“Life is more difficult if you worry. It’s better to deal with things as they come up.”
Penor Rinpoche, via Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 101)
Beyond the Quote (134/365)
I have noticed in myself over the past few days an increased tendency to use my phone. This tendency, I suppose, could be for many reasons. It could be because of the addictive nature of phones, the increased desire for connection during a time of isolation, it could be a coping strategy to deal with the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, a lackadaisical response to the slower lifestyle (in my case at least), or a combination of all of the above. While it is important to be a little more lenient on yourself during a time of global crisis, what I have also noticed, from careful introspection, is that I have felt my anxiety levels go up in proportion to the increased phone use.
My guess, is that if you looked carefully at how you felt from an increased use of your phone, you would notice a similar trend too. It’s important to point this out because if this is the case—that anxiety goes up as phone use goes up—then maybe excessive phone use isn’t something we should be lackadaisical about or allowing ourselves to use as a coping mechanism during challenging times. Because one thing I can tell you for for sure is that anxiety doesn’t help with coping.
In my case, I have found that I feel significantly better when I get priority tasks done early on in the day. And it has to be early on because it’s in the first half of my day that I notice my anxiety levels fluctuating the most. If I start the day off strong, then it is very much the case that the rest of the day flows seamlessly downhill for me. But, if I start my day off slowly or distracted, then I start to feel uneasy, worried, and unnecessarily tense. Even if I get the same amount of work done at night as I do in the morning, it doesn’t matter—the feeling of the entire day changes for me based on when I get the work done, not if.
When I look at this more closely it makes perfect sense to me. When you get done what you know you need to get done in a day, a weight is lifted off of your shoulders. You feel lighter. You can drop the thought from your mind. You can think about whatever else you want. You can relax. When you don’t get done what you know you need to get done in a day, the weight on your shoulders builds. This is very much so the case with me: the weight on my shoulders doesn’t just stay the same throughout the day—the longer I hold on to it, the heavier it gets.
Think about it like this. If I asked you how heavy a 5 pound weight was, what would you say? Well, 5 pounds, you would say, of course. But, what I would add is that it depends on how long you have to hold that 5 pounds. In the first few seconds of holding 5 pounds up, it would feel light, it would be easy—it would feel like 5 pounds. But after holding up that weight for even 5 minutes, well, that 5 pounds will feel more like 50 pounds. Why is that? Because our muscles fatigue. The same is true for our brains. The longer we hold a weight on our mind, the heavier it gets. Not because the task gets bigger or harder, but because our mental willpower fatigues. That is to say that our will to do it, our will to continue thinking about it, and our will to continue trying to distract ourselves from it—all fatigue.
My first important priority every single day is exercise. It’s the first thing I think about and it’s the first thing I aim to get done every day—Monday-Sunday. When I get it done, I feel great. When I don’t, I feel the weight build on my mind. My second big priority of the day is writing. I am committed to writing every day for 2020 and I intend on completing that goal. If I don’t get my passage done in the morning—I feel the heaviness start to weigh on my mind. This is where the phone has been giving me issues and contributing to my anxiety.
As of late, I have noticed that I have been checking Instagram longer and texting more frequently in the morning when I wake up—this cuts into my workout start time. I have noticed that after my workout, when I’m getting ready to write, I do more of the same and subconsciously check all sorts of additional apps for whatever reason that isn’t exactly clear to me—this keeps me from starting my writing. This, of all of the things mentioned above is one of the things that phones do the best, they keep you feeling busy while simultaneously keep you from doing anything important. This, as Robert Kiyosaki says, is the “common form” of laziness. Laziness, not by sitting on the couch eating chips, but by tricking yourself into thinking you’re doing important work when really you’re just distracting yourself and reacting to what’s urgent.
I implore you to reflect on where you stand in regards to your phone use, anxiety levels, and productivity. This is by no means a call for more productivity during the pandemic. This is simply an invitation to experiment with something that might help you diagnose (and course-correct) a source of extraneous stress and anxiety. If you have a series of tasks that you know need to get done in the day, can you get them done first thing in the morning rather than at the end of the night? Can you limit your phone use to help with that process? If you don’t already include exercise, writing, reading, meditating, or self-therapy of some kind into your day, can you make it a priority instead of the excessive screen time? I think, like me, once you can put your finger on what’s going on, you can use that same finger to direct your energy to where you really want to go. Good luck.
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