The precipice: a big reset
Taking a break from work - the 5 areas I'll be focusing on while I'm off.
This is my last week at my current job, a job I’ve been at for the past 4.5 years. I am finally - finally - taking a break. My body has been screaming for a break for a while, but I have gotten very good at not listening. I am grateful (and privileged) to be able to step away for a bit and decide what I want to do next.
I’m not really sure what the break will look like yet - the only firm commitments I’ve made are not to job hunt until after the summer, and to not become the president of the HOA, neighborhood swim and tennis board, or the PTA. My son brought home some seeds and wants to plant a garden, so we’ll do that.
Beyond that, I’m starting to shape up some ideas of what I’d like to do. So far, they fall into 5 areas I’d like to reset:
Boundaries with tech
Our home
Our spending
Physical health
Tangible hobbies
Resetting boundaries with screens
I’d like to run some experiments on what life looks like with a little less daily technology use. A core part of this break for me is resetting my brain - reflecting deeply on what matters to me, spending time in the real, tangible, physical world, and recapturing my focus and attention.
My phone
Like most people, I pick up my phone and fidget and scroll far more often than I really want to. I read a stat that blew my mind - the average American spends the equivalent of 2.5 months a year looking at their phone.
TWO AND A HALF MONTHS. What would you rather be doing for 2.5 months a year? It occurred to me that perhaps if I had better made use of that kind of time, I wouldn’t need a break from working quite so badly. Pretty much every excuse for not exercising or not cooking nourishing meals or otherwise not taking impeccable care of myself goes out the window in the face of that.
I’m curious too, how this change will affect how my days feel. I’m already an intentional tech user - I don’t get notifications on my phone, it’s mostly on silent, notifications even for texts don’t go through to my watch. I don’t use a lot of social media, and the only social media app on my phone is Instagram. I imagine my daily phone usage is quite a bit lower than a lot of people’s, and yet I still feel the effects on my attention span.
To accomplish this, I’ve ordered the Wisephone II. I’ve considered ditching my iPhone numerous times, but I’ve always found a reason not to. The apps that really held me back are Spotify and Audible. I enjoy listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks, especially while going for walks or doing mundane household tasks like dishes or laundry. I also need a GPS on a regular basis.
Well, the Wisephone supports all of these features! The display is intentionally text based and black and white. There aren’t very many screenshots on the website, so I’m not quite sure what to expect beyond that. I’ll definitely write about the experience as I tinker with it!
My computer
One of the reasons I’m thinking about screen time is that I experience something called visual migraines. The first time I experienced one, I was pregnant with my son and thought I was having a stroke - my vision started to white out around the edges until it eventually covered my whole field of view. I could still make out shapes, but that was it - a field of white with some blurry outlines. I thought I was literally “going towards the light.” Thankfully, it wasn’t too long before it passed, and when I asked my doctor about it, she said that this just happens to pregnant people sometimes. (Also - WHAT?)
My son is now 14. I generally have one or two of these migraines a year. The symptoms have evolved a bit - sometimes it’s a full whiteout, sometimes it’s a technicolor distortion of my vision - more like I’m looking through a ripple of water. I’ve learned that I’m pretty much useless during them - I can see enough to get myself to my bedroom, and then I can lay down in a cool dark room until they pass. As my work evolved to be more meetings-focused, I realized I can simply keep looking in the direction of the camera and get on fine enough without taking a break. (This is not the way.)
Over the past 18 months or so, I’ve had a marked increase in these episodes - from once or twice a year to once or twice a month. I’m attributing this to both stress and the strain of constantly looking at a laptop screen and being under fluorescent lights. There’s not a ton of research into what causes them, so stress reduction and limited screen time is the first recommendation for determining next steps.
When I think about where my eyes spend a lot of (most of…) their time, it’s looking at my laptop screen. (I, with the exception of the occasional Bob’s Burgers episode with the kids - oh, uh, and every Love is Blind season - don’t watch TV, so that’s not one I’m worried about here.)
Now, that’s an obvious need when you work a desk job, but not so much when you’re taking a break. However, I can see where my laptop could become a tempting place to waste time if I substantially cut back on the web browsing, social media-ing, and online shopping I do on my phone. I want to get back to writing regularly and do the other necessary tasks I need to do on my computer - managing our finances, filling out necessary school or camp forms, or whatever other life admin - but without getting sucked into the endless sea of scrolling.
