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

by Nancy Colier

How do we stay in touch with what is most important to us when we’re buried under hundreds of emails and texts and technological tasks each day? How do we stay in the present moment in a society that beckons us with relentless — and enticing — distractions?

And, most importantly, how do we stay grounded and connected to our deeper wisdom at this time in history, on this wild digital ride that the human race has embarked upon? How do we live peacefully with the excitement and madness and do it all without going mad ourselves?

At a deeper level, the stuff and noise that our devices offer do not satisfy. For all of technology’s benefits, it is not our missing piece, not what will make our existences meaningful. We need to ground the monkey — that is, bring our monkey mind back into connection with our heart, our deepest truths, and what is truly important to us. 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 Waking Up Humans and technology are now in an intimate relationship — sharing a bed, literally.

It is alarming to see us choosing to use technology in ways that indulge a proclivity for unconsciousness. But what is even more alarming is that we have shifted our relationship with technology so that it is no longer just a tool that we control, something we set aside when it doesn’t help. We have crossed a threshold and are now surrendering our authority and experience to technology as if it were the master and we its slaves. Because technology can do something, we think it should — must do it, in fact — without considering whether we actually want it to or whether it even makes sense.

This book is about raising consciousness at a time when our society is undergoing an epidemic of unconsciousness. It’s about finding ground in a world that is increasingly untethered and ephemeral. It’s about nurturing depth even as shallowness threatens to become the norm. This book is a call to reclaim the right to be masters of our lives at a time in history when we are giving that power away.

By examining the ways we are turning technology into an active and personified entity with its own sovereignty, I mean to help us recapture our fundamental intelligence and independence. In the process of looking into and experiencing our drives for distraction, passivity, unconsciousness, and immediate gratification, however, we may have to ride through some uncomfortable feelings. The path to freedom includes being able to investigate painful truths about ourselves and the willingness to uncover our primitive and even unappealing aspects, all of which require a fierceness and courage from you, my reader.

“The smartphone is the Trojan horse through which work sneaks into the home.”

We can’t not be available now that technology has gifted us with the possibility of being available. To be unavailable when we could be available would be, as one mother put it, neglectful. The idea of our child receiving a voicemail and not our direct and immediate attention has become synonymous with abandonment.

Before mobile devices made around-the-clock communication possible and expected, it was generally only in the case of life or death, when a relative or other person close to us was sick, that we made ourselves unceasingly available, staying close to the phone at all times, just in case it might bring news. It was in the face of a potential emergency that we felt it necessary to live in a state of hyperreadiness, to be on call without a break. What’s different now is that we are living in this state of hyperreadiness around the clock. In fact, we are not only living this way, we believe that we must live this way.

stress. Most of us know the anxiety we experience when someone we love is ill and we are on alert, constantly waiting. We now live that stress, to some degree, all the time, and it is as damaging as a situational, short-term state of acute stress. Actually, in some ways it is worse, because the demand for hyperavailability never eases and the situation that requires such availability is never resolved. We never get that phone call that allows us to finally stop listening for it. As one woman I know put it, “It’s like never quite being finished with the job, whatever that job may be.” Our new resting state is one that doesn’t allow for real rest; a part of us must remain always at the ready, as if about to leap out of the starting gate. Although we may have gotten used to it, and thus not notice it as abnormal or even uncomfortable, we are living in what is really an ongoing fight or flight state.

Being fully off duty allows us to reboot our own systems, both body and mind. We need this kind of rest to reestablish well-being and, indeed, to be truly available during those times when we claim to be available.

we need to bring awareness to the new demands on our availability, recognize the effects that hyperreadiness has on us, and invoke the courage to decide for ourselves how available we actually want to be, when, and to whom.

When we decide for ourselves how we want to conduct our lives on the basis of what is actually important to us, we discover that we can be in our lives instead of just barely keeping up with the life that technology offers.

We may not be falling down drunk at noon or chasing a bag of crack down a dark alley, but we are addicts nonetheless — and technology may prove to be a more dangerous drug than any we’ve previously known. We need to take an active role with our technology use and not become a society of addicts raising addicts. It is important to be able to control our use of technology, to be able to use the cell phone when we want to call a friend but not to have to check the phone while we’re in the shower to avoid missing a text. At the most basic level, addiction just plain feels bad. It stunts us socially, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Addiction leads to unhappiness when the substance starts failing to provide the relief it once did — which eventually it always does.

