Thought-Provoking Reads from a Device-Free Summer (Day 2): The Power of Off

This week I'm taking some of the books I've read this summer while researching productivity, children and the internet/devices/video games, and how devices and the internet change our brains and am giving y'all some highlighted quotes for those interested.

I know that most people don't want to read a stack of books about the same topic, but I'm a nerd and a researcher at heart, so I love this stuff. ;) Hopefully by pulling some of the quotes from all these different books, it will give you some food for thought and also help you decide if you want to pick up the book to read. 

Yesterday I tackled The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Today, I'm going to cover a different book with a similar topic, but this one is more about how to protect your mental health in the connected world we live in. So yesterday's book was more philosophical, The Power of Off is focused more on psychology and self-care.

From the back cover:

Effective mindfulness practices for transforming your relationship with technology and reconnecting with your real life
 
Our reliance on technology is rapidly changing how each of us experiences life. We’re facing new issues and difficulties, we’re encountering new emotional triggers, and we’re relating to each other in new ways. As Dr. Nancy Colier writes, “How we spend our time, what motivates us, and what we want are all are on a radical course of transformation.” The promise of technology is that it will make our lives easier; yet to realize that promise, we cannot be passive users—we must bring awareness and mindfulness to our relationships with our devices.
 
“The compulsion to constantly check our devices plays on primal instincts,” teaches Colier. “Even people with strong spiritual practices or those who have never had other addiction issues now find themselves caught in the subtle trap of these miraculous tools we’ve created.” Through The Power of Off, she offers us a path for making use of the virtual world while still feeling good, having healthy relationships, and staying connected with what is genuinely meaningful in life. You’ll explore:  

• How and why today’s devices push our buttons so effectively, and what you can do to take back control of your life

• Tips for navigating the increasingly complex ways in which technology is affecting our relationships—with ourselves, others, and our devices themselves

• Self-evaluation tools for bringing greater awareness to your use of technology

• Mindfulness practices for helping you interact with your devices in more conscious ways

• A 30-day digital detox program to kick-start a new healthier relationship with technology 

With The Power of Off, Colier sounds the call for wakefulness, reminding us that we can use technology in a way that promotes, rather than detracts from, our well-being. This book provides an essential resource for anyone wanting to create a more empowered relationship with technology in the digital age.

Quotes that stood out to me in The Power of Off:

On why the internet and social media are so seductive. We think...

"If other people know about our lives, our lives will feel more real...If the world knows who we are, we will know who we are....With enough virtual destinations to choose from, we will find somewhere that we want to be."

---

Like most of you know, I did a device-free summer with kidlet and was very nervous and intimidated when we started it, but it ended up being a great decision and easier than I thought. Her experience below with her daughter was similar to mine in that my kidlet handled it much better than I anticipated. I actually didn't have to say no except once because when I told him it was for the whole summer, he accepted that as fact, so he hasn't asked because he knows no devices or video games this summer, period.

"Getting kids off technology is not for the faint of heart, not once they’ve tasted the relief and glee that a princess video on YouTube can provide. Getting off technology is, in fact, hard for the whole family. In the end, for me, it’s a matter of using my resilience and my ability to stay present and connected with my love for my daughter, my deeper wisdom, and my clear intention to teach my child to enjoy herself without external entertainment. I want her to know her own internal resources and to trust the imagination and intelligence she contains. Thankfully, the more I say no, the more she returns to playing on her own, engaging herself, and being happy and proud about it."

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On FOMO, the fear of missing out. I had to deal with this some in June/July when I did a 3-week social media fast to get my book finished, but that anxiety about missing out faded in a few days. After the fast, I've been reluctant to return to the previous state, so now I'm still limiting my social media just because it feels better. I feel calmer.

"Indeed, many of us have grown afraid that if we don’t continually tell the world who we are, as everyone else is doing, we will become invisible and irrelevant."

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She also made me think more about what I post when I do post. This is no judgment from me about what anyone decides to post, but it has now given me personal pause to think more deliberately about what I'm posting.

"A Facebook post by an intelligent friend, a fifty-year-old woman, read: 'Up for an early bike ride, now followed up by some fresh fruit and an acai juice.' Why do we now use our time to report such things? Why is it important that the public know our morning juice ritual? Do we not reap the same health benefits and take the same pride in that bike ride if others don’t know about it?"

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These made me think because it's like that tree in the woods thing--if a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it, did it really happen? That's how social media feels sometimes. It didn't happen unless we post about it. (And I know the irony of me commenting on this as I blog about something I'm doing in my life, lol.) But it comes to my mind a lot at concerts when everyone has their phones up recording the performance and watching the tiny screen instead of, you know, actually experiencing the live performance you paid all that money for in order to get a low quality video that won't be as good as one you can look up on YouTube. 

