Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:10] Share with you my experience so far in this wonderful 21 day digital detox.
[00:00:18] On the first day, I actually took most of the day off and just turned the Internet off and was spending time with friends in nature. And then the next morning I woke up on day two and I woke up extremely fresh.
[00:00:34] And normally when I wake up I feel slightly tired or a little bit groggy, but my brain was just fully on. It was like everything was firing properly and I felt deeply rested.
[00:00:49] And because I'd been offline the day before, I looked around the house and I'd tidied everything up and everything was exactly where it should be. Everything was nice and organized.
[00:00:58] So I woke up feeling great. The house was great and I felt very inspired. Had some beautiful meditation and then I actually started creating this program randomly. I wasn't planning on doing it. I just thought, I feel so good, I want to do this 21 days. And one of the best ways to make sure I keep doing it is to actually record a training like this.
[00:01:23] And so everything was great. But then of course, I had to turn the Internet on at a certain point, I think around 8 o' clock to check messages and get back to my team and make sure everything's all right in my business.
[00:01:37] And I noticed picking up my phone, checking my email, that my email just has so much random stuff in there and actually more and more spam, like people are reaching out. Would you like a loan? Would you like, you know, us to do all this stuff? You want someone to edit your things?
[00:01:55] I'm not sure how people are finding us, but I'm sure they're using AI to find emails and then they send them to people. So I got a bunch of nonsense. I was just looking at my emails because normally I'm just kind of reacting to things, but because I'm seeing things differently by doing this digital detox, I thought, why are these emails showing up at all? And is there a way for me to stop it? So I unsubscribed from as many as I possibly could and filtered some of the other ones so the less stuff gets in the inbox.
[00:02:31] I haven't found a way of blocking the random people who find my email and email me directly. But I'm sure I'll figure that out. But it just made me realize how in some ways how oppressive it is to be tethered to this device and then have to go through this long list of random messages from people I don't want to hear from.
[00:02:57] Do you know? I mean, if you just think about it. Why do we have to do this at all?
[00:03:04] Right? Like, the truth is, I really hardly need to send anyone any messages because most of the things are taken care of by my team.
[00:03:14] There's a few personal things here and there that need looking at, but realistically, it's almost entirely junk.
[00:03:24] So I thought, okay, let me just chop that back.
[00:03:28] And then I started using AI, which I have a love hate relationship with, to be perfectly honest.
[00:03:33] I wanted to upgrade this app that I've created called feel your feelings. Feel your feelings app. You can get it, and it's a wonderful app to feel your feelings and also to let them go.
[00:03:48] I created it a few months ago when I was really just focused on, let me just feel my feelings. Let me just experience everything. Because one of the things that happens when we do a digital detox and we stop getting distracted and going into hypnotic fantasy states is that we feel our feelings.
[00:04:10] If you have ever been in any addiction groups, 12 step groups, or done the. The deep work, looking at what's really going on underneath, like, why do I do something? Why do we do these various, what could be called unhealthy behaviors? The reason most of the time is that we don't want to feel something.
[00:04:34] I was talking to some students yesterday in one of my programs about, all right, if you're going to stop doing these things, what are you going to do instead? And people were just sharing the kind of things that they're stopping, you know, like eating certain foods or watching certain shows.
[00:04:52] And we have to understand that the reason we do these behaviors, whether it's, you know, media, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, shopping, gambling, whatever it is, right? Any of these behaviors, they're trying to help us manage our feelings, right? So the reason I personally have become addicted to media is because when I don't feel good, I want to escape that. And the quickest way to do it is just to, oh, let me just check the news. Oh, let me just have a look at this thing.
[00:05:31] And it's been very interesting. As I do these programs and get offline, I noticed that when I stop using, doesn't stop me reflexively opening the tab, right? So, for example, yesterday, reflexively, I was just doing something and I was using AI and I felt slightly disturbed. And I immediately just opened up BBC.com, right? Just immediately and press the button and it's blocked, thank goodness, because everything's blocked.
[00:05:59] But it happens within a second. It happens so quickly, I don't even realize it's happening. I notice afterwards, so I'm feeling something and I immediately go and open this thing. Other people, they might pick up their phone, right?
