The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World

by Nancy Colier

The most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.1 Every day, when I wake up, I try to remember to ask myself: What is the most important thing? What is my heart’s longing? What parts of myself do I want to nourish and grow? What do I want to offer? In essence, What really matters?

I observe more and more of my clients, as well as friends, family, and others, becoming dependent on their devices in order to feel complete, “calm,” and basically okay. Many people now need their devices and the ongoing infusion of entertainment, information, and communication that technology provides to keep themselves from feeling bored and agitated, which are now considered the normal sensations for a life that is “turned off.” What we expect from the present moment has changed: we are now accustomed to ongoing stimulation and feel anxious and lacking without it. There is a continual sense that we should be doing something, which then causes us to grab our smartphones to seek some relief from that anxiety. And while most people now check their smartphones 150 times per day, or every six minutes,2 not enough of us consider our behavior around technology to be a real problem.

We are succumbing to our more primitive tendencies toward unconsciousness, going under a kind of technological anesthesia, which renders us unaware of where we actually are physically and with whom we are sharing company. Technology is dazzling us into a form of entertaining sleep, and too many of us are not yet making conscious choices about whether we agree with what is happening and in fact want to disappear from our lives.

When our technology-fueled mind is consulted as if it were a wise sage, it convinces us that the following falsehoods are true: • The more virtual friends and followers we acquire, the more connected and loved we will feel. • The more “likes” we get for our opinions and ideas, the more liked we will feel, and the more we will like ourselves. • The more we communicate, the less alone we will feel. • The more entertainment we consume, the less bored and empty we will feel. • The more information we amass, the more interesting life — and we — will become. • The easier we make our lives, the better they will be. • If other people know about our lives, our lives will feel more real to us. • If the world knows who we are, we will know who we are. • With enough virtual destinations to choose from, we will find somewhere that we want to be. • We must keep up with technology if we do not want to be left behind and miss out on life.

What do we need in order to be able to inhabit our lives peacefully and joyfully? Here are the leading contenders: • To be aware and present — to show up for our lives • To feel emotionally connected to ourselves and others • To feel cared about, valued, and known • To feel engaged in a life of meaning • To feel we have choice and control • To feel we are part of something larger than ourselves • To live an authentic life — a life that is in sync with who we truly are and what really matters to us

While turning off our phone is one path to breaking the stress of chronic availability, we can also find relief through a simple dip into our breath or into any of the body’s senses. When we take a single conscious breath, or pause to feel the sensations in our body or to listen to the sounds coming into our ears, we turn the tables on perpetual availability and become available to ourselves in the deepest way. Diving into our own present-moment awareness, through the breath, through the senses, is the most simple and direct medicine for the condition of constant availability.

In addition to conscious breathing (or sensing), try the following: schedule a time today to spend fifteen minutes being unreachable, entirely. If it helps to tell those who might want to contact you that you will be unavailable, do so. Notice the sensations in your body when you are unavailable, as well as the thoughts and feelings that arise. Don’t react or judge. Just notice what is happening inside you in this off-duty space. If possible, practice this on a daily basis.

We use our substance to avoid feelings that are uncomfortable and as a result become less able to manage discomfort of any kind without numbing out or distracting ourselves. Furthermore, addiction causes us to become reliant on something outside ourselves for our fundamental well-being, which in turn makes us feel vulnerable and disempowered.

Anything can be used as an escape from what we don’t want to feel. Alcohol, food, work, fantasy, shopping, television, sex, books, exercise — the exit routes are as limitless as our imagination.

The awareness of our craving to escape the moment is not a sociological concept to ponder, not a cultural study to consider, not about what “them addicts out there should do.” Rather, awareness is a practice that we actively initiate by paying attention to how we are interacting with technology from moment to moment, starting now. We can do this only if we are willing to look honestly at our personal behavior and the consequences that stem from it.

We can start practicing mindfulness by simply noticing the impulse to get on technology whenever it arises and use that awareness to become conscious of our desire to escape the moment. We can then pause in this desire to use. We can learn to tolerate the feelings of craving, staying conscious and still, allowing it without reacting and without giving in to what our mind is telling us to do to satisfy it: Click on that app. It will help me feel better! We can experience the desire to click, check, play, text, wiki, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, but without actually doing anything about it.