"What has happened to the power of internal experience, the private knowing of what we do in our lives? It appears that internal validation is disappearing and we increasingly need an external response for each moment we live."

"The rise of technology in our lives has been accompanied not only by the drive to turn ourselves into a brand but also by an undeniable explosion in our need to be witnessed."

"And often what accompanies this swelling desire is the belief that everything we live, from every thought to every splinter, is of monumental significance and fascination to others."

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And a good question to ask if you feel you're more attached or dependent on social media than you would like:

"Ask yourself: What role (if any) does technology play in making me feel seen, known, or valued? Why is it important to me that others know about this? ...If they know, does it change the experience...? What changes or relaxes as a result of my making this experience known to the world?"

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On how our sense of self matures (or doesn't.) This definitely gave me pause since I'm in my thirties now.

"There used to be a developmental stage in life, usually sometime in our thirties, when we shifted our focus from the outside to the inside. That is, we stopped defining ourselves by what others thought of us and became more interested in what we thought of ourselves and the world. This stage could be called “growing up.” It seems that this stage of life is now disappearing for many of us. Now, the question Do I like myself? has been replaced by Am I liked?"

So if you're looking for a read that will make a case for stepping away from social media sometimes and give your brain a break in the name of self-care, this is a good one to pick up. 

Research Reads from a Device-Free Summer: The End of Absence

If you've been following me this summer, you know that we embarked on a device-free or screen-free summer for kidlet. (Device-free is more accurate because we allowed watching TV and movies as a family but screen-free summer had alliteration, lol.) Here are the previous posts:

• A Screen-Free Summer for Kidlet: How, Why, & If I'll Lose my Mind
• The 10-Day Update
• The 5-Week Update

The experiment has gone so much better than I expected. I anticipated much more push back and problems. I expected it to be HARD. In truth, week one was hard. The rest has been...surprisingly easy. We've developed new routines and habits. Kidlet knows he's going to get his devices back in very limited quantities (20 min max a day) once summer is over, but he hasn't complained or asked for devices. The pull they had on him before (what inspired this screen-free summer idea in the first place) has disappeared. So I'm thrilled that we decided to take the leap and go cold turkey all summer (as scary as it seemed at the time.)

In addition to helping him, this whole experiment has opened my eyes a lot and helped me as well. I've wrangled a lot of my device time and social media time and have developed an aversion to things that are stealing my focus. Part of that is because I'm the type of person who wants to know ALL the things about a topic when I'm interested in it, so I have read A LOT of books about smartphones, social media, internet addiction, the changes technology has caused in how we interact, how our brains function, and how we live our lives.

I'm not sure I'm capable of summarizing the wealth of information I've read this summer, but I thought, for those interested, I could post the books I've read and share some of the quotes I highlighted while reading. So, that's what I plan to do this week. Each day, I'll post one of the books I read and the quotes I found most interesting or helpful.

Now, a disclaimer, I'm posting all of this without judgment. If you're into your devices and social media and don't feel the need to disconnect sometimes or back off of it, that's totally cool. I'm sharing this because I didn't like how things were trending with my lack of focus and my free time and family time being eaten up by my phone. So if it's not interfering with you or your family, then feel free to skip these posts. But otherwise, I think there's good food for thought in these books even if you aren't looking to make changes right now.

First up is The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris.

This one mainly focused on our ability to be in the quiet, to be bored, to be alone. I thought he had a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say about how the internet, smartphones, and social media have changed us.

Here are the quotes that stood out to me:

"Evolution (nature) endowed us with minds capable of fast and furious transformation, minds able to adapt to strange new environments (nurture) within a single lifetime—even within a few weeks. Therefore, we’re always products of both inherited hardware and recently downloaded software... The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains, immersed in a dozen hours of screen time a day, may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, often quiet, material world."

"we now need to proactively engineer moments of absence for them. We cannot afford to count on accidental absence any more than we can count on accidental veggies at dinner. Without such engineered absences (a weekend without texting, a night without screens), our children suffer as surely as do kids with endless access to fast food. The result is a digital native population that’s less well rounded than we know they could be."

This is part of what spurred me to do the device-free summer. I have an amazing kiddo. I knew he was capable of more than running to his Xbox or Ipad every free moment of the day.

"It’s becoming more and more obvious. I live on the edge of a Matrix-style sleep, as do we all. On one side: a bright future where we are always connected to our friends and lovers, never without an aid for reminiscence or a reminder of our social connections. On the other side: the twilight of our pre-Internet youths. And wasn’t there something . . . ? Some quality . . . ?"