I don’t have a definite plan for this yet, but I think I’ll set up time blocks - some for writing, some for life admin, and then keep track of any other sites I visit or tasks I get sucked into that distract me from my core objectives for those sessions.
My Switch
This may be an odd choice, but I think I’d like to spend *more* time playing on my Switch. During Covid, my son and I played Mario Kart every day during lunch together. It’s a memory I really cherish - how long had it been before then when we had such an intentional break for play together? Now, we occasionally play Wingspan - a board game we both enjoy that’s been ported to the Switch. The joy of the Switch version is that we can play a full game with just the two of us, as we can add computer players, and we don’t have to set up all the pieces on the dining room table.
While I’d also like to play more physical games, I think the real thing I’m after is some intentional play with the kids, and removing the time-and-space-to-setup barrier seems a reasonable way to accomplish this.
Resetting our home
This next category is a hard left turn - resetting boundaries with tech seems like a pretty obvious next step, but decluttering? Isn’t that kinda work, too?
Decluttering: creating space to think and breathe
Decluttering wasn’t really on my radar as a thing I needed to do until an unlikely podcast popped up in my queue. I’ve been consuming all things Emily and Amelia Nagoski as part of my un-burnout-ing journey, and I discovered they have a podcast - the Feminist Survival Project. Their episode on Cozy Spaces and Decluttering blew my mind.
In the episode, they cover how objects in your space can activate your ventral system - the one that activates joy. That means that if your space is filled primarily with ventral-activating objects, you can access more joy in your home. But if your space, like mine, squeezes the life out of your ventral objects by shoving them into corners or behind other stuff… you’re not getting as much joy out of the things you already own as you could be.
Joy is one of my core values, so anything I can do to be more in touch with joy is a thing I’m interested in. And since we’ll be revisiting our finances as well, getting more joy without spending more money sounds exceptionally appealing.
Back to the podcast for a minute - in the middle of the episode, Emily namedrops Dana K. White, and immediately happy bells in my brain started ringing. I’d listened to Dana’s podcast, A Slob Comes Clean, when I was single-momming and trying to figure out how on earth to keep my house manageable. Dana was so warm and kind and funny that I looked forward to her episodes, and her straight-forward strategies made my house feel under control.
So when I heard her name come up in the podcast, I popped some of her more recent episodes into my podcast queue, and sure enough, she’s as wonderful as ever. I bought two of her audiobooks, and listened to them in what can only be described as a self-soothing session. (God, I am such a weirdo.)
Listening to her tales of decluttering made me realize that I shared some of her frustrations - not being able to get to my favorite things because they were hidden by things I rarely use, taking a long time to clean the house because there’s so much stuff to pick up, etc. I also had a lot of the same objections she tackled - “but these are good things! They cost money!” With a goal of being an intentional consumer, surely I couldn’t donate or throw away perfectly good things?!?
But the siren’s call of being able to reset our house with a 5 minute pickup every evening (a Dana strategy for keeping the house sane) - and the even larger vision of having a home that activates joy - is too strong to resist, and I think I’m finally ready to realize that our home has too many things in it to reasonably manage. In the name of resetting my brain, managing fewer objects, especially the objects I don’t even like that much, seems like a great project to embark upon.
Resetting our spending
I was really proud of being a high-earning woman in tech. Having economic power and freedom was something that I was (am?) really passionate about. While it has bought me the freedom to choose this break, there’s also no getting around that I’m giving up a substantial income during this time.
We are generally intentional about our purchases, but intentional in the way that people who have the privilege of not worrying about money are intentional - we plan for the biggest budget items, but don’t sweat grabbing an unexpected lunch out or treating a friend to drinks.
Part of that is that there’s just not enough bandwidth to think about the smaller choices - is produce cheaper at Publix or Kroger? Which is a better value based on how far away the store is and which generally has prettier produce? My dude, I literally cannot, let’s just go get what we need.
The other part of it is that (privilege again), it just doesn’t make that much of a difference for us. We’re definitely in the stage of our lives where we worry about the thousand dollar choices, not the $20 ones.