The next time you feel the urge to check your device, kindly inquire: What experience am I now searching for? What happens if I let everything be exactly the way it is right now?

As much as we crave intimacy, being truly together — and not filling the space with content or distraction — can feel awkward and even scary. Being present with another human being can make us feel vulnerable, anxious, and overly exposed. It’s not how we’re used to relating. Connection and intimacy, first and foremost, require our full presence. To be truly intimate with another person, we have to be able to be intimate with ourselves, to stay with our own experience. For many people, being with themselves is not something they have been taught or know how to experience, and given the fear attached, it’s not a skill they particularly want to learn.

Human beings, at least in our more primitive aspects, don’t want to have to consider new ideas or modify themselves, because change is frequently uncomfortable and scary. Change puts us in touch with our own ephemeral nature. We opt to be solid rather than fluid, right rather than related or even happy.

It’s in between activities and tasks that we give life to unformulated intuitions and reignite the embers that linger within us. Nothing to do is the most nutrient-rich food for the human imagination. It’s in the unfilled spaces that we develop the confidence that comes from being able to engage our own minds and know that we can take care of ourselves in this way — without needing a suitcase full of devices to babysit us. This kind of confidence is profound and lasting, not at all the same as the feeling that comes from knowing that we have enough apps and enough bars on our phone to stave off any potential boredom. All of us, children and adults, need to be able to tolerate and reside in the experience of having nothing to do — it is part of growing up, as well as part of just being alive. A hollow is a place where a nest can be built. When we send our children to their rooms to play on their own, we are giving them the opportunity to discover and invent something, to engage themselves. Playing alone — without a device — teaches children that they can rely on their own creativity and imagination. Furthermore, it allows them to experience what it feels like to imagine something into being. Such play makes children self-reliant and teaches them to take ownership of and responsibility for their own attention.

When you find yourself reaching for your phone as you stand in line at the grocery store or playing with an app when you are in between tasks, ask yourself: • What would I have to feel if I couldn’t play with my device right now? • What experience is here now when I resist the urge to distract myself? • What are the sensations in my body that I am labeling as “boredom”? • Who inside is noticing that I am bored, and who makes the effort to fill it? • What happens if I allow the boredom to be here? We can investigate, with curiosity, the experience that boredom is, without having to turn it into something dangerous.

Being able to store and retrieve information from our phones frees us up not to have to remember anything. And yet having to remember keeps our minds strong and gives us a sense of mastery, mental acuity, and continuity. When we are able to pull up things from the recesses of our minds, dig deep into the memory files, it feels good. We feel alive, fully functioning, sharp. We get to experience the particular sensation that is the brain turning its wheels, working. On the other hand, losing our memory, which happens when we cede memory to our devices, feels disempowering, disabling, and even frightening.

With technology’s presence now solidified in our lives, we need new rules for our relationships with other humans. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to be able to ask for a certain kind of undistracted attention from those we are close to — or used to be close to before we all started prioritizing our devices.

I suggest we step up and be brave: take the risk that comes from telling the truth. Ask a friend or your partner to put away their device if that is what you need; tell them what would make you feel more connected and cared for. We can be the first to bravely voice what we really require, knowing that deep down it’s the same thing everyone really requires. We can be the courageous ones who open the door and offer permission to others. Ask for the best from your friends and intimates, and you will receive the best friends you deserve.

We will never end up anywhere profoundly satisfying by avoiding difficulty. We need to bring mindfulness to the challenges that relationships present and address them directly and with awareness. Each moment that we are willing to be uncomfortable in a relationship, to live in and through the messiness, is a drop of gold in the relationship itself. Investment in the hard stuff is ultimately what makes relationships worthwhile.

When people are dying, they almost never talk of work, entertainment, or other distractions. They talk about their relationships, about love. If we want to live well as human beings in a digital world, we need to recapture the exquisite and profound skill of listening, of remembering, and of real presence. In other words, we need to remember the most important thing and act from that place.

If we still want, and maybe even need, a world in which we experience life together, then we ourselves, individually, need to look away from our screens and enter the physical world we are in. If we want the world outside us to wake up, then we need to wake up to the world inside and outside ourselves. If we want the people around us to be available and present, then we need to show up and be available and present. It all begins and ends with the choices we make for ourselves.

Make it a practice to notice and experience each of the five senses, intimately and individually, every day.

