Putting away the computer for the night
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For probably the last 10 years and many years ahead, at least American society has gone really fully digital. A mixture of high-speed internet, the smartphone, and social media has led to a society that can be online and consume information and content 24/7, and as we push forward, a thing I'm trying to really figure out is what the balance or healthy limits of consumption are and when I need to step away and put any of my devices down.
Something fairly personal about me related to this is that my brain seems to be buzzing for a good chunk of the day, and the one key point for that is when I try to go to bed. When I go to bed, I tend to struggle to stop the consistency of thoughts in my racing mind, and you likely can tie that to my computer usage. If I'm browsing social media, reading articles or news stories, or chatting with friends up to the point where I want to go to sleep, it intuitively makes sense that I don’t have a period of time to wind down before falling asleep. So the question that arises is "how do I fix my wind-down routine?"
Step one that I have been trying to do more and more starting in the middle of 2024 was a cutoff time for devices. On weeknights (Sunday through Thursday nights), I try to disconnect for the night 30-60 minutes before I get into bed. By the time it gets closer to bedtime, almost anything I do on my electronics can wait to the next day, so putting a fixed point nightly of putting things down I think has been a beneficial thing so far. That said, when I am driven to keep track of things and I don't want to pick up my phone to put something down in Todoist, Notion, my calendar, etc., I still want to find somewhere to write that down. To do such, I have a standard black Field Notes notebook that I use throughout the day as a catch-all notebook for when I want to note something of importance down. During the day I may write a task down in Todoist, but past my cutoff time, I go ahead and jot it down in the field notes and then go ahead and file it into Todoist that next morning.
As well alongside this, I try to do a mind dump during this period of wind down such that if there are things that are lingering in my mind at the end of the day, I can note it down such that I can process it to either be resolved then and there or remembered to be picked back up at a later date. That said, I have been sometimes in the habit of trying to fall asleep, think of something and then have to turn the lights back on to write it down. This process is definitely something that is still a work in progress due to making a reasonable change to my wind down schedule compared to the last 10 years. Changing my habits to tell my brain it is okay to start winding down is definitely not easy but I hope that it brings positive long-term benefits down the road as I continue working on this.