We walk like zombies, chronically anxious and overstimulated. Fixating all our attention and energy on a 6-inch black mirror that has become our window to the world. The only window we want to gaze the world through. Even though it’s full of lies, exaggerations, and way too much information for our brain to process.
We live with our necks perpetually crooked down, as if we are looking for something we have lost on the ground. Meanwhile, the only thing we lost was our connection to each other and ourselves. We sleepwalk, completely oblivious to the world around us. A world that is ever changing, and is walking us by.
A study published in Surgical Technology International found that tilting the head at a 60-degree angle to look at a phone puts 60 pounds of pressure on the cervical spine—the equivalent of carrying an 8-year-old child on your neck.
Yeah. Crazy right?
I’m of the opinion that this is a more serious situation than just neck pain.
For me, the connection to these toxic tools was based on something more visceral. It was survival.
As long as I was numbing my nervous system with podcasts, video essays, any content that took me away from the storm of emotions raging silently inside me and the the political chaos I live in, I was safe. But that safety was brittle. It was a lie. The gusts of unmet needs and self-abandonment would still burst out violently on random nights, and it was becoming more frequent every week. It would wreck my emotions and make me feel like a ragged doll pulled in all directions. Leaving me on the ground in ruins.
It’s a tough existence. And no matter how much I doubled down on ignoring my flare ups and numbing with more distractions, it kept catching up to me.
Therapy wasn’t helping. In fact, it was making the process of healing incredibly painful and frustrating.
The Pain of Healing
For the last 3 months I have been practicing the EMDR treatment with my therapist to connect with my body and tackle my traumas more directly. To say that it has been a tough transition would be an understatement. It’s been the rawest, most intense emotional experience I’ve had in my life. And it’s unearthing a lot of stuff I wasn’t able to see before. A lot of it I wasn’t even sure I could process safely. But I braved it on, because I was getting so frustrated with the lack of progress with myself.
What I have learned so far is that my body is saturated with emotions. Perpetually trapped in a past state of hurt, when I felt helpless against a physical or emotional threat. My responses would be so intense that my shoulder would ache as if yelling to me “Hey! Listen to me! We are not safe!“ My stomach would sink, and my gaze would fixate on my feet. I was feeling like a little kid being yelled at. Terrified. It’s wild to witness, and even wilder to know it’s happening to you and not being able to get a hold of yourself.
This was a good indication that we were going in the right direction, and things were changing. But soon enough, progress stalled. I felt unable to really connect with my body, and once again felt like I was running into another wall. I would get emotionally numb during my sessions, feel some ache, but not be able to connect the dots.
What’s more, I wasn’t even feeling like I was there.
I was disassociating.
I started dreading the sessions; I watched, almost from the ceiling, as my bad habits reclaimed the rhythm of my life. I would binge for hours. Go to bed late. Eat erratically, and too much. The only thing that was somewhat consistent was my workout routine. It was the last anchor I had to some sense of control. I was constantly checking my phone. Taking it everywhere I go. Opening and closing apps over and over. Waiting to see something new. To feel something.
I was dishing away my attention and time like my life depended on it. But that’s the funny thing. It was a life I didn’t have, because I was not “alive”. Not in any recognizable way for a healthy adult. I was a husk, animated by a curse that compelled it to consume and consume. In constant swings between agony and apathy.
The longer I existed in that unhealthy state the more my toxic core beliefs would manifest —and the harder they were to endure. I would go from “I don’t feel seen“ to “I don’t deserve to exist“ or from “I lack talent“ to “I’m unemployable“. I started to believe there was no way out. That I was where I was because of who I am.
Let me tell you something. There’s nothing worse than believing that everything is your responsibility, everything is a result of your actions, but not believing yourself capable of rising to change anything. That is where many unfortunate souls saw their road end.
Needless to say, my therapist was alarmed. It took me acknowledging the severity of my habits and the extent of my emotional distress to finally take decisive action.
But here’s what you need to know. All this can be avoided. You don’t need to go through a similar ordeal. As long as you are present enough in your life to listen to your body.
Doing What We Can
Honestly, I can count on one hand the times in my life I have sat down to brave the painful emotions brewing inside me. I have never allowed myself to inhabit the thoughts of anger, desolation, uncertainty, betrayal, sadness existing in the corners of my mind. What’s more, I haven’t acknowledged how fucked up and unfair what happened to me was, and (here’s the kicker) the fact that it was nobody’s fault. Because everyone was doing their best, as was I.
More importantly, I haven’t felt comfortable existing in my current environment.
Sadly, being an active target for deportation, or even execution, for being who I am has been crippling my mental health. I don’t blame myself, or anyone else for that matter, for doing whatever they need to do to survive and feel safe.
But surviving is not living. And I want to brave the storm.
Seizing Back your Attention and Energy
So, what can you do for yourself? Well, come back to the real world. Limit your screen time as much as possible. I know you’ve heard this many times, but it is said often because it is true.
One thing that worked for me was making my phone as boring and annoying to use as possible. I made the screen grayscale, disabled background tasks, turned off all notifications and deleted every non essential app. I also made it so I have to press the button for the screen to turn on and input a password to unlock. Believe me, it becomes very frustrating to use your phone once you have faced the password input screen a handful of time.
