Weekly Blog 9 - By the power of grayscale

So I have had my phone display on grayscale for the entire week, and the results are a bit mixed. I thought my screen time would be much reduced, but it was not (the daily average from last week to this week only decreased by about 10 minutes! What is this disappointment). But I have noticed some patterns of change that I can discuss here.

Firstly on screen time, I stopped using my phone to watch dramas and to play games like Wordle (the colours don’t translate very well to grayscale), so the DuckDuckGo browser app lost its top spot. Usage of Firefox Focus (mainly for news reading) also went down. Surprisingly enough, messaging apps like Signal and Teams went up - I didn’t think I spent much time on them, but apparently I did. That’s actually ok with me, since I reason that the phone is a communication device and I’m ok with it being used as such.

Secondly, the number of average phone pickups actually went up, wtf. This week it was 93, and last week it was 81. The week before that was 67… but then the week before that was 111. I do remember this week picking the phone up by instinct, noticing the grey display and putting it down repeatedly though.

I noticed that I was more conscious about phone use in the beginning of the week when the grey display was new, but when the novelty wore off towards the middle of the week I started to use the phone more. I think it was also because the week grew progressively more stressful because of various happenings and compulsive phone use for escapism kicked in. It wasn’t so much about what I was using the phone for really, but more about the autopilot habit of picking the phone up when I feel bad, as a self-soothing mechanism.

But from a larger picture, it’s not so bad. The grayscale phone experiment has been accompanied by some routines that I’m trying to put in place, and I think it might take a little bit of time for a virtuous cycle to kick in. Such as doing other things in the place of using my phone, including reading and playing the guitar, which I did manage to do some this week. I’m trying to build in meditation into my after-work routine as well, and I’ve managed to do it three times this week, and regular meditation practice should help later on to pull back from autopilot mode.

In the bigger scheme of things, we are still moving towards a better direction. Waiting for the compounding effect of little changes to hit the threshold, so that we can finally perceive some difference made.

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I’m a little tired. At night I’m having long and tedious dreams either of tests that I cannot excel in (e.g. easy questions, broken keyboard) or actually crafting full-length essays that make me wake up feeling like I’ve done a full day of work. Assessing my stress levels I’d say that I’m not at nightmare level yet, just at overstimulated and needing to chill.

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A friend just told me that she thinks that I’m not only a person of multiple interests, but a person of multiple practices. Like I actually commit to doing things. And that I have an academic/analytical brain but at the same time am quite hands on in implementing my ideas and experimenting to see what happens.

Documenting it because this is probably the nicest thing that anyone has said to me in a while that has actually penetrated my wall of self-doubt and criticism, especially these days when I am feeling a general sense of overwhelm and inadequacy. All is ok. I am doing fine, because I am a person of reason and action. A person of reasonable action and actionable reason.