phone-shattered attention.

Though I started mainly at home, the commute - with ambient train noise as a focus - quickly emerged as a very handy time to do it. Over the weeks, the timer increased from 5 to 10 minutes, and soon enough the end of a 15 minute train journey marked the end of a meditation.

My practice changed over time. But the endless cycle between focus, forgetting, noticing the mind wandering and pulling it back to the focus, remained crucial for months.

Is this effort necessary?

Obviously I can only project from my own experience. And I’m going to say yes and no.

The no first.

Over five years of fighting the phone, 18 months of meditation and over 200 hours of phone free commuting, I feel like I’ve learnt a huge amount about phones and my mind. I’m convinced phone use creates in me a pervasive fog of glum anxiety that’s hard to perceive until it lifts, and that the best way of keeping it at bay is to schedule rigorously protected daily mental rest.

But it seems unlikely that meditation is the only way of getting that rest. I would guess it can be achieved using a wide range of activities, like reading or swimming or gardening.

You might call these activities meditative. Or perhaps boring.

During these activities the mind will likely wander where it will, and I suspect that gives it the rest and breathing space it needs.

But here’s the argument for the effortful training.

Mind wandering for me was not a pleasant experience. It was inseparable from overthinking and rumination. (And, by the way, the need for distraction from that discomfort likely drove a lot of my phone use.)

I didn’t know it at the time, but the focus / forget / return drill taught me the skill of mindfulness. That gradually changed my relationship with my negative thoughts and made them bearable to sit with.

I’m convinced I would never have achieved any distance from my thoughts without this effortful training. I’d read pieces lauding mindfulness before, and believed I understood what it meant. But I was flat wrong - I didn’t know what mindfulness was until those weeks of hard training kicked in.

Meditation is just one form of daily mental rest. But for me it’s a highly portable form that has slotted neatly into my busy life. It’s taught me to see far more clearly the effects of the phone on my mind, it’s made doing nothing a less painful choice and it’s reduced pickups that would otherwise have been automatic.

But if you choose to build some rest in your day in a different way, I’d recommend importing one feature at least from the meditation world: patience.

Whatever you do isn’t going to deliver benefits in the moment. The fruits of a rested mind develop over weeks of steady practice. After all, if it delivered in a straightforwardly joyous and immediate way, the commute wouldn’t be full of phone fiddling.

At least that’s where I’m at on all this at the end of Phone Free Will Season One anyway. My evolving understanding of how this all fits together - phone free time, mental rest, meditation and mindfulness - is the mission of this Substack.

I hope it’ll serve as a thousand reasons to put down the phone, and an ongoing experiment into how that is best done.

Thank you so much for reading this! I’ve enjoyed writing it hugely over these months. My dream one day is to write a book about it, so working through it all on here has been invaluable.

Heartfelt thanks go to everyone who has helped shape and improve my writing with their comments over these months.

If you ever fancy reading more, it’s all available (and neatly categorised) at phonefreewill.com.

If you know anyone who’d be tickled by it, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with them.

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See you in mid-September,

PFW

It’s nearly the final episode of Phone Free Will’s summer shorts. Reader questions and other bits.

Soon after I started documenting my phone free commute, an established writerly writer told me, in a slightly lofty way - “You should just read a book”.

And yes, there’s definitely a strong case for that.

I wrote a post earlier this year, the Boredom Line, in which I suggested that phones are so interesting that they have made everything else in life more boring. And that deliberately spending time doing boring things reverses this, making normal life (like talking to your kids) more interesting again.

I listed a load of activities, sorted from Boring to Interesting. Listening to Chappell Roan is fairly interesting, while one time I watched an opera and was so bored I nearly chewed my arm off. (And that’s how I knew it was good for me.)

Books are in the middle - way less stimulating than phones. Accordingly, I don’t disagree that swapping phones for books would be very beneficial.

But of course doing nothing is even further down the Boredom League Table than books, so according to my logic, even more beneficial.

What makes it so special?

There’s a war on. A war in the gaps. Every moment life pauses. Between the conversations. Waiting for a bus. While waiting for the kettle to boil. In those moments we likely have two choices - do nothing or use the phone.

I believe that the “do nothing” choice has to be seen as valuable. It was what we did before the phone was invented, and it was likely good for us in a way we are only now learning. Some speculate that this action helps us by allowing a part of the brain called the Default Mode Network to come online. That neuroscience is contested, but we don’t need it - I’d argue we can deduce the benefit of nothing time from our own felt experience.

If we agree that nothing can help, we can fight the war each gap one at a time, choosing nothing over the phone as often as we can. But more often than we’d like, the phone will win out. For two reasons: we just pick it up automatically without any conscious choice, and the decision to do nothing feels unappealing.

And here’s where I personally find my scheduled doing nothing time to be invaluable. It meaningfully trains me for those moments.

In my doing nothing time, I hear my brain coming up with a thousand reasons to pick up the phone. I believe I train my mind to hear that clearly and to resist it, reducing automatic pickups.

And in my doing nothing time, I get used to my inner world. Some like to pretend that putting down the phone will be in some way pleasant. Unfortunately, that’s not the case - we get besieged by worries about all sorts. The phone displaced them, but when we put it down we are tacking our little boat into that gale.

This is the patient work of sitting with worries and accepting them, the work that the phone tells us to put off to another day. But it’s a sham promise, because these worries will always find a way to be heard - in the dead of night, or as a background drumbeat of anxiety. I’d rather hear them in daytime, thanks, at a time of my choosing.

And then, over time, when viewed from a distance, they can become as interesting as any novel.

But at first, doing nothing is much harder than reading. And getting the best of it involves a little technique (More on this next week, in the last of these before the break).

So if that’s not for you, and fair enough, reading is likely a better way for you to get daily mental rest.

Mind you - while reading is definitely an easier choice, it’s not always a cinch.

There is a small pocket of book readers on the train. Sometimes I see one huffing and puffing over a page. Then they reach for their phone very quickly, check nothing and quickly put it away.

I imagine their phone reach might have been automatic. Or it might be that they were overcome by a worry, and they reached for a more powerful anaesthetic than a page could offer.

I know that feeling. This was me trying to read on the commute a few years back. My mind was going too fast for a book, as if I was glimpsing it from the window of a speeding train.

Reading is supposed to be fun. We get told that all the time. With doing nothing, I say nothing of the sort. It’s patient training.

But I’d argue that training is worth it. Our minds are racing at the speed of the phone. If we slow it down we can enjoy books. We can enjoy sunsets. We can enjoy life.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

Share

This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

Photo by Furkan Elveren on Unsplash

Phone Free Will’s Summer Shorts continues. Answers to reader questions, weird miscellany.

The most common question I get asked - why don’t you just cut down your screen time like normal people do?

Very fair.

In the years after I made my daughter cry because I looked at my phone rather than her during a ballet recital, I tried a lot of things to reduce my screen time. I tracked it carefully.

But I kept reversing whatever successes I had. I was a yo-yo screen time reducer.

Then I decided on a change of tactics - I chose a small part of the day in which to do absolutely nothing.

In practical terms, switching from “less screen time” to “more nothing” had lots of benefits -

• It’s far easier to track the introduction of a new habit than it is to track cutting down a bad habit. I used a few hacks to bed in the habit (including “stacking” it to something I do every day, i.e. commuting), and it was a relatively simple regime when compared to the mess of failing hacks aimed at cutting my screen time.

• It solves the problem of determining what is “good” phone use. Substack and WhatsApp seem like harmless apps - but they’ve both got an infinite scroll. Reading news can be active citizenship or needlessly ruminating on misery. Watching telly on Netflix feels benign enough - but the other day I walked past their tube advert saying “Pssst we do games now”.

• It solves the dilemma over which other tech “counts”. I suspect all tech use drains us to some extent - phones just happen to be the most portable and omnipresent form (unless I lose my senses and somehow end up buying these glasses I see advertised everywhere). I use my laptop a tonne and I watch a lot of telly at home - my doing nothing time helps counterbalance all of that.

But this change in approach has had some odd effects that make very little sense to outsiders -

• I needed a time of day that I wasn’t using for anything else. The most obvious candidate for my phone free time was my tube and train commute, which put me in the opposite camp as everyone else in the whole world. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus.

• And it means the biggest phone use villains are the ones most likely to replace my doing nothing time. Enter the humble podcast, the seemingly harmless habit that destroys the silence on offer on the walk home from the station.

I don’t think society has solved this whole phone problem yet. I’d argue that the missing piece of the puzzle is nothing.

If you can learn to be at peace with boredom, doing nothing is a choose-able option; but without it, the phone is the only default. What’s more, the quiet helps you hear and learn to resist the otherwise automatic call to the phone - you will have built up internal barriers to picking the thing up.

When I did look at my screen time many months later it had come down substantially. And what’s more I felt a tonne better in surprising ways - improved mood, more energy, more optimism.

Although I still have some external barriers in place - I charge my phone downstairs, keep my phone in a different room when I work and restrict some apps (particularly Substack) - I find I don’t dismantle those barriers like I used to. Confident in my doing nothing time, I no longer feel I’m fighting the phone 24/7.

That’s all very compressed. If you’re not immediately convinced, your punishment is to read all the other articles on phonefreewill.com.

(Sorry. This one might help - Phone Free FAQ)

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

This is the second of a little handful of shorter summer essays - some reader questions, some very strange thoughts that didn’t fit elsewhere.

A few weeks back I was pestering a friend of mine to read something I’d written on here. I am ever anxious as to whether any of this makes sense.

She apologised. She said she had meant to read it the night before, but when she picked up the phone to do so, she instead scrolled away what time she had.

She then added, with unexpected poignancy, “I don’t know why I did that.”

Because I am a terrible know-it-all I started to mansplain my theories.

I still wonder what I should have said.

You wake up and the phone is in your hand and what ON EARTH have you been doing?

And for how long?

You have only so many hours on this earth and you have just spent one of them doing worse than nothing. How much, you wonder, has this added up to over your life?

You’ve read enough stuff to know your brain is fried by it and that you’ve likely just supported a business you hate.

Dragging your attention back to whatever needs your focus, there’s a palpable bleariness. Like your brain ate a tonne of crisps.

You open and close a couple of windows on the laptop.

Around this point a thought arises to check something benign on the phone… did your mother-in-law look at the WhatsApp about picking up your daughter?

But no. You know enough now to spot where that’s heading.

You fling the phone at a sofa. Your face flushes a little and you do a little nervous tic with your fingers. There’s an odd sensation in the back of the head.

