7 Lessons I Learned From a 30-Day Screen Diet
If you are like me, moderation isn’t part of your vocabulary. My whole family is this way. My relatives all abstain totally from alcoholic drinks or they are total drunks. They’re the life of the party or the wallflower. They’re radical leftist or alt-right. It’s kind of annoying. I am especially annoyed by my family’s extreme tendencies because the traits we don’t like about ourselves are the traits we find most annoying in other people.
I think a lot of people are like my family and me. What is ironic is, if someone were to ask any of us to describe ourselves, we would describe ourselves as easy-going, level-headed, flexible, moderate?
One of my closest friends just hit 1 million followers on TikTok. He started a TikTok account couple of months and I soon followed suit. He created this character he plays where he is a time-traveling cop who claims he’s not an undercover cop. I had created a joke account around the same time called comedy school. At the time I thought this was hilarious and maybe even a useful top use of my time. Despite being a special educator, father, husband, and grad student, I was finding 30–60 minutes an evening thumbing through Tik Tok.
That’s time I could have spent with my family. Time I could have been reading, exercising, meditating, solving the rifts in space/time continuum to correct the disturbances of the Mandela Effect. Basically, Tik Tok was a waste of my time. So I deleted the app and haven’t returned to it. My buddy, @not_an_undercover_cop, still updates me on his ventures with social media via phone calls.
To get to the point, I didn’t stop with Tik Tok. I was wasting a lot of time on the dreaded “Screen”. The simultaneous villain and savior of our generation. I don’t know how many hours I’ve wasted on YouTube searching free-style rap reaction videos and cringe compilations.
Answer: too much.
But, also, I don’t know how many useful tips and hacks I’ve learned on YouTube. Villain/Savior.
The problem is, I’m not cut from the genetic cloth that can watch one video and move along with my life, no more than I’m biologically disposed to taking one drink and carrying on with the rest of the party. Moderation doesn’t exist in my world and instead of pretending like I can learn willpower at 35, I decided I had to cut some things from my life. This was the plan: I had decided that for thirty days, I was going to significantly cut down on screen time.
I was going on a screen diet.
What I cut out:
Television (all streaming services)
Social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc)
YouTube for entertainment. (I have downloaded an app that blocks all comments and suggested videos on YouTube, to help me not go down the YouTube bunny trail when I search things for informative reasons.)
Google (unplanned browsing that isn’t completely necessary)
Video games of any sort, on any device. (I was never a big gamer, so I allowed an exception for when my sons are stuck on a level in Super Mario World, I’ll guide them through it or jump on and help them. This happened twice in thirty days. Both lasted less than 20 minutes.)
These are the 7 lessons I’ve learned since significantly cutting down on my screen time.
One. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.
I asked myself, what I was getting into. In fact, when I first broached the idea to my wife, thinking she might join me so that we could be accountability partners, she looked at me like my skin turned purple with polka-dots.
“I will never do that. You’re crazy,” she said.
Her response was pretty typical of what I heard from the few fellow teachers and friends when I brought up the idea to them. People acted like this was some kind of herculean feat. Silently, I agreed. That is, however, until I tried it. The apps were off my phone, I said I wasn’t watching tv, and I got a few books from the library that have been on my to-read list ever since I created a Goodreads account. The thing is…it’s not that hard. It feels impossible to stop staring at the screen while staring at the screen, but it’s not difficult to abstain from the screen if you have declared and prepared not to.
Two. I have way more time than I realized.
I had historically not been a productive person when I was growing up. I was a poor student during my school-age years. It took me about five years of community college to drop out without anything to show for it. I only recently have started a new career that I’ve found some success in. Most of my previous professional experience had been as a temp manual labor worker and the lowest on the totem pole at a church mailroom. So, I wasn’t exactly an early bloomer.
I didn’t really hit my stride until my early thirties, a few years ago. Now, I am a middle school special ed teacher, I have three kids, a ten-year-old and twin eight-year-olds. I am a grad student, and I have my side hustles. Some might say that I’m a busy guy, but it turns out I have a lot more time than I realized.
In retrospect, it should seem obvious that I felt like I never had enough with my wife, kids, friends, and projects because I was always on my phone. I was spending time with them, but not really.
