“Limit Your Interaction with Your Devices”
I hesitate to quote anyone that I haven’t read their entire body of work, but I will at least recommend this one piece of advice from Eckhart Tolle: “Limit your interactions with your devices.” This excellent life hack is espoused by many others, but the one piece of topspin that puts it into the category of transformative is to not look at your phone first thing in the morning. Instead, let your mind wake up a bit more naturally. Don’t expose your waking mind to the large number of notifications from emails, social media, texts. Transitioning from sleep to wakefulness can be a challenge on its own, but adding in this jarring symphony of information and notifications may have an impact on your mindset that carries with you throughout the day.
First-Thing-Phoning (FTP) and Cognitive Creativity
Your morning routine as a canvas for creative genius? Yep, it's a thing. A morning free from digital distractions can boost problem-solving and creative thinking. Letting your waking mind shake hands with your resting mind, minus the digital noise, creates a playground for fresh ideas and ingenious solutions. FTP takes away those potentially magical moments when your sleeping mind passes along new ideas, and new solutions to problems which have been floating around in our minds all night. How many times can you remember waking up with a solution to a problem you were thinking about the night before? It doesn’t happen very often for me these days, but my subjective memory is that it used to happen much more often in the past. Of course, my own aging process and hundreds of other factors may account for that perceived difference, but my current working hypothesis is that not checking my phone for at least the first hour of my morning greatly increases the odds of my mind bringing with it from sleep to waking: useful ideas, helpful solutions, and more completely processed emotional experiences.
Power of Now
Back to Eckhart for a moment; his most famous work is called “The Power of Now” (Tolle, E. (2003), which I have heard excellent things about. Again, I haven’t actually read the book, but it’s central thesis of prioritizing the current moment of life seems very much in the center of the bullseye of being mindful.
Check out the video linked below to hear Tolle making this recommendation:
“Limit your interaction, the interaction with your devices. If you cannot eliminate interaction with your devices completely, and I understand that you may not survive if you do, at least put aside just maybe once a day, 15 minutes, when you check your, whatever it is that comes through. Whatever, text, email, Facebook, Snapchat, Tinder, It's all very important, but there's something more important and that's why you are here if you. I suggest to you that you make an agreement with yourself. That not to go there unless any more than is absolutely necessary. And I mean, if you occasionally you get it out and to take a photo is okay, but also don't interact with things around you only through imagining what it would look like as a photo on your phone. And then say, okay, I'm going to fully experience this beautiful thing when I get home and look at my photos. In the meantime, I'm more interested in taking this photo.”
-Eckhard Tolle