I am the very worst phone addict in the world, you say. But it ends today.

And then, if you’re anything like me, a few minutes later the thing is in your hand again.

What are we supposed to do with these moments?

I say a friend said this. I could equally say everyone I’ve ever talked to on the commute. I’m the worst they say - the worst addict of all. You won’t believe this, one person said, but I had to ask my seventy year old mum to set a phone password for me. And then just a few days later I called her up to get the password off her.

But rather than blame the phone, the person telling this story was blaming herself. She was genuinely embarrassed.

I have felt my fair share of self-loathing about phone use. But no more.

It stops here.

Self-loathing is no help.

In fact, it makes it worse - I’m convinced that there’s something in the condition of post scroll self-loathing which begets even more use.

No. Since my very strange mirror experience I take a hard line on this stuff.

A thought arose about using the phone. That thought was produced by the brain at that time for what reason we do not know - we might guess a need for distraction, or purely just from an engrained habit.

Then, later, another thought arose - that the previous decision to pick up the phone was a bad one.

A thought then followed that the entity thinking up the thoughts is a doofus.

And that it should be sure never to pick up the phone again.

But this thought on its own has no power to bind future thoughts. It’s just a thought.

The logic that exculpates you from blame also demands you be deeply pessimistic about your in-the-moment resolve to resist the phone. (Read more about my thinking here.)

It may not be your fault, but it is still your problem.

So a more helpful thought than “Never again” would be: I’ll make a pact with my loved one so we don’t use phones at such and such a time. Or I’ll install a hardcore blocking app.

Personally I found that I later demolished any barriers I set up, sometimes without even noticing. So I decided I needed to switch battlegrounds, to devote a little time each day to watch my mind. And over time I saw the automatic impulse to pick up the phone more clearly. And because I saw it clearly, I could practise resisting it.

The external barriers to phone use - still useful by the way - were joined by internal barriers. My use slowed and I felt much better in lots of ways.

Maybe you’ll decide to go down that route, maybe you won’t. Your call.

But - and I hesitate to be prescriptive but I’ll give it a go on this one occasion - whatever you do, do not blame yourself.

This behaviour is not just widespread - it is near universal.

It is not just automatic - it is default.

I should have said to my friend - I do that. We all do that.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

It’s summer, so for the next few weeks it’s time for a little change in format: Phone Free Will Summer Shorts. Answers to reader questions and yet more humiliating admissions. Then back to normal in September.

A few people have written lovely emails sharing their experiences fighting the phone - and questions about driving in silence have come up again and again.

I believe deeply in carving out time to do nothing in a way that fits into the day. Adding something additional always ends up costing others: “Hey love - can you get the kids up and out of the house? I’m going to do nothing for a bit cos I read this guy on Substack”.

So for me the journey to work is perfect. But I’m aware that, although sometimes it feels like the entire world is crammed onto the 8.48 from Surbiton to Waterloo, not everyone commutes by train.

I started driving in silence a few weeks after I first began meditation. And because the stupid kids need stupid lifts all the stupid time to stupid places just round the corner, it’s collectively added up to quite a lot of time. It’s hard to separate out from the sitting practice I had developed at home, but I think over time driving in silence has really helped me.

It was while driving that I realised that mindfulness was giving me more control over my instinctive negative reactions - particularly involving a sharp reduction in under-the-dashboard middle fingers at old ladies who cut me up.

And it was during driving that my brain fully clocked that all thoughts arose without authorship; and that even the thoughts that seemed to be observing that were themselves just unauthored thoughts.

Plus I like driving, it’s fun.

We all need mental rest in our day. And while it might seem odd to look for mental rest when you should clearly be concentrating, I’d argue that mental rest is not at all like physical rest - you can likely get it gardening, swimming or walking. My tentative rule of thumb - if an activity has a capacity for desperate and painful boredom, then it can work. Read more about that here, and why - weirdly - mental rest might be best attempted when you’re alert.

Of course the irony of using driving time is that rather than eradicating phone use (as on my train commute) it reduces time spent listening to the radio, audiobooks and music. These pre-date the phone of course. But given that you now likely experience heavy stimulation at all other times, cutting out the radio is - in my view - a small price to pay to counterbalance that. I’ve argued that even the most benign audio cuts out the silence we need - and that it’s perfectly possible to avoid rest by listening to a podcast arguing that rest would be a great thing.

To gradually get from boring to bearable, my guess would be start small, maybe a few minutes at a time at first. I found it helpful to use the standard focus-noticing meditation technique, transplanted to driving. So I focus on the road, and when I catch the mind wandering off it, I just notice that and come back to the road. Do that enough and it should gradually feel easier, not because you’ve toughened up, but because the noticing itself changes the way your mind works.

If I’m right, you should start to feel 24/7 benefits in mood and phone use control within a few weeks.

If I’m wrong… well at least you were concentrating on the road all that time.

Good luck, and if you’re giving it a try, let me know.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

Photo by Brecht Denil on Unsplash

The other day we were all out enjoying the sun.

Well… some of us were enjoying the sun.

Others were enjoying the sun and not looking at our phones, which is similar but not quite the same.

But then a family friend landed us all in a terrible dilemma.

The conversation had turned to polar bears. And he claimed that they were heading south, mating with grizzly bears and making pizzly bears, which were terrifying American towns.

This friend is a lovely person but they’ve been known to be wrong before.

Everyone wanted to reach for their phones to Google it.

The whole atmosphere darkened.

Could we live with not knowing whether this was true?

It is hour 186 of phone free commuting.

The chief disadvantage of phone free commuting in high vis is that you look like a massive idiot. And if anyone asks you what you are doing it’s hard to know what to say. I looked at my phone during my daughter’s ballet recital. That was a few years ago. And then in trying to fix the problem I meditated a lot. And then I had this awakening experience. And now I’m wearing high vis.

There really aren’t the words.

That’s the downside.

The upside is I have rare, total clarity on the phone question. No matter what’s going on, I never use it. It’s my totally protected mental rest time.

Otherwise I’d be lured in by all sorts of positive uses. Because the trouble with the phone is that there’s always a good reason.

And the most positive use of the phone is to seek wisdom.

Sir Isaac Newton said he only saw so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants. And we who have phones can stand on so many giants.

As I commute my mind thirsts after knowledge.

Was Ben Stiller in Marley And Me, as my wife claims? I am pretty convinced he was not, but I could verify it now.

No, says the high vis vest. Later.

It was bad enough in the days of Google. But now the siren call of wisdom is even louder.

Much has been written about AI, its ethics and its accuracy. For me, one of the most interesting effects is to hugely expand the number of questions one could conceivably answer by checking the phone.

Recently we were on holiday in the Lake District. We were planning to climb Scafell Pike. The night before, on a whim, I told AI we were doing that. It advised me to leave early, getting to the car parks at 9am at the latest, because they filled up. This had not occurred to us.

We followed its advice. And took the last parking spot. As we walked past people forlornly searching for parking on a single lane road designed for old narrow cars and not wide Teslas, the thought occurred that these were people who had not shared their plans with AI.

For me, the surface area of life that was checkable was expanded enormously in an instant. I could tell AI all of my upcoming plans!

There’s so much out there about AI being wrong. But let’s face it… it’s not wrong that often.

And when did knowing more become a bad thing?

I believe that things picked up from the world of meditation can help us greatly in managing the harm from the phone.

I believe we should learn to be bored again. If that’s your earnest desire too, read my essays about my meditative experience here, here, here and here.

Over the hundreds of hours I tried many different forms of meditation, with different techniques and focuses. So much advice.

If there was one unifying instruction, one thing you could always do no matter what stage of meditation you were at, it was to accept. Having a bad day, mind wandering all over the place? Accept it. Feeling really low? Accept it. Fidgeting? Accept it.

This worked in the earliest stages, when I was overcome by itches. The answer wasn’t to scratch them, but to accept that you are itchy. You just watched the itchy feeling and accepted it was there. And soon enough, that stage passed.

And it worked in the moment where it all ended, standing in front of a mirror.

Honestly, across hundreds of hours, it was probably the best way of describing the whole thing. I came to imagine meditation to be training for the acceptance muscle. “Ah well, it’s okay” reps.

By weird coincidence, phone use pulls us in the other direction.

Don’t accept you don’t know, says the phone. You CAN have certainty on this. Quick - check and check again. And now, with AI, check even more things.

So maybe it’s not the quality that’s the issue with AI, maybe it’s the quantity.

Because with each check, the opposite of acceptance - unease - is reinforced until it’s inflamed. And soon enough I feel uneasy about everything.

It’s like scratching a mosquito bite.

I’m not saying that we need to never check anything. Sometimes we need to know what happened to Theo Walcott.

But there might be value in those moments when we grit our teeth and practise accepting we don’t know.

Back with our friends.

The bear conversation continued.

Everyone had resisted. No one had looked up the pizzly bear. But then someone else suggested that the area around Chernobyl was populated with fur-less nuclear bears, who were ravenous and attacked at night.

It was one bear claim too many. Everyone had to look it up.

The calm of the afternoon was lost.

But at least we knew.

Thanks for reading! This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the very strange story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share the joy of Phone Free Will.

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I rushed to look into the mirror.

It was as I suspected. The person staring back wasn’t me.

It was clearly the body I inhabited, but I had no control over its actions. It felt foreign and at one remove.

I wasn’t there any more.

And I never had been.

My first thought was that I had maybe overcooked this meditation business a little.

I only really started because I wanted to reduce my screen time. On reflection, I probably should have just got a flip phone.

My second thought was that I was going to dinner with my wife in a few hours and my loss of self might introduce a layer of awkwardness that could well ruin the evening.

Everything had changed.

I nervously checked the dinner reservation time on my phone.

Then I checked the classroom WhatsApp group, refreshed BBC News and verified that the robot vacuum was charging okay.

Nothing had changed.

A brief recap.

A few years back I made my daughter cry when I looked at my phone instead of her at a ballet recital.

In the years after, I tried everything to reduce my phone use. Nothing worked, which I found fascinating.

I saw that much of my phone use was automatic. It was initiated by a hidden me that I didn’t control.

I came to believe that meditation was the way of getting at that hidden me. And over the months I gained the power to say no to automatic me. It was excellent in so many ways - and the first thing to reduce my screen time.

I thought that the right response was to strengthen the inner me in control of that focus. But that ended up in what felt to me like a dead end. Albeit a very strange and pleasurable one.

Change of tack.

