Digital Detox in the Bedroom
Sunday Blog 129 - 31st March 2024
Happy Easter to you! This is my first Easter since we sold the family home. This was the place we would gather for birthdays, Easter and Christmas but now it is no more. Well, technically the house is still there and apparently being done up in a way we had always longed to - but we are now trespassers to the place we called home our whole lives. Sigh.
So I booked a sneaky little Easter retreat in Collie, two hours south of my home town of Perth, where one of my sisters is having her first Easter as a grandma. Collie is just under two hours’ drive from Margaret River where another sister lives. I decided to do a day trip on Easter Saturday and crash in on their Easter Saturday lunch. Just to round out the experience, I decided to make it down by 9.30am so we could do our Saturday Shut Up and Write in person rather than online.
All the drive down from Collie, to Margaret River, the thought pursued me. What will I write in my Sunday Blog? Why on earth will anyone want to listen to me, blah, blah, blah?
I pulled into my sister’s driveway at Margaret River just in time for our Saturday Shut Up and Write, and we logged on to catch up with our Perth Shut Up and Write buddies. As if sensing my mental chatter, one spontaneously broke into praise for my consistency with writing the Sunday Blog over the last two and a half years. It was as if she could read my mind. It was just what I needed to hear.
Getting the writing yips is very common for emerging writers like myself. Feeling like it’s all been said and done before, why should I bother and who do I think I am? And that is where having friends to write with is so darned important. As is drowning out those yips and just getting on with it! And now, for the Sunday Blog…
Sunday Blog 129 – 31st March 2024
You can listen to the Sunday Blog here, if you like.
This week, spurred on by a podcast on sleep hygiene and the horrors of incessant social media, I took decisive action. Definitely no devices in the bedroom. My iPhone, iPad and AirPods are now banished to the study to charge overnight. If I want to use them in the night, I have to get up, walk to the study and then taste the forbidden digital fruit there. Whilst I haven’t opted for a peg on the nose, that may yet come.
I’m allowed to read analogue books in the bedroom—that is, paperbacks with real pages, but Kindle books are forbidden because, well, iPad.
It can’t be a coincidence that this resolve descended after a bout of Covid where I binge watched to the end of Succession (meh) and then to the end of the Crown series (excellent). By then, my eyes were on stalks and my ears almost forgot what it was like to be naked to the world, exposed to ambient noises.
I arose from my sickbed and swept all electronics aside. I suddenly saw the wisdom of the endless new book purchases I’ve made over the last few years, either at writing festivals, author events and of course, online. My To Be Read Pile is actually an entire shelf. I have re-badged my incessant impulse book buying as excellent planning for the self-created apocalypse of a digital detox in the bedroom.
I need all of those books from my literary version of doomsday prepping. My persistent habit of nighttime wakefulness is such that, if I wake in the morning and realise I have had an unbroken night’s sleep, I’m almost wildly jubilant. A bit like I’ve managed to successfully execute a headstand in yoga class without either the superhuman effort of puffing and blowing, or a wall as a ballast to prevent me from toppling. Actually, I don’t know what it’s like to execute a headstand without all the above, but you get the idea.
With the zeal of the newly converted, for three nights I stuck to my regime of banishing tech to the study. I have tiptoed up at some point each night at least for a bathroom visit and once I quickly did Wordle on the iPhone before guiltily heading back to bed. Luckily, I can bang on the light in bed and read as much as I need to drift back to sleep.
Then I upset my new regime by booking a getaway in a gorgeous little lodge in Collie with wonderful shared spaces but a tiny room. Tech simply cannot be banished. I’ve had a couple of slips (Wordle and Connections while still in bed) but mainly, I’m pleased to say, I’ve been reading. Maybe this new me might stick a little. Maybe I might try some daytime digital detoxing. Right after I master my headstand…