This one above really made me think because I think sometimes what we chalk up to "nostalgia" may be more than that. There was a quality to my childhood and those pre-internet years that's missing. I've learned this summer that it's not something that can't be reclaimed. Doing things like playing old school board games with kidlet or teaching him how to cook or watching him make up his own games has recaptured some of what I didn't even realize was missing.

"Children do need moments of solitude as well as moments of healthy interaction. (How else would they learn that the mind makes its own happiness?) But too often these moments of solitude are only stumbled upon by children, whereas socialization is constantly arranged."

I loved that line about how would they learn their minds make their own happiness. 

"Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent."

Things I'd never thought about, but so true. Everyone has their heads down looking at their phones now.

"Solitude may cause discomfort, but that discomfort is often a healthy and inspiring sort. It’s only in moments of absence that a daydreaming person...can receive truly unexpected notions."

Sound familiar, writers?

"What will become of all those surreptitious gifts when our blank spaces are filled in with duties to 'social networks' and the relentless demands of our tech addictions?"

"I fear we are the last of the daydreamers. I fear our children will lose lack, lose absence, and never comprehend its quiet, immeasurable value."

God, I hope this is not the case. As a writer who makes her living in the world of imagination and daydreaming, I hope a new crop of writers, artists, creators is behind me. 

"Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose."

This quote will stick with me. It's going to make me stop and think--when I look at this device, social network, whatever, what am I looking away from? I'm not a Luddite who is going to totally disconnect from the online world, but I'm becoming a lot more deliberate and choosy about how and where I'm spending my time and energy.

Needless to say, I found this book an engrossing read. I have more to share from other books the rest of this week, but I think this one did an excellent job of making the case for creating time in your life and your children's lives for solitude, quiet, absence, boredom, and blank spaces for your brain to daydream in.

Dream on, y'all. ;) 

The August Read & Watch Challenge: Let's Get EPIC

So confession: I completely missed July's Read and Watch Challenge. Being up against a book deadline and getting ready for the RWA conference pretty much buried me. I shut down all social media and had to buckle down to get the book done. I also was reading all non-fiction since I was so focused on keeping my head in my story and didn't want to add more fiction in there. So I apologize for missing the month! But I'm back now and ready to tackle August's Read & Watch theme: EPIC

The basic premise of the challenge is that each month, you read a book and watch a TV show/movie that play to the theme. If you want more details on the Read & Watch challenge, you can still join in. Just click here to see the other themes. And even if you're not doing the challenge, stick around for some book and tv recs. : )

Okay, so "epic" can mean a lot of different things to different people. For me, when I think of epic, I think of stories that span a large amount of time or a lot of characters. When I read a story that is epic, it stays with me for a longer time than a typical book. I feel like I've lived with the characters and they are now permanent residents in my memory. Epic books stick longer. And typically, they are literally longer--page-count wise. Or, they are part of a long-running series that follows the same characters. Harry Potter, for example.

I also find that epic books are a double-edged sword because on one hand, they are the books that stick with me and often become lifelong favorites BUT they are also intimidating as hell because they're often SO big, which means I'm reluctant to pick them up in the first place. Anyone with an out of control TBR pile knows that feeling--I could read this giant book OR I could read three shorter ones. But that's why I wanted to choose this as a theme. I almost never regret having picked up one of the long books, so I need to make myself get over that intimidation factor.

So, what would I recommend if you're looking for something epic?

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

I know many of you have probably read this already or have watched the TV show, but this is always the one that first comes to mind when I think of epic. The book is long and has a lot of history woven in, which is fascinating in its own right, but at it's core, the love story between Jamie and Claire is what has stayed with me. Even with my faulty memory these days, this story hasn't left my brain.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

King is really the, well, king of the long ass book. I could recommend a few different ones of his for this theme. And I will have another below that I'm picking as a reread for me. But I'm choosing this one because if you're not into horror, you don't have to be scared of this one. The premise is that a guy in present day finds a wormhole back to a few years before the Kennedy assassination. He tries to stop it from happening. Along the way, he meets a woman and there is a romance thread as well--which was a nice surprise. This is also now a TV show, which I haven't watched yet, but I loved the book. It was fascinating and character driven and just so well done.

The Original Sinners series by Tiffany Reisz

If you want your epic in sexy form, grab these. I know I've talked about these books here before, but they are a fantastic example of an erotic series that is about so much more than sex. You will follow the characters through so many stages of their lives and they will feel real to you--like they are living their lives in some place you just haven't visited yet. Highly recommend.

The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare

Another TV show (Shadowhunters). But I read the books years ago and they've stayed with me. This is YA urban fantasy/paranormal so a little outside of what I typically recommend here, but I raced through this series and loved it. Love triangles and hot warriors and kickass ladies. I'm so there for it.

The Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead

Oh, how I devoured these books. Another YA paranormal (I was going through a phase, with the rest of the world) but these are SO good. Don't let the vampire theme scare you. It's very well done and unique. And the love story in this one does feel epic to me. I love me some Dmitry. And just writing this makes me want to reread them because I haven't read them in years. Damn. *adds back to TBR pile*

What I'll Be Reading

It by Stephen King

I read this in high school and it has always stayed with me (in my mind and on my shelf.) It's one of my favorite horror books of all time. But with the new movie coming out, I really want to reread it with adult eyes. So my goal is to take that doorstop down from the shelf and start it again.

What I'll Be Watching

Gilmore Girls

This is an ongoing project. I'm only in season 2 because I don't get a lot of alone TV time, but I've loved the journey so far.

11/22/63

Hubs and I both read the book, so I've been wanting to watch the Hulu series to see how it compares.

So those are my picks, what would be your picks for EPIC? What will you be reading and watching this month?

OFF THE CLOCK Won a RITA for Best Erotic Romance of the Year!

I know it's been a little while since I've blogged, but I've just returned from a week in Florida at the Romance Writers of America conference. I had the best time and...I won a RITA! I'm thrilled and flattered and all the happy words to announce that OFF THE CLOCK won for Best Erotic Romance of the Year! 

Me, RITA, and my writer buddies Genivieve Lynne and Dawn Alexander.

This year I managed not to ugly cry on stage...but just barely. You can watch all of the awards on the replay video (my award is at the one hour and 22 minute mark if you're interested. But I look WAY more calm than I felt, lol.) Also, you may have to fast forward a little to get the video started.

And if you'd like to see ALL the winners in all the categories, check out the list here and go add to your TBR pile! : )

Thanks to RWA and the judges and congrats to all the winners!

Morning Rituals: Breaking the Smartphone First Habit

As I mentioned in the last blog post, I took a 3-week social media break while I was finishing writing book two in The Ones Who Got Away series. I didn't post except a little on my personal FB, and I didn't scroll through my feeds on FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Part of that was inspired by kidlet and his screen-free summer, the other part was just practical. I needed to minimize as many distractions as possible so I could focus for long hours and stay immersed in my story.

So, one of the habits this fast disrupted was my habit of getting on my phone and scrolling through my feeds, mentions, and messages first thing in the morning. I've read enough habit books to know that a good strategy in breaking a bad habit is to replace the unwanted behavior with a positive behavior instead--habit replacement.

I decided that what I really wanted in the morning was quiet and to ease into my day, a calm mind, so that when I sat down to write, I wasn't scatterbrained with today's news, who said what, cat videos, all my To Dos, and whatever else I may have come across on my phone. So I decided that in the morning, I would read in bed for about 20 minutes before everyone else woke up.

Next question was, what to read? I didn't want to read whatever book I was currently in the middle of, mainly because I'd find it hard to put down an immersive story. Plus, I was so buried in writing fiction that I didn't want to read a novel. I wanted to read short things and something that was reserved only for that morning time. Something I could feel like I finished instead of left in the middle.

So, I found a few contenders: a writing memoir with essays, a short story collection, and a book with small passages about famous artists and their daily rituals. These are the three books that ended up on my nightstand.

I tackled Still Writing first and it was amazing. I'll do a full post on it another day, but it was the perfect selection for me. Short, beautiful essays about the writing life that just made me sigh and think and ponder. It ended up being a centered and gentle way to start the day, almost like meditation. I loved every minute.

I didn't miss the phone. I didn't miss the noise and pictures and constantly swiping screens of information. My lamp was on, the sun was coming up, the other people in my house were soundly sleeping (or my husband was already up and working), and it was just me and lovely words and the start of the day.

I am a complete convert of this new ritual. Even now that I've turned in my book, I have no desire to go back to the obsessive smartphone scrolling first thing in the morning. What exactly am I expecting to be there? What is so important that I need to look at it first thing and then spend the rest of my free time on it? Nothing, is the answer. Email. FB. Twitter. News. Chat. All of that can wait. The day will be noisy enough later. But for those first few minutes, the day is all mine.

Some other ways to replace the habit if reading in the morning isn't your cuppa:

• Meditation
• Yoga/stretching
• Journaling
• Having a quiet cup of coffee or tea and just letting your thoughts go wherever they want with no distraction. (That's where the creativity lives--it doesn't show up unless we give it empty, non-distracted space.)
• Take a walk outside or sit outside

So, anyone else have a morning ritual that makes them feel great before they start their day? Anyone getting tired of reaching for their smartphone first and then getting lost in the noise?