Our escape strategies generally tend to fall outside the norms of acceptable societal behavior and thus incite some awareness that what we are doing is abnormal, not good for us, and in need of our attention.

To break free from our addictive use of technology, we must first realize and acknowledge to ourselves that we are using it as a means to escape the present moment and using it without awareness.

render us unconscious. So what can we do to recover? How can we become free and in control of our relationship with technology? How can we make conscious choices about how we use it and include it in our lives? First, we need to be willing to acknowledge that something is not working in our relationship with technology. Then we need to notice and personally take responsibility for our use of technology. 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

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,

So freedom from our tech addiction happens in four simple steps: 1. Being willing to investigate our human (not just our computer) drives. Ask yourself: Am I willing? 2. Noticing that we’re behaving in a way that we don’t like or that doesn’t make us feel good. Ask yourself: Am I willing to honestly look at my behavior? 3. Making the choice to do something different, to change our behavior. Ask yourself: Am I willing to change my behavior? 4. Practicing the new behavior until it becomes habit — and then continuing to practice! Ask yourself: Am I willing to practice a new way of behaving, which may be uncomfortable, until it becomes habit?

The drive to check out, to be anywhere but here, is not new to the digital age, and certainly not something Wikipedia created. What is new, however, is that the availability of information that technology makes possible now offers us a way to achieve our more primitive proclivities with less difficulty and judgment. Gathering information, regardless of its purpose, is now considered a useful and impressive pursuit.

rich but life poor. If you watch political talk shows these days, the dialogue, if you can call it that, usually involves two people with different sets of facts shouting at each other and not really listening to the point of view the other person is presenting. We share facts, but we have stopped dialoguing. Before information became a commodity on the Internet, its primary purpose was to be an agent of change. We heard a piece of information that did not fit into our already constructed model of the world, and as a result, we adjusted and transformed our model — and we changed along with it. Information had the power to change who we

The opportunities to come across information we don’t agree with are now diminished. We can easily expose ourselves only to the information that supports our views, stated as facts right there on the Internet. We show up at the table armed with our already decided upon personal truths, and when the information coming at us doesn’t fit what we already know, we stop listening and discard it. The more information we have, the more “right” we are — and the less related. When information becomes an equal opportunity weapon, there is no open room to build consensus and no possibility for something new to emerge.

If we are interested in truly educating ourselves and growing internally, not just swelling up with more facts, the skill that’s required is a different kind of listening. When we use information to create an emotional barricade or to cement a position and identity, we are listening defensively, with the purpose of protecting ourselves from anything that is not like us.

have to investigate what we know we know. To break free from the information syndrome, we need to change how we view the exchange of information: to realize it is a dialogue with the potential for growth and not a battleground with the potential for annihilation.

We break free from the information syndrome when we allow ourselves to: • Gather information as if curiosity itself were doing the gathering • Share information as if we were a mouth floating in space • Listen to feedback as if we were ears floating in space

In truth, we do not need to treat information as if it were a weapon. We have done that to information, turned it into that, by using it to define ourselves defensively. But information itself is neutral. We can reestablish a friendly and respectful relationship with information now — appropriately in this Information Age — so that we can enjoy it, grow from it, and exchange it peacefully, as we would any other resource,

We can investigate, with curiosity, the experience that boredom is, without having to turn it into something dangerous. So, finally, ask yourself: Is the experience of investigating boredom boring? By taking this approach, we can stop squandering the most fertile ground we possess, stop wasting the incredible energy that is our own attention, stop collapsing into the habits of avoidance with which technology so powerfully tempts us, and stop believing the thoughts that tell us unfilled time is nothing, nowhere, and of no inherent value. A

We are choosing to surrender the tasks of living to technology, but instead of becoming higher functioning creatures, we are becoming, to some degree, more helpless. There is evidence to suggest that we now make more mistakes in our tasks because we assume the computer will do it for us — until it doesn’t.