I had a spiritual awakening on the school run
But it didn't fix my phone use, so I bought a high vis vest
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.
This is part of a little run that began here.
If you know anyone who might be tickled by this, please share below.
All my pieces are on phonefreewill.com.
Really enjoyed that one, Will. Keep up the good work in your Batman cape!