Don't Let Your Phone Ruin Your Vacation
Plus, a special invitation from The Book of Delights author, Ross Gay
Friends,
First of all, congratulations to everyone who made it through our 30-day phone February breakup challenge based on the revised edition of How to Break Up With Your Phone. (And a special thank you to the paid subscribers who joined me in our private support group chat—it was a true delight.) I hope you found the experience useful.
I’m about to head out on a much needed vacation, but before doing so, I wanted to pass along a few things.
Get Creative with Ross Gay
If any of you are looking for an early spring creative pick-me-up, I just got word from my buddy
(author of The Book of Delights, amongst other great reads, and my guest on this podcast episode), that he has launched a new creative endeavor on Substack:
He and some of his creative friends are offering up writing exercises every day and, as the title suggests, Mondays are free. I personally cannot wait to check it out and encourage you to, too.
From their description:
These exercises are sometimes “poetry” exercises and sometimes “prose” exercises, but in fact, the older we get, the less invested we are in the particularities or rigidities of genre. In other words, all the exercises will hopefully be useful for whatever you might be working on. After all, beautiful writing is beautiful writing. And practice at beautiful writing is practice at beautiful writing.
This is a resource, a reservoir of exercises, a river of possibles. Use the exercises as you like, revise them, make them better, make them different, make them what you need or want them to be. Some writers like to follow an exercise to the letter, and some like to take the idea and make it their own. (Kinda like recipes.) And, please, share them—with your friends, your students, your co-workers, your writing group, your book club, your meditation squad, your pickleball team, whoever.
Are You Going on Vacation Yourself? Don’t Let Your Phone Ruin It.
As anyone who knows me personally can attest, I have been working too hard recently, and I’m burned out. I am very much looking forward to vacation, and I also very much do not want to let my phone ruin it! I’m following a lot of my own suggestions for how to do this, and I wanted to share them with you, too, in case you’re going on a spring break of your own.
I wrote up a bunch of them in this article for the New York Times (and I think I’ve managed to get a link that doesn’t have a paywall — apologies if I have failed!)
I also have a downloadable, printable “Vacation Survival Guide” PDF available on my site, if you want a workbook approach. (Paid subscribers get 25% off using the code in the footer of this email.)
Here are some of my general tips to get you started:
Identify what you want to use your phone for. To take photos? Navigate? Check in with the office? Knowing what you want to use your phone for makes it easier to catch yourself when you’re using your phone for something that’s not on your list. Once you identify what these things are, I highly recommend using an app blocker, such as the ones mentioned in this post, to turn your smartphone into a “dumb” phone — or, more precisely, into a tool rather than a temptation. (For example, I intend to only use my phone for photos, music, and maps.) Seriously, these app blockers are game-changing.
Don’t fall for your brain’s tricks. It is likely that your brain is going to concoct all sorts of “reasons” you have to check, or scroll, or post while you’re on vacation. That’s because checking our phones triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that encourages us to repeat behaviors that our brains have judged to be rewarding (it’s no coincidence that dopamine plays a major role in addictions). So whenever you feel yourself reaching for your phone because you “need” to do something, ask yourself whether it’s an actual need — or if it’s an excuse.
Every time you find yourself about to check your phone on vacation, ask yourself: What is the best thing that could be waiting for you? At the very least, checking your phone will distract you. And if you find bad news waiting for you, it can ruin your day.
Remember: when you “check in,” you check out. Mentally and physically, we can’t be two places at once. So every time you turn your attention to your phone, you are turning your attention away from everything else.
Phone Breakup Check In: Perfection Isn’t the Point
Lastly, a quick check-in moment for any of you who did the phone breakup challenge in February and feel like your new habits are slipping.
If your relationship with your phone still doesn’t feel perfect, don’t worry: it never will. That's not me being pessimistic; it's simply true. No relationship is ever perfect, and our phones have been deliberately designed to make healthy relationships extremely difficult to maintain. It’s inevitable that we’ll sometimes lose our way. And that’s okay. Instead of aiming for perfection, our goal is to train ourselves to notice when we begin to drift back to our old habits, and to use the tools and techniques we’ve worked on together to gently get ourselves back on track. Every time we do so, we're succeeding.
“It’s not like these changes have unlocked an extra twenty-four hours in the day for me, during which I’ve suddenly become the perfect mother, spouse, recreational athlete, and world-class writer. Rather, with fewer clickable distractions, I feel confident that I am doing the most with the time I do have.” —Vanessa
To scrolling less, living more, and enjoying the early signs of spring —
PS: If you missed the February Phone Breakup Challenge, don’t stress: you can do it yourself (or with friends) by following along with the plan in the book and I also created a printable workbook for it (paid subs also get 25% off).
PPS: Here’s a delight for you: my dog (on the left) meeting a new friend at the dog park. I love that NONE of their paws are on the ground.
I love how grounded and realistic this is. Especially the reminder that perfection isn’t the point—that struck a chord. I did the February phone breakup challenge solo, and I’ve definitely slipped back a bit. But reading this helped me feel less like I failed and more like I just need to “gently get back on track.” Appreciate the workbook rec too. Enjoy your vacation—hope it’s everything your nervous system needs.