My biggest time-waster was watching YouTube videos. It would normally start off innocently enough. How do I make a Mississippi roast? I’ll look up a recipe on YouTube. One hour later and I’m watching the best knockout finishes in UFC history and the kids are wondering what’s for dinner.
The brain really isn’t designed for multi-tasking in the sense that you can really be present with another person and have a novel distraction in your hand. If you think that your family and friends are so boring that you need entertainment just to sit on a couch while they’re around you, you either think your family and friends really suck or you have an issue. Either way, I found that I had an issue–the desire for a screen to distract me. And, once I dumped the issue I found that I have a lot more time on my hands than I had originally thought.
Three. Screens aren’t the best options for being entertained.
When I made the decision that I was going to cut out all this excess screen time, I went in with the understanding that I was going to be severing the primary source of entertainment from my life. This was only kind of true.
Without television, how am I supposed to be entertained before bed? The truth is, I didn’t need to be entertained before bed. I don’t know if others would have the same experience I had when I cut tv out of my life, but fall asleep faster and sleep much deeper after the change. I’ll read some books if I find time between putting my kids to bed before I go to bed, but now I often fall asleep before my kids do.
I’m also now listening to informative podcasts instead of trying to search YouTube for Lil Dicky freestyle raps while driving to and from work. Probably a safe change. I listen to podcasts with a lesson and I record myself with my iPhone’s voice to text. This is how I journal, and how I get a lot of ideas for my articles penned. My 36-minute drive has now turned into a studying, journaling, and writing session.
Four. Sometimes boredom is something that should be embraced.
The thought of giving up excess screentime at first feels akin to amputation. We are programmed by these devices to be distracted. I never realized how habituated I was to novel input until I cut it from my life. It was like I was afraid I was going to get bored. One thing I’ve learned from studying the work of Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, is to embrace boredom. Boredom is not always bad. A distracted mind is a mind that is only able to get shallow work completed. You can wash dishes while distracted but you can’t get focused work completed while distracted. Not well anyway. I’m able to get so many more things done that I’ve always wanted to work on. This was done by putting the screen away and embracing that some of the stuff I want to do is going to be meaningful but not entertaining. Projects are going to be boring in the moment but rewarding in the end.
Five. I don’t feel any less connected.
One of the selling points of social media apps, especially Facebook and Instagram, has been the accessibility to the outside world and to friends and family. How was I going to keep track of everything going on with those whom I love if I quit social media? I’m not. I don’t. And, guess what? I don’t feel any less connected or any more lonely than I did before.
In fact, I find myself calling more often. I block time off to call people and I try to stick to those time blocks. I write letters, which apparently is still a thing that can happen. Who knew?
I talk on the phone just to shoot the breeze about once every day or two or three. I don’t let the chatting go on for an hour like I’ve had a habit of doing before in the past. I need to be intentional with my time, so I am.
Six. I am less informed but in a good way.
I am much less informed than I was expecting to be. I don’t know what people are talking about when they say so-and-so politicians or social media stars did such-and-such. I’m clueless.
This has been a huge turnaround for me. I, not that long ago, prided myself on being able to keep up with all the stuff my students followed.
“Hey, Mr. Boyd. Did you hear about Logan Paul’s beef with So-and-so?”
“Yeah, of course. Haven’t you watched the diss-track he just released on the guy?”
“What? I need to check that out.”
Not only is the above conversation accurate, but it’s also embarrassingly something that happened all the time. Now, I’m not as cool, in the eye of middle school kids. I miss it a little. What I don’t miss? All that crap that’s going on in the world…no thank you. I’m blissfully unaware. Did you know we have a president and stuff? Pssht! Whatever. Lawnchair, don’t care.
Seven. I would like even less screentime.
This is the lesson that surprised me the most. What started off as a 30-day detox just kind of stayed a fixture in my life. If I could cut out emails, I would. Maybe I can convince my school district to go back to inner-office mail. I doubt it.
Until then, I’m searching for more screen time to cut from my life. As a teacher and a grad student, I find myself on the computer a lot. I feel like I’m living on the computer. No question it is an invaluable tool. I’m not suggesting that we all live the Amish life, but maybe some of us could benefit if we lived a little bit more Amish-ish?