I thought I was pretty present these days.
Then I spent a week on a cruise with barely any reception or Wi-Fi, and realised how often my hand reached for my phone before I had even consciously decided to pick it up.
It was fascinating.
The first day or two, I felt properly lost without it. I kept wondering when I would next be able to get online. Which port might have signal? Would there be Wi-Fi somewhere? Had anything happened that I needed to know about?
I would even pick my phone up automatically, knowing full well there was absolutely nothing it could give me.
And if you have ever wondered how to be more present, I think there is something really interesting in that.
Because what happened next surprised me.
The less I used my phone, the less I thought about using it.
There was no big detox. I had not decided to become a better person who was wonderfully mindful and never looked at a screen again. I did not need discipline or some elaborate set of rules.
The wanting simply started to fade.
By the third or fourth day, I was barely noticing my phone was not in my hand.
I was just there.
Looking at the sea. Having conversations. Eating. Walking. Watching what was going on around me.
Actually in my life rather than having one foot in my life and another somewhere else.
When a habit feels much stronger than it really is
One of the things I found most interesting was just how powerful the urge to check my phone felt at first.
It can be very easy to interpret that feeling as proof that we need something.
I need to check.
I need to know what is happening.
I need to reply.
I need to see if somebody has messaged.
But did I?
Because once checking was no longer really an option, the urge did not keep building and building until I exploded. Quite the opposite. It lost momentum.
It reminded me of something I often talk about when explaining thought.
Imagine you are riding a bike and pedalling really quickly. If you suddenly take your feet off the pedals, the bike does not immediately stop. There is still momentum there, so you keep moving for a little while.
But if you leave your feet off the pedals, the bike naturally begins to slow.
Put your feet back on and start pedalling again, and of course you create more momentum.
Our thinking can work in a very similar way.
So can many of the habits we innocently build around it.
A thought appears telling us to check something, solve something, look something up or distract ourselves for a minute. We respond to it. Another thought comes. We respond again.
Before long it can feel incredibly automatic.
That does not necessarily mean there is some huge problem we now need to fight our way out of.
Sometimes we have simply been pedalling for a long time.
How to be more present without making presence another job
This is where I think we can accidentally overcomplicate presence.
We hear that we should “be more present”, so naturally we turn it into another thing to achieve.
Perhaps I need to meditate.
Maybe I need to put my phone in a drawer for two hours every evening.
I should stop scrolling.
I should have stricter boundaries.
I need to become more mindful.
And before we know it, we are thinking very hard about how to stop thinking so much.
I have written before about what getting present really means and why it matters so much for anxiety, because presence is much simpler than we often make it.
You already know how to be present.
You were present before anybody taught you what mindfulness was.
Presence is what is left when we are not mentally somewhere else.
On that cruise I did not learn a new technique for being in the moment. There was simply less opportunity for one of my usual distractions, and gradually I noticed myself coming back into my actual life.
No force required.
Distraction is not always obvious
This experience also showed me something slightly uncomfortable.
I spent a lot of years extremely anxious, and I am incredibly grateful that anxiety does not run my life in the way that it once did.
But not feeling anxious and being present are not necessarily the same thing.
I had not really clocked how often I still distracted myself.
And the phone is only one version of that.
We can distract ourselves by scrolling, obviously. But we can also distract ourselves by keeping ridiculously busy, constantly planning, thinking about what needs doing next, replaying conversations, working when we do not really need to work, researching something for the eighteenth time, listening to something every second we are alone or mentally disappearing into tomorrow.
Sometimes distraction even looks productive.
I wrote about this previously in How to Break Free from Distraction: Giving Yourself Permission to Rest and Reset, after noticing my own screen time creeping up when I was tired and not really allowing myself just to be where I was.
And I think this is important because I do not want this to become another stick to beat ourselves with.
If you suddenly realise you spend half your life with your phone attached to your hand, you do not need to start telling yourself off.
That would just be another form of noise.
Get curious instead.