I had long been familiar with the Buddhist concept of no self. It’s not an idea that’s easily defined, and indeed definitions genuinely vary.

I learnt more about one way of thinking about it from reading Sam Harris’s Waking Up, and using his app of the same name. It was genuinely fascinating stuff. I listened to it all.

These days I am called upon to give a lot of lifts. The kids go to tonnes of classes and playdates.

And the time spent ferrying them around is doubled by Surbiton’s endless roadworks.

When I was in a good mood, my preference was to drive in silence (when on my own of course! When the kids were there I talked to them - not that dedicated).

At some point in the process my inner voice had become a lot more quiet. At first this had slightly perturbed me, like missing an old friend. But it didn’t disappear entirely - it just said fewer, better things.

The arrival of new thoughts became more sporadic, and as a result far more noticeable.

One day late last year I was driving back from an errand of some sort.

A thought arose. Annoyingly I don’t remember what it was - likely about why Surbiton’s many roadworks were often simultaneous.

Then came the recognition that this thought had popped out of nowhere, that my conscious mind hadn’t originated it. By now this was a trained-in response - a standard occurrence.

But what happened next was new: my mind realised that the recognition that the thought had popped out of nowhere had itself popped out of nowhere.

And then this recognition - also from nowhere, and unauthored.

And this one too!

And onwards spiralling on forever. No thoughts were mine. It wasn’t possible for my conscious mind to originate anything. There was just awareness.

Previously I would have said that “the meditator” who noticed this was the real me. Now I realised there was no such thing. That was just another thought. Thoughts just came. Oh.

I knew immediately (it’s tempting to say “my mind” knew immediately, but we won’t go there) that this was very significant indeed.

It was accompanied by a few minor fireworks and odd changes to my visual perception.

I made it home just fine.

A dim memory of something I had read or heard made me rush to the mirror.

Ohhhhh.

Rather than feeling pleased with myself, I remember feeling a little silly. I had gone and lost my whole self and the phone thing still wasn’t fixed.

As I prepared for dinner I worried that I had done myself irrevocable harm. Would I ever meaningfully connect with my family again? Was I now like the guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?

No I was not, I thought. Here I was grateful to have listened to so much Waking Up. No need to panic. This had always been the case.

When I had noticed the automatic pickup of the phone, I had compartmentalised myself into a hidden me and a real me. This was a mistake. All thoughts just arise, created by the brain. Some of them happened to be followed by a further thought which suggested they were authored by the conscious mind. This further thought, this claim of authorship, was a fib. The conscious mind couldn’t author its way out of a paper bag.

The recognition of the fib changed nothing external. As if to prove that, my daughter walked past me and said hey. Utterly automatically I said hey back.

An image came into my head - a car on autopilot, but the driver was firmly gripping the wheel. All he had to do was let go - the car had always been on autopilot. Ohhhhhhh.

At that point a new type of meditation became possible. A now that encompassed everything. The immediate awareness of thoughts with no sense of authorship. There was no need to focus on anything. No need to label. Ohhhhh. I shuddered a little.

All sorts of meditation had got me here, but I realised I didn’t need to set aside time for it any more. I could theoretically access this new state any time, anywhere.

Maybe this would free up time for a new hobby?

Lots of people say that padel is good.

I went to dinner with my wife.

I needn’t have worried that I wouldn’t be there. As soon as we got to talking I completely forgot all of this. Not that it wasn’t true - it just slipped my mind.

And to this day I have been lucky. It has felt like a one-sided deal. If I’m having a great time my thoughts are my own and I am as I was.

If a negative thought arises then - not always, sadly - I am liable to remember everything. I switch into just feeling the thought. And it can’t get me. Not always. But enough.

Beyond that there are no great changes. I can’t move pencils with my mind.

And I am not a better person. In a way there’s no surprise here. We’ve learnt time and time again that meditative adepts have feet of clay.

Indeed I still leave all the cupboard doors open when I’ve been in the kitchen.

My life carried on normally. I kept it to myself. There was no outward change. No-one would question my sanity.

Until the day when it suddenly made sense to travel to work in a high vis vest that says Phone Free Commute.

In the weeks after I looked in the mirror, my mood got worse.

One day on the 9.17 I found myself Googling the problem.

I could step out of my mood. But I realised that even so it was still worth being in a good mood. It was still worth having positive thoughts. Though negative thoughts didn’t affect me in the same way, they affected how I treated others.

How could I improve my mood and thoughts? I knew that I needed to get upstream of them, to the physical health of the brain that was creating them.

I believed the big factors were sleep, diet, exercise, mental rest and phone use.

And it was the last two I had let slip.

After the mirror event I had decided I didn’t need to set aside time to meditate. So I dismantled all the elaborate habit structures that propped that up - and phone use just filled the gaps. This shouldn’t have surprised me - I’d already convinced myself the mind just naturally tumbled down into a fast flowing river of phone.

Mental rest and phone use are meaningfully opposites. One makes you feel better, the other makes you feel worse.

Unless something is done then one eats the other entirely. If it’s not scrolling or checking and fixing, it’s letting podcasts fill the silence when I walk Jumble.

So now I needed, for the 45th time, to find a new way to guard my mental rest.

But now I knew with certainty that my willpower couldn’t be trusted. Whatever desire I might have now to stop using the phone, there was no fixed self to carry that torch. New thoughts would come along, as surely as the weather changes.

I suddenly realised why I couldn’t stop eating cheese out of the fridge - the person that resolved to knock that habit on the head was only a passing thought.

So I created a regime to guarantee mental rest that I knew a future thought wouldn’t unpick.

My life was busy. My train and tube commute was the obvious time for rest. But my attempts to do so had been defeated by the phone again and again. I couldn’t just turn it off - I knew by now it would just get turned back on again.

No, I needed something bigger. Something to end it once and for all. A fitting end to years of struggle. I made an extravagant and highly visual commitment that I would never use my phone during this time.

I ordered a bright blue high vis vest that said Phone Free Commute. And I used the commuters around me to reinforce accountability.

The tool I needed was looking like a tool.

I felt like an idiot. But that was a feeling I could now observe with equanimity.

The vest guarantees two hours of phone free time. Which guarantees two hours of mental rest. Which feels like enough to counterbalance the harm that my tech use is doing at other times, and to slow down the automatic phone pickups. It is a thumb on the scale.

And that - as far as I understand my brain - has kept my mood very positive for much of the six months I’ve been doing this.

But obviously that’s only a part of the story. I also can’t deny there is something evangelical here.

After all, I am writing about this.

There is something about the whole experience that has created an unshakeable confidence in what makes minds happy. An unshakeable confidence in a message that won’t stay in its box. I’m a TV producer and I pitch for a living. My mind is inclined to persuade people.

I wouldn’t ask you to believe what I say about the conscious mind - though I feel certain it’s true.

I can’t deny I would ask you to consider meditation - I love it, and I think most people would get something from it.

But if you take away only one thing, let it be this: use the phone less.

I would argue that the greatest effects of phone use - lowering mood, increasing anxiety and making normal life more boring - are the hardest to see and the easiest to wrongly attribute to something else. And that you don’t get any phone use for free. Even “good” use has an effect. Don’t judge it by how it makes you feel in the moment - it’s about a 24/7 baseline.

I would argue that if - like me - we want to continue to own a smartphone, we need to recreate the incidental mental rest that it eradicates. But far from being relaxing as many suggest, it is unpleasant and difficult - especially at first. Meditation techniques might help deal with the anxiety that arises when distraction is removed - and also to give a sense of day-by-day progress. The benefits of rest will be slow to accrue, and could feel disconnected from anything you did or didn’t do with the phone. It might manifest as an optimism, a lightness, a mind more ready to see things as glass half full. Vague but priceless.

I would argue that we can train ourselves to slow automatic pickups. I would argue that as well as external barriers making the phone harder to use, we need internal barriers - to hear clearly the voice that calls us to the phone, the hardwired instinct that would cheerfully smash down any rules around phone use you might have established. So many people I’ve spoken to on the commute have talked about an endless cycle of creating and dismantling rules.

And this trained power to refuse the phone, combined with a belief in doing nothing as a useful (if not pleasant) alternative, comprises true Phone Free Will.

I can’t know that what worked for me will work for you.

I can’t know if my chosen form of rest is better than gardening or reading or wild swimming. My son doesn’t use screens before 6pm and spends his time bouncing on the trampoline.

But however you aim to get your phone free mental rest, maybe we could boil down everything learnt from the past few years to two words: regular and non-negotiable.

Regular means adopting the training ethos. Building it into your day. Doing it with no expectation of result.

Non-negotiable means imagining I’m right about what I saw in the mirror. Any conviction you have now about reducing phone use will pass. Another thought will arise, namely to start using the thing again. The Evil Advisor will think of something. We cannot trust the decisions of future us.

We humans have made this sort of accommodation before, tacitly recognising our powerlessness. We don’t imagine we can just decide to go to sleep. Instead we create a framework that helps it to happen. Some point after we humans figured out how to make light in the dark, some genius realised we needed to turn it off at night.

Then, some decades ago, many of us found our lives had eliminated incidental exercise. I now pay someone to tell me to run around in a circle carrying heavy weights! Ridiculous.

Now, purely because of its newly 24/7 nature, we need to make the same mental leap with the phone. It’s harder to imagine we need to do so, because both sleep and exercise confer immediate benefits, while phone withdrawal feels bad and takes weeks.

In a calm moment, we need to do enough to prepare for a future when we will be tempted. What'll work will be different for each of us, and we might need a spirit of trial and error.

Trial and error is how I ended up with my version of regular and non-negotiable: commuting in a high vis vest.

Maybe don’t do that - it looks really odd.

But also look again at the train carriage around it, with its near 100 percent phone use.

That looks odd too.

I am seized by a conviction that won’t go away. About a harm we know all too well but don’t know at all.

But I have a day job.

Unlike Bruce Wayne I can’t be Batman at night. I have kids.

But I can be a superhero of the in-between.

I stand proudly in the gap. The previously incidental pause where the phone use has destroyed mental rest.

I stand in the biggest gap of all, the commute to work.

But I stand - arms crossed, high vis flapping in the breeze - in all the gaps.

The moment when you are waiting for the kettle to boil. The moment when you are left alone at the restaurant table when your spouse goes to the toilet. The moment standing in a queue.

I stand as a high vis idiot with no self and no self-control.

And I say:

Dude… you just checked that app like 30 seconds ago.

If you’ve made it here, a heartfelt thanks for reading.