According to research conducted at the Center for Cognitive & Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, the more face-to-face interactions we have, the less lonely we are, while the more online interactions we have (the sort that don’t lead to face-to-face contact), the more lonely we are.

The desire to capture life is motivated primarily by fear. We are afraid that if we stop trying to capture life, to pin it down and prepare it to be remembered — often before it has even happened — we will miss out on it or it will go away. We are afraid of the impermanence that is the very nature of life, the fact that every moment is born and then dies into the next, that nothing, not even our most memorable experiences, can be lived forever. In truth, we are always living with birth and death. Our minds, however, desperately want to create ground and permanence, to discover something that doesn’t come and go, something we can keep. The recording device is the mind’s tool for trying to create this permanence. The device gives us the false sense that we can solidify our moments and keep them from disappearing into the constantly flowing river that life is. How ironic that in an effort to hold onto our experience, prevent it from slipping through our fingers, we perform the ultimate sacrifice and disappear ourselves from the experience, stop living it directly.

An experience that I frequently hear young people describe is that of not being real or being alienated from their own life — as if they themselves are somehow virtual. Because their work and social lives happen virtually and so much of their self-identity is crafted online, many feel as if their lives are a simulation of real lives, as if they are unreal characters in an online game. The question I am often asked is “When is my real life going to happen?”

The next time something happens in your life, notice what it feels like to hold it alone for a little while — that is, to not tell anyone about it and keep it just for yourself. Focus on simply experiencing it, sensing any feelings, thoughts, or body sensations that the event creates. As you do this, try to refrain from preparing the story of what happened in your mind, packaging the tale that you will soon send out to the world.

many of us have grown afraid that if we don’t continually tell the world who we are, as everyone else is doing, we will become invisible and irrelevant. And if we stop the ongoing narrative about ourselves, stop being vigilant about our brand, we run the risk that who we are perceived as may not line up with how we want to be perceived. If this happens, our very sense of self is called into question.

Am I truly interested in what I am reading? If not, why am I spending my time doing this?

There used to be a developmental stage in life, usually sometime in our thirties, when we shifted our focus from the outside to the inside. That is, we stopped defining ourselves by what others thought of us and became more interested in what we thought of ourselves and the world. This stage could be called “growing up.” It seems that this stage of life is now disappearing for many of us. Now, the question Do I like myself? has been replaced by Am I liked?

Presence requires that we be embodied and connected to our senses and that our attention be in sync with where our bodies are at this moment in time. Thoughts are the primary seducers that pull our attention away from here, luring us out of the moment and separating us from where our bodies are actually living.

when we are identified with mind and believe the present moment to be whatever thought we are paying attention to, most of the time we then experience great suffering. While entertaining and interesting at times, the mind’s basic state is one of dissatisfaction and unrest; it is always looking to get to somewhere else.

Working as a therapist for many years, I can say the following with 100 percent certainty: people feel more connected to themselves and to their lives, more aware and present, when they make their bodies their homes. The senses usher us into the moment, and they deliver us here with an immediacy that is reliable and profound. Mindfulness is the practice of learning to pay attention to and reside in our embodied reality, directly experiencing our senses in each moment. Mindfulness is the practice of presence. No matter how virtual life becomes or we become, this real-life body and its experience in physical time and space are still the doorway to our deepest well-being.

Right now, slowly, move your attention through the different parts of your body: face, hands, shoulders, chest, belly, legs, feet, and whatever else beckons. Invite each area to relax and soften. Rather than observing or noting what you feel, actually feel the sensations directly, from the inside out. Sense any warmth or tingling that your inner presence evokes. And now feel your whole body, here, where you are seated. Sense “hereness” itself. Feel the vibration of just being. Stay with this physically felt sense of being for a minute or two. If you discover that you’ve drifted off and are lost in thought, no big deal — simply return your attention to one of your anchors: sound, breath, or body sensation. Simply come back into your body, into the senses, and into the feeling of presence itself. Enjoy being here.