What happens when you are not distracted?
What do you notice?
How quickly does the urge actually pass when you cannot automatically respond to it?
You might see something you had never noticed before.
Why our minds love somewhere else to go
Our minds are extraordinarily good at taking us away from what is actually happening.
We can be sitting somewhere beautiful while thinking about an email.
Having dinner with somebody we love while mentally organising tomorrow.
Walking along a beach while wondering whether somebody has replied to us.
Nothing has physically taken us away from the moment. We are still sitting at the table or looking at the sea.
But mentally, we have gone.
This happens with anxiety and overthinking too.
A huge amount of suffering can come from living somewhere other than where we actually are. We jump ahead, predict, rehearse, imagine and try to work out what happens next.
Our thinking can feel incredibly convincing while we are doing it.
That does not mean we have to wrestle ourselves back into the present.
Often, recognising that our mind has wandered off again is enough.
“Oh. I’m not really here.”
And here we are again.
I talk more about what happens when the mind goes into problem-scanning mode in Why Do I Overthink Everything? Meet Your Meerkat Brain. Once our mind believes there is something to solve, it can become incredibly enthusiastic about finding more things to think about.
Our phone can give that busy mind somewhere very easy to go.
Another message.
Another search.
Another scroll.
Another little hit of something to think about.
And sometimes when that option disappears, we get to see just how capable the mind is of settling without us doing very much at all.
The mind settles when we stop interfering
This is one of the ideas that runs through The Unrestricted Model®.
We often assume change requires more effort.
More discipline. More control. More understanding from our intellect. More things to practise.
Yet so much of our experience changes when we understand what is happening and interfere a little less.
I saw that with my phone.
Nobody had to convince me that I should want it less.
I did not have to spend every day resisting the urge.
The pattern simply stopped being fed in the same way.
And it softened.
That is interesting to me far beyond screen time.
How many things do we believe are permanent parts of us simply because they have become familiar?
How many times do we say, “I’m just someone who overthinks,” or “I’ve always been like this,” because a pattern has been running for so long that it now looks like part of our identity?
Familiar does not automatically mean fixed.
A thought can be familiar.
A reaction can be familiar.
A habit can be familiar.
It still does not have to tell us who we are.
I am not throwing my phone into the sea
I would love to tell you that I returned home completely transformed, deleted every app and now spend my evenings gazing peacefully into the middle distance.
Obviously not.
My phone found its way back into my hand remarkably quickly once there was signal again.
Because I am human.
And I am not interested in creating another load of rules around it.
What I came home with was something much more useful than that.
Awareness.
I saw something about how easily a habit can feel necessary when it is available to us all the time.
I saw how quickly the urgency can disappear when we stop responding to it.
And I noticed how good it felt to be properly in my own life.
That does not mean I now need to force myself to be present every second.
I will get distracted again. I will scroll. I will disappear into my thinking. I will have days when I am far more interested in what is happening on my phone than what is happening around me.
But I have seen something I cannot completely unsee.
There is a difference between being physically present in my life and actually being available for it.
And I want to be available for it as much as I can.
What are you giving momentum to without realising?
So perhaps the more interesting question is not, “How do I break this habit?”
Maybe it is simply:
What am I noticing now that I was not noticing before?
You might notice how often you automatically reach for your phone.
You might notice that the minute there is a quiet moment, your mind wants to fill it.
You might notice how often you leave the present to think about something that has already happened or something that might never happen.
You do not have to turn any of that into a project.
Just notice.
Because sometimes an insight changes far more than forcing ourselves into another new routine ever could.
And perhaps there is more freedom available to us than our habits would have us believe.
Want to understand anxiety, overthinking and fear differently?
If this has made you curious about how thought, overthinking and our moment-to-moment experience actually work, my free mini course Understand Anxiety, Overthinking & Fear Differently is a lovely place to begin.
I will introduce you to a different way of understanding your mind and why the things that can feel so powerful, urgent and convincing do not always need fixing or fighting.
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