If this feels a little like it came out of nowhere, the start of my journey is here.

If you know anyone who might be tickled by this, please share below.

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All my pieces are on phonefreewill.com.

I was sitting with my eyes closed, around 10 minutes into a one hour meditation, when I was overcome by an overpowering joy. It forced my smile into a huge grin, almost painful in its intensity. Every now and then I let out a little laugh. I felt warm. Against my closed eyelids I fancied the light brightened a little.

I stayed in this state for some time, perhaps more than half an hour, until I heard a commotion. The household had woken up, and gone downstairs to find that our dog Jumble had been sick on the rug again.

I rushed downstairs and pitched in with the tidying up. There was a lot of it. And some of it bore the hallmarks of being eaten and sicked up again. Jumble seemed fine - happy in fact.

I was still reeling from my bizarre experience. As I sponged the rug, I found myself wondering if I now needed to free myself of these commitments and leave my family to become a monk. Maybe because of my new meditative experience I now needed to relinquish all attachments?

But then who’d take my daughter to all her after-school classes? So many classes.

I had better stick around.

The journey to the spare room experience had begun many months earlier.

(This essay is the third in what has unfortunately become a four part trilogy (sorry). Read the story so far here and here.)

I had begun meditating to tackle my phone use, but by now I was really enjoying myself. I had taken to meditation with the zealotry of a middle-aged man who gets into cycling one month and fills his garage with bikes the next. There was a tonne to learn and I read every book I could lay my hands on - Joseph Goldstein, Shinzen Young, Culadasa, Rob Burbea… the list went on.

Short of time in my busy life, I had decided that my train commute was a great time to practise. This was before the high vis vest - I was just a guy on a train with his eyes closed. Internal eccentricity only.

From all my reading I had learnt that there were hundreds of types of meditation. I devoted my morning commute to a practice called noting.

In meditative noting, when you become aware of a new thought you quickly put a simple label on it. The goal - in part - is to reinforce your distance from your thoughts. It becomes clearer and clearer that thoughts just arise, and that “you” didn’t originate them.

It’s kind of fun, if you want a new secret hobby. So you would catch yourself thinking about eating cheese and you would come up with a simple label. Like “hunger”. Or you would wonder where you’d be in ten years’ time and you’d label it “future”.

Of course, labelling means categorising, which isn’t straightforward. I worried about a stupid thing I said to Clive at work. Should I label that as “work”, “Clive” or “replay” (a category I invented for when my mind revisited all sorts of stupid things I said)?

As I refined my categories, I noticed that a lot of thoughts ultimately manifested in ways I could use my phone. Things I could check. Things I could fix. I started labelling more and more thoughts as “phone”.

Bored? Use the phone. Worried about work? Check something on the phone. Worried about some health thing? Check it on the phone. Worried about anything? Distract myself using the phone.

So many mental processes led to “use the phone”.

I guess it makes sense. Phones are infinitely available. And they are infinitely malleable. So they can evolve into whatever your brain wants them to be. They aren’t just an imprint of our darker nature, but of our whole nature.

My fear of being chucked out of my tribe? LinkedIn. Scanning for danger? The news. The human instinct to check under a bush for fruit? Let’s see what’s next on the scroll.

And with every use, the mental wiring supporting instinctive phone use was reinforced. The mind loves continuity - and soon enough the main reason to pick up the phone was that I did so before.

It was like all the reasons to use the phone were mountainous catchment areas feeding a fast-flowing, irresistible river.

This was all too easy to imagine as I sat on a train trundling to Waterloo surrounded by a carriage full of people using their phones. Some use looked deliberate, but it was mixed with an unthinking use very familiar to me: the quick opening and closing of apps, continual refreshing and re-checking. The mind just keeping doing what it did before.

When I stopped and meditated, it was as if I’d dammed up that river. I felt the weight of it pressing against my body like a wave.

In the silence, my mind invented a thousand reasons to just go with the flow. I imagined a whispering Evil Advisor living in my head. (Good thing I keep this sort of thing to myself).

The Evil Advisor was clever, it didn’t just shout “pick up the phone”. It came up with endlessly creative ways of getting me to pick it up. Starting with practical reasons, it would cycle through more and more until - ever wily - it would get me in the end: “Master… did we definitely message your mother-in-law about after-school pickup? We must check whether your daughter is safe!”

Time and time again the Evil Advisor won out. More and more often train meditations ended with “just one check” and before I knew it found myself absorbed in my phone.

Very often I couldn’t remember why I picked it up.

No matter, I thought. I was enjoying the challenge now. I would try something new - back to the books.

But there was no easy answer.

Meditation is considered a science by its practitioners. Their view is that they watch the mind closely and draw conclusions about how it works.

But of course much of the writing predated the phone. And serious meditation practice seemingly rarely overlaps with heavy phone use.

To me it felt like the phone wasn’t just another compulsion - it was perhaps the biggest change to mental life in thousands of years.

I felt like I was in uncharted territory.

During my commute meditations, I only picked up the phone when I forgot what I was doing. So my best guess was that I needed to build up my focus to extreme levels so I never forgot. Divert more power to Main Engineering.

Training to build up focus didn’t feel possible on a busy train. So I set my alarm early, before the house woke up, and meditated in the spare room.

In the quiet of early morning I would focus intensely not just on the breath, but on the exact sensations of the breath on the tip of the nostrils. I became - in the words of those who follow this approach, a connoisseur of the breath.

(And I enjoyed it. Except for the day when Jumble came and sat next to me and farted, something that was extremely challenging to treat with equanimity.)

I carried on, spending hours exclusively focused on the breath at the nostril. I could detect ridiculously fine details and hold my undivided attention on it for longer and longer.

Until that morning in the spare room. I had been reading yet another book by a meditation author, Leigh Brasington, which recommended taking a short break from focusing on the breath to see if one could find some inner joy within. I tried it.

And that’s when the happiness exploded inside me.

I never want to speak disrespectfully about the experience of finding joy amid meditation. Clearly it was extraordinary, and it was a great comfort to know that such emotion could be within reach, independent of conditions. To this day I can still occasionally search inside me and find joy and amplify it - and I can still raise a smile when I do.

But to nitpick for a second - this extraordinary focus didn’t help me with what I set out to fix: my phone use.

However powerful my focus got, it never felt portable. It was something I could only achieve in benign conditions. There was little I could transfer to my daily life - once off the cushion I was back in the real world of dog sick and giving lifts. And amid all the distractions I just kept on automatically picking up my phone.

It felt like the end of the line for my meditation practice as currently framed.

I had already begun reading about a different approach that seemed more convincing as the answer. Prior to this I had been sceptical about some of the more extravagant claims around meditation. Having tasted spontaneous joy, I took the other promises of the ancients far more seriously.

Not ideas like reincarnation or connectedness - without disrespect to them, I can only report that I still haven’t found much to support them.

But I did wonder what else might be true.

Don’t wonder for long! Read the final part here.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share the joy of Phone Free Will.

Share Phone Free Will

A few years ago I changed job, and as a result I had to go East rather than West on the Central Line at Oxford Circus. But my brain kept me going the old way for ages. It was like I was caught in a current. I had to double back when I snapped out of it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from commuting over two decades, it’s humans’ formidable capacity for continuity. We commuters do each day what we did the day before. We all stream up and down the stairs in Waterloo as one, as surely as if we were on rails. Our routes through London mirror well-worn neural pathways. We can’t change it easily - no sudden moves allowed.

Very gradual change we can manage. Christian Wolmar would be able to trace the decline of the hat, the decline of the suit. And the arrival of the phone, first held by one, then many, then all.

When I saw that some of my phone use was automatic, I believed that I had caught sight of the brain’s underlying, overwhelming unconscious adherence to continuity.

You use the phone a lot, says the brain, so let’s keep doing so.

(Read last week’s piece here - part one of three marking six months of phone free commuting, and explaining what all of this is about).

How to root out this automatic impulse?

I had tried everything and it had failed. Whatever obstacles I put in the way of my phone use, I cheerfully dismantled. Now I had seen that the impulse to pick it up was entirely unconscious, I was ready to try anything to intercept it at the source.

After nearly four years of trying everything, could meditation help fix my phone addiction?

I read a lot of books, and listened to a wonderful course on the app Calm. (Incidentally, it was wonderful more because of Jeff Warren than Calm - please look him up on Substack if you are interested).

The overriding message was to forget the image of relaxation, and to embrace daily training. A little like learning an instrument.

I learnt to set a timer for a short period, say five minutes, and to choose something to focus on for that time. Traditionally one chooses the breath, but I learnt it could just as easily could be an ambient noise. I chose the sound of the fridge. As it seemed less spiritual.

I closed my eyes, concentrated on the fridge sound, and…WHOOMPH. I completely forgot what I was doing. I spent all the time thinking about how Clive from work hated me. And then the timer went off. Great.

Luckily, I had taken good advice. I knew this wasn’t a failure. I knew the mission was to come back the next day and try again.

Same time tomorrow.

But of course the same thing happened again. And again.

So I gave up.

Meditation is perhaps the world’s most abandoned habit.

But I had two advantages.

Firstly, I had a problem I wanted to solve. A problem that I already knew had major effects on my family life. And a problem that interested me.

My second advantage was that in years of fighting the phone I had learned not to underestimate how hard it is to start a new habit. So I signed myself up for an app that fined me if I didn’t meditate.

And… I got fined quite a bit. A month or so in, my wife noticed the payments.

The embarrassment of having paid out over 100 dollars (the app was American) for failing to regularly do nothing was all too much.

I started again, with my tail between my legs.

But for weeks it was the same. Try to focus. Forget. Feel no change.

It wasn’t that I was distracted. It was that all thought of meditation was totally obliterated. My little boat of fridge focus was capsized by a massive wave that I didn’t see coming. A whole load of thoughts about whether I should have written “All my best” on a work email.

Until one day, a few seconds or even minutes later, my tiny boat bobbed back to the surface. I remembered that I was meditating. I returned my focus to the fridge.

And this moment of recognition was the moment I had been training for.

In that second of coming back to focus, there’s an opportunity to clock that a thought arose that I didn’t originate.

Conscious me didn’t think that stuff about the “All My Best” email. Conscious me was aiming at the fridge.

Who changed the channel? It was the hidden mind. Aha! Saw you.

This observation, I learned, was mindfulness. The ability to observe my own thoughts without getting sucked into them.

I kept training. The gaps where I could concentrate on the sound of the fridge became longer. Even pleasant.