In truth, we are like the ocean that takes the particular shape of a wave for a short time. But we forget our oceanness and believe ourselves to be just the wave. We are pure infinite presence before conditioning locks us into a small and separate person. We are free before we become captive to our story and mired in the responsibilities of defending our personhood. We are simply “I am” before we become “I am . . . everything else,” all of which changes and passes, like the ocean waves. The remarkable thing is that we can reclaim this freedom, this knowing, and surrender our story of “me” while we are still living. Liberation, relief, and joy bubble over when we realize we don’t have to be that person we keep describing and defending. As a result, we can finally just be in life, knowing that fundamentally we are not any of the hats we wear and that we are infinitely larger than any story we tell about who we are.

With the advent of the digital age, our attention is perpetually focused on something. We are playing a game, texting, researching, watching, or talking — always doing — our minds turned toward and engaged with something outside of ourselves. We treat our undirected attention the way a parent might treat a toddler on a long plane ride, frantically shoving activities and videos in front of their face until either the child passes out or the ride comes to an end.

Like a child, the mind needs recess periods in its day, when it can just run and play, jump from thing to thing and not have to narrow its attention onto any particular object or event. The mind needs to be able to flow freely from thought to thought or simply to rest in no thought with an open and diffuse focus. Downtime between tasks allows our minds to rest, and this lowers our stress levels.3 Gaps in the day give us time to just float about, space out, or take much-needed breaks from mental activity. They allow us to reboot our systems and come back to our tasks refreshed and attentive. When our attention is narrowly focused on something all the time, we become mentally exhausted, and though more time is spent focusing on tasks, we in fact become qualitatively less productive.4 What’s more, when we’re not playing a game or engaged in a Google search, we can hear our own thoughts and feelings, contemplate our experience, check in, and discover how we are doing in the middle of all this modern life. Having our attention constantly focused on technology disables our ability to focus on ourselves.

When we lose the ability to live in the gaps, we become slaves to the mind, terrified of any moment when the mind is not occupied. Gaps then become a kind of death, as if we cease to exist when they occur. On the other hand, when we can tolerate and even enjoy open, undirected space, when being with just ourselves is not something to be feared, a deep and lasting confidence arises.

On a practical level, we can begin to create downtime in small ways. For example, we can take five minutes every day to consciously resist the urge to give our minds something to chew on. When our minds tell us it’s time to play a game, email a friend, research a vacation, figure out a work problem, or write a to-do list, we can just say, “No, not now.” Although the mind will always search for something to attend to, we can practice being aware without having to direct our awareness at something. Try it in short stretches and notice what unfolds, whether you feel different. Or, similarly, take a walk without your phone or any other device and let your mind just wander. Set aside times for an approved “space out.” Give yourself the gift of the gap, the privilege that used to be built into life but no longer is. As a result, not only might you feel less mentally fatigued, you may also discover a sense of internal spaciousness, a wider and more panoramic view of life than you normally experience, one that is not frantic and does not depend on external material to enable you to escape an internal void. With enough practice, your own presence may become a place unto itself, and you may discover that it is in the spaces between your objects of attention that you feel most calm, whole, and, ultimately, well.

How utterly radical it is to live without intention, and how utterly freeing it is. But be prepared: the mind will scream in protest when you drop “What do I do?” as your life’s mantra. But my life will never be what I want and nothing will ever happen if I don’t do something to make it happen! No matter what your mind screams, though, take a chance, be courageous, give it a whirl, and see what you discover. If the experiment fails, you can always return to your intentions and agendas and the experts who will be there waiting to help you figure out what you need to do about your life. In truth, life actually happens when you stop doing something with it and to it. But to trust this fact, you have to discover it for yourself. When you live with here as your destination, life gets better and much easier. You can relax and become part of the natural unfolding of life, the process you think you are making happen. When you stop asking, “What do I do?” and start asking, “What’s here, now?” you discover that the presence you are after, the place of no effort, is right here, without your having to do anything at all. Trust that life, as its own force, doesn’t need you to force it forward.

If you pay attention to the way you feel after you’ve spent an entire day on technology, you’ll know without any doubt that it has affected you. I’ve heard the feeling described as edgy, agitated, sick, empty, amped up, depleted, anxious, deadened, unfocused, burned out, depressed, scattered, jumpy, and irritable, among other things, but, in general, people do not describe a positive feeling. Technology turns the world into a cruise-ship buffet of information, one that never closes, and we are bingeing on this banquet, making ourselves sick with nonstop ingestion of too much information. Even though I am someone who spends a lot of time trying to understand the mind and the side effects of our digital drugs, I too am peppered with thoughts throughout the day about what I could do, find out, or check right now on my computer. What changes when we have more awareness is not necessarily that the thoughts stop but that responding to them becomes a choice and not a compulsion. This is awareness at work.

