Ban Your Phone from Your Bedroom

Let's try this NO-PHONE-IN-BED challenge for one week! March 8 to March 15, 2021. Don't use your phone in bed at all for this week. You may use it as an alarm clock, but I recommend putting that across the bedroom so you are not tempted to break your challenge.

Let me know you are doing this challenge, by tagging @smartveghead on social media.

Link to the cervical pillow I use. Related to sleeping for better alignment and posture, here is the cervical pillow I use, which basically has bumpers for when you're on your back, curves for your arm, and hills for when you're on your side!! It's incredible and helped me not sleep in pain anymore.

Transcript:

Sorry, what were you saying? Hi everyone, welcome to learning and unlearning. Just joking! This episode is about my phone, so I was pretending to scroll. If you were listening and you weren't watching on YouTube, that's what I was doing.

Thank you for returning to the show after my vacation. It was really important for me to take a break and use my regular full-time job vacation to really rest and stop doing the podcast as well and I'm really glad I did. It took the pressure off me for a couple Fridays and now I am back.

So I don't know if you've heard of Jay Shetty. He's an author and I think he has a podcast. His book is called Think Like a Monk and he is a former monk and now he's more like a life-purpose coach. I heard him interviewed by Ashley Graham and he was really cool and I liked what he said about cell phones. So what it was Is something like, you would never let someone into your bedroom right when you woke up, and so why are you turning on your phone and looking through social media or doing something on your phone right when you wake up? It's kind of like someone is interrupting that private time. You wouldn't say, “Hey, come on in!” when when some stranger is going to come in your bedroom and you're in your bed or in your pajamas. So, why do you let your feed be the first thing you see? If somebody had knocked on your door, you probably wouldn't have invited them in, right? You would get dressed and you wouldn't want to feel embarrassed, so you would get ready to see your acquaintances. We don't all go out of the house looking the way we look when we wake up from bed.

You know what else? Scrolling through your phone in the morning does, or at any time of day, it sort of sets your mood. Whatever you do in the beginning of the day can make your brain think a certain way. You know when people say “you got up at the on the wrong side of the bed?” So if you get up on the wrong side of the bed, per say, through looking at your social media feed, and you have a negative emotion, it's going to set you off for the rest of the day.

Perhaps it's highly likely that you won't even realize that that's what happened, and then your mood will be affected for the rest of the day. And not until something negative happens, like if you become impatient with someone and you catch yourself, if you're self aware; not ‘til then will you realize what mood you're in or what might have set you off. Sometimes we're in a bad mood and we don't even know why. So think about how your phone might influence that mood in the beginning of the day.

Social media is meant to be a great thing. It connects people. It helps you see beautiful visual art or dream about traveling. I mean, that's kind of the things that I look at our art and travel, but, nevertheless, whatever you're looking at, there can still be issues that come up. You might feel comparison. You might feel guilty. You might see someone's post and think that they are doing better than you, or you might say, I wish I looked like that. Whatever you think, in a split second can really set you off for the day.

05:00

I think we've all heard what social media can do to our brains. When you get likes or you get comments on your pictures, dopamine is released in your brain.

Social media can be really distracting too. It can be a time sucker, a time robber, where you end up scrolling and you don't realize how much time has gone by. I don't know anyone who has a limit on their phone where it lets them know how long they’ve been on an app. I think there's a special app for that.

We've all heard about how looking at other people and their edited pictures can make us feel like we are less than, even though a lot of the people who you're looking at don't look like that either. It sets unrealistic expectations about what we should look like. No one should look like anything except the way they look when they're healthy.

If you look at social media before bed, we know that the blue light that comes from your phones can keep you awake longer or what you saw might have been disturbing or just made you think about something really important. Right before bed, that's very distracting and it can put off sleep.

One really interesting part about social media that is not good, but something that I would have never thought of, is that it can make you spend money. First of all there are sponsored ads trying to get you to buy things. Then there are influencers who are also sponsored and they create their own ads and tell you how much they love things or how much they are obsessed with a totally basic Amazon dress. I know that there are things people have bought on TikTok that are actually amazing. So you know, good for you if you get a great Tiktok find, but otherwise you might be spending money that you don't normally spend, or that you wouldn't go shopping when you go on social media, you're actually shopping without the intention to shop.

You really just want to look or be inspired, or connect, or even even disconnect from reality, but you don't intend to go shopping usually.

On a personal note. I want to tell you that I do use my phone as an alarm clock and I look at my phone before bed. Before bed, I go on Instagram and I look at the pretty things that I like to look at and that's sort of a nice way to decompress. When I wake up, if I wake up on the weekend and I don't have anywhere to be, I will lay in bed and I'll be scrolling. When I'm going to work, I don't scroll on my phone. I don't have time for that.

Starting Monday, March 8th, for one whole week I am going to not look at my phone before bed and when I wake up. So like I said, it will be very different for me to do something else before bed.

I'm inviting you to join me on this. No phone in Bed Week, March 8th. As soon as you wake up, you're not doing it anymore. And then March 15th, it's over.

Would you like to join me? Let me know. And what will be important here is to pay attention to how you feel or how you sleep.

So plan it out in advance. Think about how you're going to conduct yourself. So before bed, what am I going to do? I'm going to set my alarms. I will plug my phone in across the room so I have to get out of bed to turn it off. I'm not going to succumb to plugging it in next to my bed, reaching for it from bed, turning the alarm off and then seeing the notifications that I got overnight. That would be sort of a temptation for me to start scrolling if I'm still laying there, and that's not allowed, so that's why I'm going to put my phone across the room in a different outlet.

11:00

At night, I am going to read. Reading a book is more of a destressor. It will relax my mind, will let me escape into a story, and then I will be thinking about the book when I go to bed, and my eyes will not have just been exposed to blue lights. When I journal, I will think about my sleep, my mood, and just what it feels like in general to do this No Phone in Bed Week, March 8th to March 15th.

What do you think? Are you in?

Alright well thanks for tuning in. I hope you do this challenge with me, or at least think about decreasing your phone use, for your own mental health. Much love, Sam.