As my focus improved, so the unauthored incursion of old thoughts stuck on repeat became even more glaringly obvious.

My wife and I get on very well (that’s loving, isn’t it). But our Achilles heel is tidying the house.

One day my wife suggested that we should perhaps tidy the kitchen. My habitual response would be to interpret this suggestion as a veiled attack. She was, I believed with all my heart, secretly saying it was all my fault.

My usual move in this situation was to expertly parry her concealed attack by talking about a time some two months back when she had left out some dirty plates. Take that.

Until one day - and I remember this vividly - the instinct to say that arose, and I saw it in embryonic form! I saw it with the same clarity, the same distance that I saw my thoughts meditating.

And I said to myself, maybe I won’t say that.

And we tidied the kitchen without arguing.

And house harmony was improved.

It was a transformative moment.

Across my life I could suddenly see all sorts of well-worn negative behaviours and intervene before they happened. When I was driving and someone cut me up, I had an automatic impulse to do an middle finger gesture below the dashboard. Now gone! I stopped barking at the kids in the morning, even when they were eating cereal so painfully slowly.

I used my new skill all the time. Sometimes, when my wife was speaking to me about some chore or other, I would decide to concentrate hard on my mindfulness. My eyeballs would even bulge a little, and she would say “Are you being mindful now? Because that’s brilliant if you are.”

Many years ago I had read all sorts of articles extolling the virtue of mindfulness. I had even been on corporate courses. But for me personally none of it clicked, none of it was possible, without the meditation - without the regular training of a distance between me and my thoughts.

After all, no one learns how to play a guitar by reading articles about it.

When I had picked up the phone, I had asked “Who’s Me?”

My answer at this point would have been clear. The real me was the part of me that was mindful. If I could strengthen that me, it could observe well-worn patterns from a distance and then decide whether or not to action them.

But if mindfulness was about me versus continuity, it turned out that phone use was the boss battle. Of all the ingrained negative habits, the one that started this whole thing was the most stubborn.

Until one day, I was lying on the sofa in between other things with nothing to do. I vividly remember mindfully observing a call to pick up the phone. I firmly believe it would have been automatic before.

And then, thanks to my newfound comfort with doing absolutely nothing, I did that instead.

I lay on the sofa and rested. Maybe for the first time in years.

A decline in automaticity, and a comfort in doing nothing. Together they gave me a taste of free will over my phone.

Boy, do people who learn to meditate go on about it. I remember feeling it was the third best thing to have happened in my life after marriage and kids.

And, what’s more, it was the first thing that seriously reduced my screen time.

Arguably this would have been a great place to stop.

But I had the bit between my teeth now. Though I had a taste of success, I still didn’t have the full control over my phone use I set out to find.

I decided I needed more time to meditate. I increased my daily dose to an hour each day. But the kids kept ruining it.

So I searched for a huge block of available time.

And soon enough the sound of the fridge was replaced. By the sound of the train.

And I went deeper.

Wondering how weird this is going to get? Read Part Three

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share the joy of Phone Free Will.

Share Phone Free Will

To a degree, that defies rational explanation.

But let’s give it a go.

First, some important context: my family are terrible at stacking the dishwasher.

I too was once ignorant like them, and had to live with the consequences of that. One day I was drinking from a glass of water and I was horrified to discover it was full of weird orange gunk powder.

I had long imagined that the dishwasher rained water on items from above. I say imagined - it’s more like this was my default opinion, the unconscious impression one has about something that you’ve never given any real thought.

But after a little patient study, I saw that jets of water are pushed out of the spinny arms BELOW each tray.

After working to gain a better understanding of how dishwashers work, I now know how to stack the dishwasher far better. For example, I now NEVER put little plastic cups in the bottom. If I do, I know that the jets of water make them fly up and fall through the gaps, blocking the arm from spinning.

This is wisdom I patiently share with my family almost daily.

I didn’t want to spend any time learning about the dishwasher. Dishwashers are boring. But I had to.

So it was with my mind.

For most of my life I found stuff about the mind to be deeply boring and off-putting. So I never took any interest.

Even as, entering my forties, I was feeling increasingly anxious day and night. Often about work. I was feeling glum about life ahead, and sometimes urgently panicky.

Yet I still wasn’t interested in my mind, because these feelings did not make for a compelling mystery. Actually it seemed like a pretty common experience in midlife.

But there was one area of my life which did feel like an interesting problem to solve.

In the years since I made my daughter cry by looking at my phone rather than watching her ballet recital, I had been trying everything to reduce my phone use and failing. I had a real bee in my bonnet. But no matter what I did, I was compulsively picking up the phone any time, day and night.

And then one day, I noticed something I believed to be fascinating. I was standing in the kitchen with my phone in my hand, and I was convinced - absolutely convinced - that I didn’t deliberately pick it up.

I had very clearly done so automatically, with no conscious choice that I could remember.

It felt like an insight that was new and at the same time oddly familiar. Like I had always known this on some level, but not paid attention until now.

It was the first time I properly wondered why I was doing something that I didn’t decide to do.

Clearly my mind didn’t work in the way I imagined. If I did give it any thought, I would have guessed it was almost like a little guy in my head, looking out of my eyes, pulling little levers to make things happen. But here something had happened without a decision.

Driven as much by curiosity as a desire to reduce my phone use, I watched carefully. I looked out for those moments where my body did stuff without me consciously deciding to do so. And I started to see it everywhere.

The hidden me bit my nails. It could drive quite a long way without my conscious mind intervening. It could play football - it seemed extremely clear my conscious mind was rarely involved in that. And of course it used the phone a tonne. It loved doing that more than anything.

Who’s me?

What was the nature of this hidden me that did all these things?

And why did it keep eating cheese from the fridge like an apple, without cutting it nicely with a knife?

I read a lot. Philosophy, neuroscience, contemplative traditions.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t the first person to notice this curious division in the mind. A lot of writers described it with metaphor - for example, an iceberg, with the conscious aware mind that could see and hear and feel at the top and a vast unconscious mind below it, making decisions for hidden reasons.

None of this implied anything supernatural or cosmological. I could see why some people felt the universe was speaking to them, but me personally it never felt that way. (Not least because these cosmic forces kept directing me to the fridge to eat ingredients that had already been set aside for a future meal. It seemed odd that the universe would do that).

Far from being unscientific, this division seemed to fit with a lot of science. Stuff I had heard about but not paid much attention to all my life. Hypnosis. Brainwashing. Subliminal messaging. These were all methods of speaking to, and influencing, the unconscious mind.

And this division seemed to make sense of a tonne of self-help. The clue is in the name I guess. All sorts of advice seemed underpinned by the notion of trying to trick the hidden mind as if it were a third party. Almost as if it were a wayward child.

In my mid-40s I found myself wondering why I hadn’t clocked this division before, and whether I was unusually stupid. It was odd. It seemed I had known all this in the abstract but not accepted it as actually pertaining to me.

Or, like the dishwasher, I had an imagination of my mind that was default and had never been challenged, even in a cursory way.

Why was I so thick?

But I didn’t have time to focus on that. I had a more pressing problem.

The hidden part of my mind was a phone-addicted moron.

I needed to find a way to get to it.

And correct it.

Wonder what I did next? So did I, for about a week. Read Part Two.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

It was apparently very popular in the 1820s to let your mind wander, and enjoy what popped in. Doctors warned against it, worrying that people’s minds would become unhinged if not used constructively.

Times change.

Unfortunately, my most productive “waking dreams” - 149 hours of them so far - have been almost entirely about the phone. This is a bitter irony.

Rather than brilliant ideas for novels, I end up with lots of different ways to think about how the phone affects my mind.

And about the challenge which I think faces all of us in 2026: how to learn to be bored again.

So rather than Frankenstein I get boredom and phones.

Ah well. As my daughter’s dance teacher used to say when handing out sweets to the kids, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

The Boredom League Table

Let’s line up a few activities in order, from stimulating to boring.

• Going on a rollercoaster

• Using a phone

• Watching Yellowstone or one of its many spinoffs

• Listening to a podcast

• Me telling my wife about my day at work

• Listening to Chappell Roan

• Watching the Netflix rotating screen, unsure what to watch

• My wife telling me about her day at work

• Doing some DIY

• Going to B&Q to look at paints

• Country walk

• Listening to opera

• Looking at artwork for more than 30 seconds

• Being told about Minecraft by a four year old

• Loading the dishwasher

• Commuting on a train doing nothing

• Breathing

Everything towards the top is really easy for the mind to do.

Things lower down the list tend to be more boring. By boring, I mean that these activities in isolation will make you feel antsy and unsettled. You’ll be constantly yearning for more stimulation, for faster input. If your mind doesn’t get them it’ll revolt by filling them with negative thoughts.

Probably the key word here instead of boring is unsatisfactory.

For each of us, you could draw a line somewhere along the boredom league table, and have a boredom threshold. A Boredom Line.

Above the Line is okay, below it is Boring.

The Boredom Line (And Its Lifechanging Effects)

This line can move. Thousands of years ago hunter/gatherers did very little. Do we imagine they were walking around talking about how bored they were? Likely not. I ride every day on a train that would blow a Victorian’s socks off.

So the line moves up and down - but sadly it doesn’t do it on request. If your spouse is telling you a story about their day at work and you find it boring (ie you feel restless, and like you want to be doing something else) it’s not much good for them to tell you not to feel that way. Sure, you can pay attention and mask your irritation. But you’re still bored.

You don’t want to be bored during this work story about Clive, but you are. What you want doesn’t come into it.

There are plenty of things lower down the list we want to be able to say we find interesting. But deep down, very honestly, we may worry that we are bored by them.

Recently I’ve read a lot of very honest (and quite disturbing) discussions in which people who were once avid readers say they struggle to concentrate on a novel.

The trick to happiness is to gradually move the line downwards so these things become genuinely satisfactory or even enjoyable.

How do we move the line? By steadily, day in day out, reducing the amount of time we spend doing things at the top of the list.

Each minute of the day we spend at the top of the stimulation list moves our boredom line upwards.

And looking at the top of the list, there’s one clear candidate for moving our baseline. I’m sure there’s someone out there who works testing rollercoasters for whom everyday life has been rendered tedious, but for most of us it’s going to be the rectangular thing in our pocket.

The phone is resetting our minimum stimulation levels. It is the thing that is making everyday chores more boring. It’s making interactions with our family more uneasy. It is recasting more and more of our life as unsatisfactory.

