Why doesn’t it stop? I try to concentrate, but this burning feeling is creeping up on me. I don’t understand the content on my laptop screen and resort to that burning feeling that makes me think of some things different for a while, even though I want to make this blogpost.
Waking up in a digital world is trying not to give in to that burning feeling inside. The normal thing to do when you wake up is snoozing your alarm, getting out of bed and beginning your morning routine. Instead I give in to that burning feeling, the alarm starts and I pick up my phone to turn it off. I don’t start my morning routine, but open the app Instagram to watch some short videos. This is easy to get lost in, and before I know its half an hour later and I really need to get out of bed. “A bad way to begin the day” I think to myself. To put It in the words from the site “Crossland Counseling”:
“When you wake up, your brain is still transitioning from a resting to an alert state (known as sleep inertia). Using your phone during this time overwhelms your brain with stimuli, making it harder to concentrate and focus later.”
My thoughts are correct, this is a bad way to start my day.
Luckily I have some time left to prepare for my college later in the day, but first I eat some muesli, while watching a YouTube video. Why is there always this need to watch something? I am not the only one struggling with this problem, Ella Hahs writes in “Essay: Why is it so hard to eat without YouTube?” how we as humans in this digital society hate silence because the society is filled with sound. Only with practice you can come to peace with sitting in silence.
After eating it’s time to really begin to work on preparing for class, I need to watch “The Hour of the Furnaces (1968)” for my Third Cinema class. It’s a gripping documentary about neo-colonialism in Latin America with a strong statement against it. Why do I still need to give in to that burning feeling right next to me from time to time when the documentary shows more scenery and there is less voice-over? Do I not care about the suffering of the people in Latin America, or am I just not interested? Those are questions I ask myself when not being able to concentrate on the documentary. I again try to concentrate, this time I succeed, but the burning feeling never completely fade.
I still want to write this blogpost so I go to the library to finish it, and that’s where we were left of at the beginning. This burning feeling, this phone right next to me lighting up from time to time, and me trying my best to ignore it. I want myself to stop that burning feeling so I search the internet on how to stop it. An interesting article from 2013 comes up from the BBC, I think to myself “2013? Where they struggling with the same thing back then?”. Apparently they were, so I read the article “Transform your relationship with your phone with these rules, and prepare to enjoy life’s greater pleasures.” “Enjoy life’s greater pleasures”, that doesn’t sound so bad. And by reading this article the burning feeling lessened for a bit and made me feel like I’m missing out on so much by sitting on the phone all the time. Life can be challenging: stress while studying, the difficulty of coming out of bed and the patience you sometimes need for a documentary will occur in life, but these things can’t be fixed by some quick dopamine from scrolling trough your phone. Embrace the feeling of the things that make life difficult and try to stop that burning feeling, because if you don’t, it will get hotter and hotter inside your pocket and eventually burn a gap inside of it that cannot be fixed anymore.
I deleted Instagram after writing this blogpost because I realised that there is so much trash I consume every day, that my health begins to suffer. I feel down quite a bit because all the things I consume. I want to change this feeling because it isn’t doing me any good. I hope the people reading this blogpost will recognise this burning feeling, and want to do something about it, because the burning isn’t worth it. I believe there are many variables and these will vary depending on the person in usages of the phone and how to lessen it. If you recognise this burning feeling, look for your way to change it, don’t do nothing, because life can be lived more happily and healthier without it, or at least with less of it, and we may appreciate silence again.
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