[00:06:16] So all these different behaviors are there to help us feel our feelings. And when we stop doing the behavior, then we actually have to just deal with the feelings directly. And so I created this app, feel your feelings, to clarify, what are the feelings? What exactly am I actually feeling at all? Because we can't even tell necessarily what they are because there's so many different kinds of feelings. Is it happy? Is it joyful? Is it grief? Is it fear?
[00:06:46] You know, is it irritation? What is it? There's so many different emotions. So first thing is just to clarify, what am I feeling? And then there's various practices to just be with it, welcome it, and release it. And it's a, I think, a very important thing to be able to do, especially if we're not doing the thing that we used to do to avoid the feeling.
[00:07:07] So, anyway, I was using AI to deal with get that app working better, because it's still in process and I'm refining it and various other things I was working on. And I noticed that I started to feel quite disturbed because AI in my experience, is highly addictive in the sense that it's a dopamine loop, it's a ludic loop. So, so I, I know what I want the AI to produce for me, so I say, here's what I want. Change this, change that, change this, change that, this needs to change. I press the button and then I'm curious what's going to come back with, is it going to be good? Is it not going to be good? It's like a slot machine, you know, it's like gambling, because I don'.
[00:07:55] It's a variable reward schedule. I don't know what it's going to produce. It's exactly the same thing as Instagram or TikTok. The reason those things are so addictive is that we don't know what we're going to get. Is it going to be good thing? Is it going to be a bad thing? That's why the news is addictive. Is it going to be interesting news? Is it going to be boring news? Is it going to be unexpected things?
[00:08:20] Right. The variable reward schedule, that's what gambling companies use with their slot machines. You keep pulling the lever because you're not sure what you're going to get. Sometimes you might win a little bit, sometimes you might lose, sometimes you might nearly win.
[00:08:35] And so using AI, unfortunately, is also a variable reward schedule ludic loop situation. So Yesterday I was using it, and then as I'm waiting for it, I think, well, I might as well get this other thing done. So even though I said I wouldn't do more than one thing at a time, I ended up, I think, working on three things at the same time just to try and get them all finished.
[00:08:58] So it's kind of like playing three slot machines simultaneously and that they take a little while for the wheels to go around.
[00:09:08] Dear. And then after, I think about an hour and a half, I started to feel quite disturbed because it's.
[00:09:19] It's an unpleasant feeling and time can disappear very quickly using these different tools.
[00:09:27] So anyway, I did that and then I had a session which was great with my students, which I always love because I'm connecting with people live.
[00:09:34] And that was a very, very deep thing. What we're doing in that program is, is setting up a continuous round of doing the right things over and over again long enough when I was talking about how every day we're painting a picture of ourselves with our thoughts and behavior.
[00:09:57] So if I'm thinking negative thoughts and I'm doing things that are bad for me, I'm basically creating my fortune with my paintbrush.
[00:10:05] And I'm creating an image of myself that is quite negative. If I start changing that, then I start upgrading the image. And so we were talking about how important it is to keep doing the right things long enough for us to replace the previous image because we're painting over an existing painting.
[00:10:25] And that's why it takes time to change, because we have an existing painting that already has a certain shape and form.
[00:10:32] And it doesn't just go away. We have to paint over it again and again and again with like this translucent paint until the painting eventually becomes our higher self, our future self that we wanted to create.
[00:10:45] So that was great. And then I spent a lot of time going for a walk, talking to people and did a bit more work.
[00:10:54] I think I was out for quite a lot of the day, just going for nice, beautiful walks.
[00:11:00] Ah, yes. A lot of things take longer than I expect, but that's all good. And I did turn the Internet off at 7pm or even before 7pm and I had a nice early night and I woke up very, very fresh.
[00:11:20] And I feel like a totally different person.
[00:11:23] And the interesting thing I find when I go offline is that it's very subtle. It's hard to explain quite what's going on. But for example, I have in my back bathroom, right, there's various bathrooms, and one of them I Hardly ever use. And it has random things I just put in there for some reason.
[00:11:43] And normally I don't really notice it. But I went in there and I was thinking, why is this stuff just randomly sitting around here? What is it doing here? Normally I don't think that because I'm sort of caught up in something I'm thinking about or something I'm something I watched and so I don't notice things. Whereas when I go offline, I start to notice the physical world at a much higher level.