With the Boredom Line too high, trips to B&Q to look at paints feel like a waste of time. After the neon glow of the phone, all the paints look the same. Instead of feeling like part of building a home with the person you love, it feels like not enough.

It’s chores like these that are going to comprise the bulk of our lives.

And what does it do to our children when we have to focus hard on their stories? To perform presence, even as the rectangular magnet pulls your eyes back?

And how many people might get on better with their spouse if their Boredom Line moved down a bit? It’s easy to imagine there are couples who have split up who’d still be together.

If you like, you can understand all of this scientifically. I’ve written about downregulation of the dopamine receptors. All that.

But for me the Boredom Line is a more powerful and persuasive argument for using the phone less.

You don’t get away with any usage in my opinion - it all has an effect. You need to ration it carefully. Pick your method.

Mine is to go phone free and do nothing for an hour or two each day. I’ve written about how it rewires my brain, stopping me automatically picking up the phone throughout the rest of my day.

And I believe I’m also enjoying a side effect of that technique. By regularly training my mind to be happy with something at the bottom of the list, I believe I’m actively lowering my Boredom Line.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I can now sit and enjoy my commute. It’s a nice party piece. But the reason I did it wasn’t for the commute.

It’s to put my thumb on the scales, to overcompensate from all the stimulation I get elsewhere.

Because in the middle of the Boredom League table is everyone I love, everything that’s worth doing, and the default activities that will occupy my days.

If that stuff gets submerged below the Boredom Line, if the everyday gets mired in unsatisfactory irritation, then the loss is incalculable.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share with them.

(Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash)

Coming up, as they say on Morning TV. But first: back to the early days of the experiment.

When I started this in January I reported that one of the strange side effects of a consistent phone break was a weird loneliness. For me it shifted after a couple of weeks. Back then I wrote a piece about it, The Lonely Spaceman on the 9.17.

In that piece I speculated whether the London commute was a colder, more disconnected place since the phone was introduced. I imagined that in the days of ruffled newspapers, people might have smiled and talked to each other.

Frankly, I was just guessing.

Fortunately, , the unparalleled social historian of the railway agreed to a brief interview. I was thrilled. If anyone could reveal the truth about the social side of the pre-phone commute, it’s him.

“No, it’s always been pretty terrible,” he said.

This was a shame. I double checked. Surely people must have spoken to each other more?

No, not really. They used newspapers or anything they could get hold of as a social shield so they didn’t have to.

It was a crucial point. The social shielding effect of the phone is formidable. I’ve seen how the phone can help people cope with being thrown together on the tube - it kind of disembodies you, so you don’t feel your unwanted closeness to others. And I’ve noticed that for me, sitting opposite people without a phone is - unintentionally - confronting, almost indecent.

Christian told me the commute was always about avoiding unintentional company. The trouble, he speculated, with saying hello to anyone on the commute is that they might start talking back, and you don’t know if they will ever stop.

He has a point there. And that danger is surely especially acute if the person in question is commuting in high vis.

Then he added an afterthought.

Of course, there were the Commuter Clubs, he said.

Wait, what’s that?

Trains had compartments back then. They formed clubs and played bridge games and the like. (I googled this afterwards, and found a New York Times article about a bridge tournament that was played on the commute in the 1980s).

And then, of course, the evening train would be licensed. People used to drink together on the way home, he said.

I said he was making the pre-phone commute sound very social indeed. He assured me these were isolated incidents.

Ah well, he’s the expert.

Before we wrapped up, Christian did offer some cheerier news - we’d both made the same observations on the train and tube: we have passed the age of peak phone.

We had both noticed more and more people seem to be reading books on the tube each day. Still a tiny minority of course. But when I told him about seeing a full house of five book readers in a row on the Central line, he was politely excited.

We aren’t back at Commuter Clubs yet. But maybe in a few years…

Times Square In Your Pocket

Though I would dearly love a world where the morning train was full of wine and bridge (or indeed poker, a game I actually know how to play), I’m not running this experiment to force people to talk to each other.

I’m using the dead time of the commute to train - to practise the active discipline of being without a screen. The goal isn’t to improve the journey, but to reclaim my mind for everything that happens after it.

And part of that training seems to be going through a spell of loneliness, even as I’m surrounded by other people.

I’ve since heard from two other people tackling their phone use who’ve reported feeling loneliness in the early days. But neither of them were using the commute for their phone free time.

And crucially, for me the feeling passed pretty soon after I wrote the original piece - and not because of any change in commuter behaviour.

So I was likely wrong to say the loneliness was a result of being surrounded by phone-using commuters phubbing me.

I might have been experiencing a general phone use withdrawal symptom.

I remember when I was a kid and going to bed, I felt lonely at night. It was a great comfort to me to imagine the world was still busy and alive somewhere. I used to remind myself that while it was quiet where I was, in New York it would be bustley, electric and exciting.

Perhaps the phone fills that little reassurance we need of a busy world. Over and above close connection with people we know, perhaps we need that ambient connection with our human tribe.

Perhaps glancing at a busy, infinite social scroll is the adult equivalent of trying to remember a bustling Times Square from a quiet childhood bed. A reassurance that the world is still alive.

And when we finally put the phone down, the nightlight goes out. We are left alone in the dark, forced to learn how to process that sudden, cold little patch of blues.

The Loneliness Paradox

So the phone could well be something that comforts us by reminding us of the scale of our tribe, even as it acts as a social shield against real company.

And the irony is that by showing us a beguiling simulacrum of bustle, phones have made us more lonely in the real world. We have unwittingly trained in an instinct to overuse its formidable power as a social shield. Picking it up has become a default that has rippled throughout all incidental gatherings.

A friend with young children told me the other day that at her four year old’s swimming class, every single one of the mums and dads in the little viewing area were on their phone.

We found ourselves talking about what a shame it was for the kids. At that age, they look up to us when they have dived or done something impressive.

But later I wondered whether the greatest loss might have been felt not by the kids, but by their parents. It can be a lonely time, and the more smiles and incidental connection you get from peers, the better. Not that that conversation never happens now - of course it does. But it surely is reduced by omnipresent phones.

If I can use the dead time of the commute to get rid the automatic instinct to pick the thing up all the time, it will be well worth it.

If Christian is right - and the commute has always been terrible - then we may as well use it as a training ground.

So when we do get where we’re going, we have the capacity to look up.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share with them.

Two more people I spoke to this week on the commute described what I was doing as rawdogging. The sex act term seems to be bedding in. The profundity I’d been aiming for is slipping away. Drat.

I wanted to say “No, actually what I’m doing is mindfully observing the instinct to pick up the phone (which can otherwise happen automatically) and practising resisting that urge. I’m training my mind to default to the present, so it stays that way at home. And I’m resting my mind, which is newly necessary in an age of omnipresent technology, and in doing so I’m reversing the barely perceived background digital dementia, depression and anxiety created by phone use. It’s born of a conviction that meditation is the most powerful weapon against the worst effects of the phone.”

But the first person said they had to go in the middle of my description.

So when the second person talked about rawdogging, I was ready with something more snappy. I knew that meditation was off-putting, and I knew that anti-phone mental training was confusing.

“It’s a kind of Attention Gym,” I said. They nodded politely and wished me good luck with it.

My hidden talent

Recently I’ve started going to a real gym.

CrossFit, if you know it. It has a bit of a reputation as being very tough - people readily take their top off and swing round on a bar and they look like they are in an advert.

I’m new to it, and to exercise generally. The other day we were asked to do press-ups (I’m not going to tell you how many) and I got a little way into it and my muscles all exploded.

I lay on the ground with my face on the mat, wondering if I needed to turn my head to avoid bedsores. Some of the CrossFit people gathered round to encourage me to do more. They were very nice.

At the end of the session, we were all together stretching. The instructor asked what we were doing during the weekend. One person mentioned they were rowing in a regatta.

The instructor said wow, and asked if anyone else in the group had any hidden skills.

I toyed with the idea of telling the group I was capable of sitting doing absolutely nothing for hours at a time.

But while I was thinking about whether that would make up for the press-up thing, someone else chipped in that they were learning capoeira.

I decided to be the bigger man and let it pass.

Gym v Gym

It naturally got me comparing the two.

Immediate Benefits?

• Real Gym. Clearly it takes time to condition the body. But exercising makes you feel better almost straight away. In my experience, if you do even one session you get flooded with endorphins.

• Attention Gym. Feels terrible when you start, and yields absolutely no burst of good feeling directly after any session. That’s always been my experience anyway, others may feel differently.

WINNER - REAL GYM

Ease In Getting Started?

• Real Gym. Sure, it’s tough to get off the sofa, but at least it’s pretty clear what you need to do.

• Attention Gym. Let’s face it, the instructions are confusing. And coping with the feelings that arise when you stop distracting yourself with your phone is properly challenging.

WINNER - REAL GYM

Looks?

• Real Gym. I guess not great if you are stuck to the floor surrounded by a supportive crowd due to an inability to do a press-up, but clearly has the potential to improve looks dramatically.

• Attention Gym. Rubbish. Especially if, like me, you deem a high vis vest necessary. I’ve always thought it would look amazing to do that lotus position folded legs thing, but I can’t. I tried it at home but when I got up my legs gave way and I nearly hit my head against the table.

WINNER - REAL GYM

Understanding How Your Biological Brain Relates To Your Conscious Experience, And Thereby Reframing Negative Thoughts. Understanding Why Your Habits Never Stick. Understanding How To Make Best Use Of Your 4000 Weeks On Earth. Learning To Focus On The World Around You Without Intrusive Thought (In All Its Forms, Including Sunday Blues). Training To Be Present For Your Loved Ones. Finally Having A Workable Strategy For Your Digital Hygiene. Clearly Seeing The Effects Of The Phone On The Mind.

WINNER - ATTENTION GYM

Sorry. That was childish, I know. But it’s interesting… even as I try to write out the benefits in their most appealing form, they feel so intangible.

The Big Fight

Gym people will always win a fight with meditation people (Put that monk down! He’s already said he submits!)

The real gym is just so tangible. You can very easily imagine your muscles building and your heart getting stronger. And it boosts your mood right away.

It’s so hard to imagine that any sort of mental quiet over time compounds to your benefits - to really trust in neuroplasticity. Conversely it’s so easy to fill any gap with phone use and believe you’ll get away with it.

It’s no wonder that many meditation advocates borrow the gym analogy. says that trying to focus on your breath, and then noticing that it has (inevitably) wandered and then bringing your focus back to the breath is like a bicep curl for the brain.