Furthermore, I got rid of any other screens in my apartment and gave my computer a similar treatment to my phone. I nuked my YouTube and Instagram feeds and made a browser extension to break the website if I ever visit it again.
Yeah, I didn’t mess around.
Will I miss some calls, respond late to emails, and annoy some people? Yes, absolutely. But I have seized back my attention and energy away from all these scummy companies and their algorithms. Bonus points for no longer being a patron to the platforms of corporations funding the discrimination and murder of my fellow Americans on our streets.
It’s time to admit that words, intentions, actions, and results are four completely different things, and only the last two matter.
We are escaping our thoughts and emotions. I know I was. I was overstimulated and deregulated all this time. My nervous system saturated and exhausted from all the input I was using to numb myself. The input that has become common place in our lives. Like caffeine to workaholics. And it’s hard, because I know how scary things have been.
Sitting down in silence, without anything taking me away from the present moment feels like a practice of torture. Nobody wants to live in the world as it is, but we have to. We have to, because the longer we stay disconnected, the more we get lost.
Consumption is literally erasing you.
Remember. Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, Meta, Nintendo, Sony and their AI initiatives; all these companies are not your friends. They don’t care that you champion their products or that you are invested in their stock. Wake up. These are companies, not people; only beholden to their shareholders. These companies care only of their bottom line and they would suck you dry and walk over your corpse for some profit. All while saying that they believe in “equality”, “connecting the world”, and “saving the environment”.
Social Media, Art, and Gambling
Here’s the truth.
Social media, and media in general, can be extremely damaging to your quality of life. Social media is not social. It hasn’t been for a long time. These platforms are merely a funnel to extract you attention and labor for profit. Yes, 95% of creators are just providing free labor creating content that these platforms need to exist and be profitable. Shocker, I know.
Art is no longer a human expression, it is a financial tool to extract attention and sell it to the highest bidder. It’s SLOP that an algorithm can poop for cheap to numb minds and keep you consuming.
Notifications are an intrusive and direct channel to command your life, time and attention. It allows companies to control the flow of your day, hijacking your anticipation and reward system to create addictive tendencies. It’s a cheap way to make you feel “wanted“, “seen“, or “special“ with every irregular ping. It’s a corruption of connection. Empty calories.
Don’t believe me? Tech companies have adopted psychological mechanisms widely used by the gambling industry like the “Intermittent Variable Rewards” (the same logic used in slot machines). This keeps the brain in a state of “anticipatory dopamine,” which actually exhausts the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for the “willpower” you need to unplug.
These things own you.
You might think that all this is hyperbole. But think about it. If you suddenly were transported 30 years into the past, where these tools didn’t exist, how would you feel? The thought probably brings you some level of dread. You might have unconsciously reached for your phone.
Weapons of Mass Distraction
Let’s be real. We lost control a long time ago. Living without access to all the convenience and all the entertainment you could possibly want on your pocket feels like a unbearable existence.
The ad industry and the legislations (funded by them) that enable their worst aspects have created incredibly damaging incentives. They pushed companies to make tools of communication into corrupting consumption channels that destroy lives and funnel wealth upwards.
Every inch of that device you are so proud to own and take with you everywhere you go has been meticulously engineered by the smartest people on earth to extract all your attention and energy. To become an inseparable part of you. To influence your world view and how you see yourself. To disconnect you from the world you have always been part of. And, more concerningly, to make us more isolated, angry, and hollow.
Research from the University of California, Irvine, shows that the average time spent on any single screen task before switching has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds today. This is unsustainable.
We have not yet evolved our brains to live with such tools with no negative effect in our nature.
We are walking slowly into extinction.
Rejoining the Living
I’m not going to sugar coat it. If you haven’t realized yet, living a mundane life is mostly boring. If you decide to embark in a journey to heal and unplug the first few weeks will feel dreadful. The reality is that the average person doesn’t have enough going on in their lives to provide all the dopamine our brains have grown accustomed to receive from our phones. You will, undoubtedly, feel like shit. And when you don’t, you will feel so many emotions that you might want to run away from yourself. But that’s where growth is. That is your body and mind telling you “There’s work to do here.” Listen.
Constant digital input keeps the Amygdala (the brain’s fear center) on high alert. When we are constantly “on,” our body loses its ability to enter the “Parasympathetic” state which allows your system to rest and digest.
Admit it or not, you are overstimulated. I know I was. And all this noise is overwhelming your brain and nervous system. It is erasing your ability to exist in the real world. To function, and connect with others and yourself.
So, I say it’s time to rejoin the living.
It’s time to brave the storm brewing inside us and let it change us. It’s time to be a participant in the scary world we have sleepwalked into, and decide whether we want it to stay on course or course correct. It’s time to join our fellow men and women, lost in the wilderness of their minds, wrecked by their malfunctioning nervous system, scared out of their minds with the uncertainty that the world around them is crumbling, and take their hand. We can endure this, together.
You are loved.