[00:12:11] And I went for a walk yesterday into one of these beautiful places here in Sedona. And you know, it makes such a difference because the thing is, when I am consuming media and media is very intense, right? Like, for example, a lot of movies, there's crazy drama happening and there's people jumping off bridges and jumping off buildings and blowing things up. And you know, I mean, there's. And if you go on Tick Tock or Instagram, it's intense, right? It's intense. It's short curated. Powerful media, powerful images.
[00:12:53] And what that does is it resets the dopamine so that the dopamine gets. We get a squirt of dopamine when we experience these new things or when we're anticipating new things.
[00:13:07] And then after that, if I've been consuming that kind of high dopamine, high intensity content, then I go outside.
[00:13:20] The physical world, relatively speaking, is quite boring. Like a tree. What is it doing? It's just sitting there, right? What is this guy? It's just a bunch of space, right?
[00:13:31] So relative to moving pictures, it's quite boring. But when I remove and get rid of the moving pictures, then I can go for a walk and I can see the trees. I'm like, oh, wow, look at this tree. The tree becomes a very interesting thing. The mountains become extremely interesting.
[00:13:49] The light becomes interesting, the shadows become interesting, right? People become far more interesting. Everything is more interesting because it's not in comparison to these crazy images.
[00:14:03] So I think honestly the main benefit of getting offline is actually just to appreciate everything else more.
[00:14:14] And everything else is actually much more real because it's actually the real world. I'm wondering, we're always. We're in the real world and these screens and these edited things are not really real. They're staged.
[00:14:28] You know, back in the day, people might have gone to, let's say a play occasionally, right, which would be fun or a performance or a musical performance of some kind. But it wasn't like all day long people didn't have like musicians in their house constantly. There wasn't a play happening constantly.
[00:14:48] So we've sort of in a situation now with media where it's kind of like being entertained by remarkable entertainers all day long. And then relative to that, the rest of the world is boring as hell.
[00:15:02] So I was just noticing how much I appreciate the.
[00:15:06] All the little things. I was playing the piano more, I appreciate people more, I can think more clearly.
[00:15:13] And instead of having random entertainment, I listen to one of these audio books, which is very interesting.
[00:15:22] It's actually useful to me rather than just numbing.
[00:15:28] Ah, I went to bed easily, woke up feeling fresh. I actually woke up really, really early this morning and on day three. And yeah, it's like, it's like another world. It really is. But at the same time I'm also aware and I'm very curious about this because I've done this many, many times.
[00:15:47] There's going to come a certain point, I don't know whether it's going to be like in a few days or a week. I don't know. It's slightly unpredictable where the media addict in me or the habit is going to say, where's my stuff?
[00:16:06] Right. There's a certain point where, where the part of me that likes that and is used to numbing or, you know, getting its hit from randomly watching the news or getting distracted in some movie or whatever it is, that part of me hasn't just disappeared, it's just sitting around in the back in the background waiting for the ideal situation to arise.
[00:16:32] And right now I'm not aware of that. I'm not thinking about that and it doesn't bother me. But I know from past experience it's laying in wait for me to put my guard down and then it'll be like, yay, the news, yay. And it, it wants it.
[00:16:52] And then the whole ludic loop starts to kick in again.
[00:16:59] And also I'm slightly concerned that if I don't pay attention to it, I'll work too much to make up for it. Right.
[00:17:07] So one of the key things I've noticed is I have to find other things to do to replace those moments where I normally would just check this one thing real quick, check this thing to find a much healthier way of living. Because most things have sort of been swallowed up by technology and media in the modern world. Almost everything is just gets pulled into that.
[00:17:38] So when we give it all up, then there's this massive void that needs to be filled with different things.
[00:17:48] And so the more clear I am about what those things are, the easier it is and the more fun it is. So, overall, day two has been a huge success. I feel great. I feel absolutely wonderful. Today is actually morning of day three. I'm going to be doing these like the next day just to get the full experience.
[00:18:06] All is well. The sun is about to come up, it's 6:45am Had a wonderful meditation and I'm excited about getting on with things in my day. Hopefully this has been useful and interesting and I hope you have some inspiration to do something like this yourself, because like I say to many people, you really can't quite experience this until you do it for yourself.
[00:18:35] Doesn't matter how much we describe what it's like to eat a mango or to be in some beautiful place in the mountains looking over a lake or go skiing.
[00:18:45] Until you do it yourself, you just don't know. So if you're encouraged and inspired, it's well worth it. Even if you just do one or two days, it's a huge success.
[00:18:58] Yay. Lots of love and blessings.