We’re also (omg, is it going to be privilege again? It is.) in a place where we’re trying to spend in line with our values. That means we’re not spending on Amazon anymore and trying to avoid Whole Foods. We don’t shop at Target. The other day, trying to find some mundane item, I angrily grumbled that if any OTHER stores would like to announce anti-DEI policies, support for the current administration, point a spotlight at how terribly they’re treating their employees, and slowly squeeze the life out of small businesses, we will no longer be spending any money at all as we won’t have anywhere to shop.
We are a high earning household, and we spend A LOT. I believe our household spending does make an impact - and we’d like to deploy those funds wisely. We have more choice in where we spend than someone who has to buy the lowest cost options to make ends meet.
But now we’re at a weird straddling point - making consumer choices we feel good about, like buying meat and produce from the local farmer’s market, is considerably more expensive than buying them at the grocery store. With our new income situation, we’ll have to think a little harder about what balance feels right for us.
I think lots of people are trying to navigate their spending, and how to intentionally deploy their economic power right now. I don’t know that I’ll have any answers, but I’ll share how I’m thinking about it as I try to both reduce our household spending overall, and still stay in line with our values.
Resetting my health
I’ve talked a lot about resetting my brain, which is not surprising. I may reside in my body, but I’ve always led with my brain. I mentioned in the opening that my body has been screaming at me to take a break, and also casually dropped a note about my terrifying visual migraines, but it’s taken me a long time to connect the dots and realize that my body is trying to throw up flags that my brain is steadfastly helping me ignore.
I’ve gotten much better at caring for my body over the past 3 or 4 years. Over the past 2.5 years I’ve picked up running 3ish days a week, and more recently, strength training… sporadically. I don’t actually feel much fitter than I did when I first started running, even though I certainly have more endurance, because every hour besides the hour I spend running is spent sitting in a chair.
Sitting for 10 hours a day does not do the body good. While I also want to be more consistent with exercise, I primarily want to be more active throughout my day. If three months from now, I’m still spending 90% of my waking hours sitting in a chair, I will not have substantially improved my health.
I don’t think I have a concrete plan for this yet - I know I want to walk more, kayak with my friends, hike with my dog, and play more pickleball, but that’s about it. I look forward to scheming more about this. I’m sure there may be a food and hydration component to this (as my brain recoils at the very word ‘hydration’ and my body gives a dusty rattle), but I’ll evaluate that when we get there.
Resetting my hobbies
This Christmas, a friend gave me a crochet kit as a gift. I picked it up in January, skeptical that I would be able to follow the instructions, and proceeded to have the most fun I’ve had in a long time. The dopamine rush of learning something new, doing something with your hands, and ending up with something absolutely adorable is immense.
Since then, I’ve crocheted a whole little army of little critters, and gotten my husband and son on board too. (My daughter would like credit here - she’s been crocheting for much longer, and is generally much craftier than us.)
I didn’t realize until I started how rarely I do things just for the sake of fun and my own interest. There’s often the lure of a “productive” hobby which can then be leveraged into a side hustle.
I don’t want to turn crochet into an economic activity, I just want to have fun and make weird, lopsided little creatures!
In terms of hobbies I think I’ll be tinkering with, here are my criteria:
Non-screen based - something tangible, in the physical world
Creative
FUN
Unproductive
On my list so far:
Reading (my OG hobby)
Gardening
Pickleball
Hiking
Kayaking
Crochet
Cooking (kind of productive, but there are some nuances here)
I generally cycle between hobbies depending on the season, the weather, who can join me, etc. - and I plan to continue that. I don’t want to get overly fixated on pursuing any particular thing - while I might build skills as I go, the goal is fun, not improvement. If I do something often enough, I’m sure I’ll also get better at it, but I want to keep the focus on the joy.
Start date: mid-April 2025
I’ll be embarking on this journey in mid-April, and my goal is to write an update once a week. I’ll be curious if I have enough to reflect on to post once a week, or if I’ll just be puttering about my garden talking to my bean plants. If it’s the latter, I’ll go ahead and assume the only being that needs to witness that is my dog, and may cut back to a couple times a month.
For this week, my eyes are on the finish line. See y’all on the other side!