Technology is building those ungrounded aspects of mind that disrupt our basic equanimity and peacefulness. Jacked up on information, images, games, communication, and all the other stuff technology provides, our minds have become impulsive and insatiable beasts demanding to be fed continuously.

Stop listening when your mind tells you what is happening in the moment, what it thinks about it, and what that says about who you are. Turn away from the commentary and sense what you are actually experiencing. When you hear the narrator return with another story about your present moment, which it will, turn away again. Say, No. Not interested. Leave me alone so I can be in my life for real. Keep breaking the narration habit until the habit is broken.

In truth, thoughts happen on their own. We are not in charge of what our thoughts are about. We are their recipients, the hearers of thoughts, the screens upon which they are projected, but we are not the generators of all those thoughts. We can make use of thoughts, but without needing them to be ours in some fundamental, identity-defining way. If you’re like most people, much of what your mind tells you is material you’ve already heard before, many times. So, too, many of the thoughts you receive are useless or unremarkable. Only a small percentage might actually be of interest to you. Most of what we hear in our heads is mere chatter that wouldn’t be missed if it weren’t heard.

Did you ever stop to notice that everything going on in your mind — every thought, feeling, sensation, everything you are aware of — is in fact happening only in your private internal world? Your thoughts appear only to you; they’re not being heard or witnessed by anyone else. As many Eastern wisdom traditions teach, there is one physical world here on earth, but billions of different internal worlds. We are all in our own separate theaters, witnessing different shows on our giant individual projection screens, and yet we behave as if we were all in the same audience watching the very same event we call life. Why is it important to contemplate this truth? Because it is liberating to realize that what we are personally living inside our heads is not real. We are aware of our thoughts, so in that sense they are “real,” and yet our thoughts do not exist outside of our awareness. There is nowhere else where the thought that is appearing to you at this moment is actually occurring. Our thoughts are not solid, like trees or rocks that exist outside of us in some tangible way. If at this moment you hear a thought about a friend — say, something specific that your friend did to you and what you want to say in response — and you don’t engage that thought, it will literally cease to exist. How freeing is it to know that if we don’t attend to a thought, answer it, change it, identify with it, and all the rest, it will subside? If we let a thought be nothing, then that’s what it will be.

Mindfulness asks us to come home into ourselves to inquire, What is happening here, at the center of this now? What’s it like if I let everything be exactly as it is?

The practice of mindfulness requires remembering to be mindful. So we take a moment to experience a full in-breath and out-breath before we log onto Facebook, or we listen closely to the sounds arising as we ride the bus. We feel each foot meet the ground as we walk the supermarket aisles or tune into our heartbeats while we work at our desks. We experience the sensations of chewing and the precise taste of our food. Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, we can take just a few moments to pause and notice what our life is actually made of. With a simple invitation and the use of our senses as both our vehicle and our anchor, we can usher ourselves into this present moment, and in so doing, into our lives, right here, at the center of “now.”

From “What’s Next?” to “What’s Here?” For a moment, imagine there is no next event, next task, next person, or next anything to get to. Remove all “nexts.” Invite yourself to stop preparing, planning, or getting ready for something else. Deliberately delete all the “what elses.” Meet “now” with “nowhere and nothing left to get to.” Ask yourself, What is here, now? Invite yourself to feel the center of now. Sense the freedom and aliveness in no future and no past, in just this.

The next time you have the thought that mindfulness doesn’t apply to you because of the way your life is, your mind is, your circumstances are, or who you are, notice that thought and pay attention to what it feels like in your body to have that thought. Allow the thought to be there, without judging it, and take note of what other thoughts accompany it, if any.

When we give ourselves permission to be with ourselves in the moments that don’t feel good — the moments that may even feel like hell — ironically, we experience a warmth and a wholeness. We come home to the truth and to ourselves. Even those moments that we think will kill us don’t in fact do us in. Rather, we discover that by awakening our own loving presence and our willingness to be with ourselves in the truth, the difficult moments actually make us stronger, more self-loving, and more able to be okay with life as it is. We discover that we can indeed be in anything.