It’s a really helpful comparison. And far far more valuable than making out meditation is easy or relaxing. Which it really isn’t.

How to be Mentally Strong - And Why

Looking out at rows of people lifting weights for fun, occasionally you remember that for most of human existence gyms would have seemed ridiculous. People got their exercise through back-breaking labour. Then incidental exercise disappeared for the deskbound amongst us, and gyms became necessary.

I believe there’s a parallel here with how phones have eradicated all the incidental moments of mental quiet.

So now the Attention Gym needs to be as much a part of life as the real gym. But fortunately there’s no monthly fee.

One last comparison before we leave CrossFit behind.

I go to classes with my wife. She particularly enjoys strength training, because it’s a rejection of outdated expectations of what a woman’s body should be like. Almost a rebellion.

Right now trillion dollar companies are making money from us, not because they produce amazing content, but because our attention span is so shot by all their clever tactics that we default to scrolling their stuff.

Reclaiming your mind from the algorithm is an act of defiance.

The Attention Gym can be a rebellion too.

P.S. I’m heading off for a long weekend in the Lake District, so there will be no long-form article next week. Please feel very free to explore the archive of past dispatches at phonefreewill.com. I will be back in your inbox the following week with a Special Guest Star - please be mindful of your excitement levels.

When I was younger, the main downside of a hangover would be feeling sick.

When I got older, the downsides changed. Feeling hungover and smelling terrible while a little toddler begged you to play with them was a different deal altogether.

Then the hangover that changed everything: I clocked that the main downside wasn’t the physical sensations. It was the mood it put me in.

In all of my hangovers I’ve been plagued by regret. Very understandable when I’ve drunk too much. But also I’d get very anxious about what I did and said the night before.

As I became more sure that the bad mood was the primary effect of the hangover, I became suspicious of these thoughts.

Wait a minute… I didn’t actually say anything THAT stupid. Is the reason why I am so anxious really because of my behaviour the night before? Or is it really my hungover mood right now making it look worse?

Is it about where I’m looking or, where I’m standing?

Like I say, it was an unusually philosophical hangover.

The Mental Weather

There’s a lot of things we can do to alter our overall mood, beyond drinking too much alcohol.

Everyone’s brain is different of course, and I can only speak for my own with confidence. My brain works better if I am well-rested and have been thoughtful about what I eat. If I do a little exercise my mood brightens. Everything looks grim when I have a cold.

After I commuted without a phone for a few weeks, I noticed a sudden change in my mood for the better.

I wrote a piece speculating that it might have a recovery of my brain’s dopamine receptors.

It hasn’t been constant. As you might expect, my mood fluctuates. And in a properly fascinating way.

The Old Grey High Vis Idiot Test

There is a brilliant expression for describing our overall outlook - whether we are glass half full or glass half empty.

The point of course is that we are looking at exactly the same glass, but viewing the situation differently depending on our underlying mood.

In the last few weeks, my mind has come up with a perfect parallel test. Like a good scientist using a control in its experiment, it has been asking itself exactly the same question again and again each day these past weeks.

Though the question stays the same, the answer I get varies each time it is asked.

That question: given you are a grown man with a respectable job, is it a good idea to commute in high vis looking like a massive idiot and then to write about it?

Answers vary from “Yes! This is superb, and the world needs this” through to “Good God, what are you doing you fool?”

I believe the answer depends on three things:

• (1) Thinking/Reason - interrogating the logic of what I’m doing and why on earth I am doing it

• (2) External Factors - has someone written a nice comment on one of the posts? Has someone talked to me on the train and told me how much they hate their phone?

• (3) Mental Weather - my overall mood, based on the factors outlined above (exercise, sleep, phone use etc)

And having watched closely, I firmly believe (3) is by far the most important factor in how my mind answers the question.

Then comes (2) external factors. (Though obviously they are beyond my control.)

And last of all, (1) thinking, actual reason, coherent thought, interrogating the idea. This is a very distant third, and seems to make very little difference.

By which I mean, if I am in a bad mood about what I’m doing, no matter how I roll the question around in my head I stay in a bad mood. Conversely, if I feel it’s great to be doing this, no new thought dislodges me from that view.

It feels like the arguments in my head about commuting in high vis are just a manifestation of the underlying mood. Which has been shaped by how much I have slept, whether I have exercised, and so on.

Man Who Commutes In High Vis Vest Advocates Not Thinking

This brain in our head is biological. Treat it well, and the world looks good. Treat it badly, and everything looks grim.

If heavy phone use is indeed making people feel more glum, the implications from that are pretty interesting.

You can start to see how phone use could create consequential bad weather in the mind. Let’s say I have a great idea for something I might do, better even than commuting in a high vis vest. It’s a way of changing my life. A new hobby to sign up for, a new thing I might create. I get a little excited. And perhaps I should be, because this new little project might serve to improve my overall brain health.

And then I pick up the phone and scroll. The energy dissipates.

Nah, I think. Let’s not bother.

We could be caught in a digital hangover, a glass half empty mood, without knowing it.

In part this reinforces obvious, well worn advice. Exercise, eat your greens, sleep well, use your phone less, meditate more (or combine the latter two, as I do). And so on. In short, keep a close eye on how you are treating your brain.

But it also suggests something less obvious. To be more suspicious of our thoughts if we haven’t managed to do the above. It reinforces the lesson of my philosophical hangover.

A brain that isn’t well cared for might start to generate all sorts of thoughts that disguise the true problem. The brain doesn’t say oof you used your phone too much. It says what about x? What about y? What do they think of me? Am I okay? And increasingly, maybe I should ask AI for advice?

It’s not like we can choose to stop thinking.

But I’m ready to downgrade the overall importance I ascribe to it, and pay much more attention to the overall state my brain is in.

Less thinking. More high vis idiot.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) feel free to share with them.

But I’m reluctantly breaking that habit due to a very odd experience last week on the 1853.

As long time readers will know, the true benefits from going phone-free aren’t actually felt on the commute, but are enjoyed 24/7.

The commute itself is pretty unpleasant for the first few weeks. And then becomes neutral.

But I’ve now done this for four months, and clocked up 116 hours. And it’s got interesting.

There is lots to be said in time about what I think about, my relationship with my thoughts. All that.

But the odd thing first.

The Steam Train Paradox

When the kids were younger we’d go for rides on steam trains. The start is very exciting, seeing the locomotive blow off steam.

And then you get on the carriage and you realise that you are just in a train. The fact that onlookers are seeing a beautiful old locomotive doesn’t benefit you - you could only see that by sticking your head out of the window. You’ve bought an expensive ticket for a normal train ride. So you have to try and enjoy it.

Last Thursday I started my commute home after a tough day at work. Previously I would have scrolled away to distract myself from it. But as I pulled out of Waterloo and looked out of the window, I remembered the steam train.

And I wondered… can I choose to enjoy this journey?

And yes, it turned out I could. The journey from Waterloo to Surbiton is not pretty. I would never say it was. But there is a lot to look at and if you are in the right mood it reminds you of a fun day out.

Near Vauxhall there’s streets full of Victorian cottages. A tourist would love to see the way the chimneystacks wind up the hill.

If you’re watching closely, the approach to Clapham Junction is spectacular. It’s way more interesting than the little halts you get on steam railways

When our train pulled out, it did so exactly at the same time as the Gatwick Express. Our trains bobbed along together and I could see inside the other carriage. For a second I had an instinct to wave at the people in the other train. But they were all on their phones.

I looked at the tops of the trees that marked the edge of the railway. I had always thought these dismal. But they are the same species of trees you see in a country walk, and that day they lost their grim trackside context and looked like country trees. Proper trees.

At Berrylands I could see into people’s gardens. Kids were bouncing on trampolines and I could imagine a smell of spag bol.

I couldn’t see it, but I knew we went under the railway bridge at Surbiton where parents sometimes take their toddlers to look at the trains. Before they learn they are just commuter trains.

We all grow up. It reminded me of those black and white photos of crowds of trainspotters. It occurred to me that was a very pre-phone hobby. Before we had other things to do.

When we pulled into Surbiton, people got up to go. Most put their phones in their pockets, but a man my age walked up beside me still using his. He looked at my stupid high vis vest with (understandable) fatherly disappointment.

I glanced at his phone. He was playing one of those games where you manage a little town. Like the one we just went through.

Finding Beauty In The Everyday Ugh

There are tonnes of people who tell you to look at the everyday through fresh eyes and find it beautiful. To appreciate every detail.

I firmly believe this advice is horsecrap. Personally, if I had tried to do that as a commuter on this same line many years ago I would have failed. And I likely would have thought less of myself in failing.

This is why I was hesitant to write an article like this.

But here I am. That annoying person.

What changed? 116 hours. I firmly believe that my 116 hours of phone free silence have made it far easier for me to take pleasure in the everyday.

Heavy phone use encourages the mind to look at normal life with uneasy, restless disappointment. Conversely, to spend time in silence is to teach your brain to accept that ordinary things are okay.

This is an invaluable training of the mind.

I’d suggest that if you can find the joy in the commute, you can find it in a lot of places. You can appreciate everyday life not as a result of deliberate effort, but as a default. You can treat life with a little more lightness. Its challenges can be more like the game the guy was playing.

So my advice isn’t to take pleasure in the everyday. I’m not saying it isn’t important. There’s a reason why it’s the message of so many movies and so much philosophy. It’s true that it’s a key part of happiness.

It’s true. But it’s not helpful advice.

My suggestion instead is to put down your phone for a few minutes every day.

And one day, taking pleasure in the everyday might happen. Not because you chose it, but because it became choose-able.

Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

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This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

For several years I worked a four day week. One day a week was spent looking after my kids.

Or to put it more honestly, one day a week was looking after my kids and looking at my phone.

(We should likely add “and looking at my phone” more often to descriptions of what we are doing. “I was watching a film and looking at my phone.” If we were watched by aliens, that’s what they would report back to base.)

Fortunately I didn’t need an alien to tell me.

One day I took my three year old son to his football class. When a ball bounced near me and needed returning, the huge coach shouted “Oi, Phone Dad!”

The name stuck.

This week on the commute I’ve found myself thinking back to that time. As you all know by now, thinking time isn’t in short supply for me.

And these days I view it all very differently.

You might imagine I’m going to say I regret it more. But that’s not true. I regretted it plenty at the time. I definitely noticed I used my phone too much.

No, the change in my thinking is why I used my phone. Back then if you challenged me I would have said “Oh, a bit bored.” And if you asked me to characterise my overall habit, I’d have conceded that I was probably “addicted” to my phone.

But after many hours of reflection, I’ve realised those words hide a multitude of far, far more interesting things.

I love a bit of neuroscience. But I have to say ultimately I agree with Jonathan Haidt, who once wrote that metaphor can be a powerful way to understand the mind.

There’s a long and venerable tradition of this, from Plato’s chariot pulled by two horses, to the Buddha’s wild elephant, through to Freud’s warring provinces of the psyche.

Those thinkers grappled with profound questions. Why is the mind tempted by evil? Why does our mind seem beyond our control? How does our past live with us?

I am grappling with my habit of checking a classroom WhatsApp group, and then refreshing the same damn group five seconds later.

And, of course, why I found myself looking at my phone at my daughter’s ballet rehearsal in a way that made her cry.

Less profound perhaps, but no less interesting.

The Iron Wheel

The philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote about how the pace of technology can alienate us from those parts of our life that we need to slow down to enjoy.

For four days each week my mind was working pretty quickly. On my day off, I expected my mind to adapt to being with the kids. And it didn’t.

The mind can’t turn on a dime. It can’t change speed quickly. It kept rumbling on at the velocity I previously set.

Imagine you swap a fast-paced day in the office for a day with a toddler who tells very very slow and mazey stories that don’t end and when you think surely this story has ended, it never does because then they say “and then” and just carry on.

Listening to that very slow story, the mind is still going pretty fast. At the speed set by the previous days. It craves something at a faster pace than the toddler’s story.

And it finds it in the phone: buttons to push, things to check, things to fix, things to check again. The fast whirring mind loves an activity centre.

I imagine a heavy iron wheel in my head. It’s turning really fast, telling me to use the phone. It’s not going to stop straight away - it has enormous momentum. This is one of the reasons I came convinced I needed to carve out some time each day to stop properly. To slow that spinning flywheel.

But in the years I worked a four day week I was nowhere near figuring that out.

I just assumed my mind would do what I asked it to.

The Caveman’s Darkest Fear

But that’s only part of the reason.

Time to mix metaphors.

When people talk about phone use they tend to talk about scrolling. But for me with the kids, it was refreshing work emails that took up most of my energy.

That wasn’t because of any notification - I switched them all off. It wasn’t because of colleagues - they were respectful of my time and careful not to bother me. And it was rarely because I actually had work I needed to do.

No, I think when I strip it back, it was because I was plagued with a question that wouldn’t go away: “What do my colleagues think of me?”

The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has written fascinatingly about how humans have evolved to be obsessed with how they are perceived by others. We are animals that work in a team to hunt mammoth, so we are pre-programmed to make sure we eject bad hunters from the group. And that rejection from our group is our ultimate hardwired fear.

I’ve come to believe that it was this caveman fear that plagued me when I worked part time. I couldn’t see the rest of my industry. But I imagined they were out there, judging me. Ready to reject me.

It drove me to check my work emails incessantly, as a way of picking up any information on this question. The LinkedIn feed was another treasure trove.

Despite all this effort, I almost never got a clear answer as to what everyone thought of me. But the searching only increased the anxiety.

At its worst there were moments that - without much evidence - I fully convinced myself that my colleagues believed I was worthless. I became panicked, and almost breathless with fear.

In these moments the phone could suddenly switch to a new role. Having failed to answer my primal need to know what others in my tribe thought of me - and having increased my anxiety massively in the process - it then offered the only distraction available from that anxiety. Scrolling became the only way to clear my head. My toddler with his long stories never had a chance.

Maybe it was this strange fuel cocktail that powered my phone use.

And the more I used my phone, the more it reinforced the wiring in my brain. The iron wheel turned faster and faster. Pickups became automatic.

What The Football Coach Should Have Said

Back in that room, I was a million miles away from the advice I needed to hear:

“That mind of yours is leaning forward, forever reaching forward. That heavy iron wheel in your head is turning so fast. It’s going to take patient work to slow it down.

You need to learn to say no to checking and fixing. Practise accepting the world as it is, and the iron wheel will turn slower each day.

And that phone of yours. It’s never going to tell you what the world thinks of you. You need to become comfortable sitting with that anxiety and knowing you will never be certain.

The answer, in all cases, is to practise accepting.”

But no-one said that.

They just said “Oi, Phone Dad”.

So I looked sheepish and kicked the ball back.

And tried really hard to watch my son playing football.

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of doing nothing - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.

On the plus side, I passed the one hundred hours mark. One hundred hours of mental silence on the daily commute. No phones, no music, no nothing - since the start of the year.

But on the other hand… turns out I’m rawdogging. Ugh.

I’m not a big TikTok person. I’m someone who can get addicted to checking if connected apps are charging properly; if I’d ever got seriously into TikTok it’s likely I’d still be in that same room where I first downloaded it, having not slept in the intervening years.

But I’d vaguely heard of rawdogging. Look it up if you really want to, but it’s a term both for going on public transport without any sort of distraction, and also having sex without a condom. Great, thanks a lot, TikTok.

Really, is there anything worse than social media? Not content with being really annoying and destructive itself, it also gives a terrible name to the practice of taking a break from it.

Every now and then on the commute someone might mention the R word. Especially the young folk. Many of them on the tube are curious to see what this wise old man is doing wearing high vis. They approach him to hear what life lessons he can impart. When I describe the thoughtful contemplative experiment I have embarked upon they say “Oh, rawdogging!”

I thought it was just the young’uns. But then I bumped into an old friend on the train. He is a pillar of the Surbiton community, a Deputy Headteacher no less. We had a detailed discussion about the Meta/Google case and the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. It was very clever and thoughtful, and I imagined the people on the train listening in and thinking how clever I was.

He then turned to me and said “So you’re rawdogging then?”

I was taken aback. Him too?

Great. So just as I’m ready to celebrate the 100 hours mark of dignified mental silence, I learn I am the Rawdogger-In-Chief. Thrilled about that.

So it was in a grumpy mood that I read this piece about it on Substack. Seeing as the world has decided this is what it’s called, it made me think about how useful that name is, and also what it misses. In my humble opinion.

Rawdogging: the Rawdogger-In-Chief’s Verdict

First the good.

Most coverage of rawdogging treats it as an extreme challenge. This is useful. It’s deeply unhelpful to imagine putting aside the phone at first will be pleasant or in any way relaxing. Rewiring your brain is hard work.

But now, the bad. The rawdogging concept is too raw. It misses three important ideas.

• Training for the long haul. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not the most typical subject - I had practice meditating before this. I suspect there’s an enormous prize to be had, but only if you do this daily over weeks. For me it was unpleasant for three and half weeks, but in the fourth it became quite amazing. Having had that experience, I really can’t see the point of doing this sporadically. Neuroplasticity just doesn’t work that way. Suddenly attempting a long haul flight is like running a marathon with no training - at the end of it you won’t be fit, you’ll just be miserable.

• Mindwatching. I’m a huge fan of letting the mind wander and not putting oneself under any pressure during this. But it’s worth being prepared: your mind will inevitably call you back to the phone. You should be ready to hear that voice - in fact it’s great training yourself to hear it clearly. And to practise saying no to it - no, I will not check that now. I’ve written here about how this can be quite an entertaining experience with the right priming.

• Being aware of the present moment. I’d argue that choosing to concentrate on any aspect of the present moment is good training (read this about how I learnt this from my dog). On a commute, it’s easiest to pay attention to sounds. I found it really helpful to imagine this as rebuilding my phone-shattered focus. Or training my mind to be in the present moment, so it more readily defaults to it at home with loved ones. Noticing that you become gradually more able to do this each day is very motivating.

The one term no-one wants to hear

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the above strays dangerously close to meditation.

Some would more happily use a term for a sex act than they would use the M word. It’s common in articles on rawdogging to say something like “Don’t worry, you don’t have to meditate”, as if any planned or sustained effort in these rawdog sessions might suddenly transform you into someone who talks about the cosmos all the time and buys healing crystals.

Despite the mountain of clinical studies attesting to its power, for a huge part of the population it’s inescapably wishy washy woo woo. Which is a shame, because really it’s mental training, and the one thing that the phone-addled among us need is steady and patient training to rebuild our focus. Without any sort of framework, you’re denied any sort of feeling of progress, which is a recipe for abandoning this on day three.

And of course, watching your mind, well that’s mindfulness: meditation’s even more boring cousin. It smells like a corporate retreat. Our society has garbled the translation of an extremely powerful concept so it now means pretty much everything. The other day I saw you can buy a mindful fizzy drink.

Whatever we call it, the need is real

We’ve created an enormous dilemma for ourselves by inventing the phone.

We know it’s making us ill. Each individual use might be harmless, but constantly checking, fixing and distracting 24/7 makes you anxious and stops your brain resting. (Read about checking and fixing here).

Unfortunately it doesn’t work to just “use the phone less”, phone use just spreads back in. And I’d argue you need sustained periods of rest to let the brain’s Default Mode Network do its thing.

Many are coming to the conclusion that the only way to undo the phone’s brainfogging effects is by an intentional digital break. The incidental pauses in life that the phone destroyed need to be consciously rebuilt. (Read here about how the phone invades every little gap in family life).

There seems to be a cultural consensus emerging behind this.

But far less of a consensus as to what to call it.

A rawdog session by any other name…

Rawdogging is gross. For too many, meditation is woo woo. Mindfulness is meaningless (in popular culture I mean).

More and more experts are reaching for “you have to be bored” (TV producer talking here: great pitch, guys), or doing nothing, or mental rest, or being present. There’s truth in all these terms, but none really give you the framework or motivation you need.

And the English language folds in on itself under the pressure of describing it - I’ve argued that mental rest involves activity. Hmm. As soon as you try silence, your brain becomes very loud. Okay.

We don’t have the words, and it’s irritating and distancing.

If we are (unfortunately) averse to borrowing terms from cultures more adept in this, we have to invent a whole new language to dig ourselves out of this hole.

I’m still not sure myself. Going Phone Free I quite like, it captures the joyfulness of the end result, but it’s a negative and there is something active to be done here. Anti-phone training perhaps? I’d be genuinely curious to hear people’s thoughts on this.

Or maybe things are just what everyone calls them. If you can’t beat them, maybe I need to join them.

Until next week,

Raw Dog Will

This is part a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the commute - here’s the embarrassing story of how it all began.

If you know someone who’s tired of their phone use (or if you know someone whose phone use you are tired of) please consider sharing with them.