i want my brain back
hunting for focus! attention is an endangered resource!
Last week, I visited a chiropractor to deal with my shoulder situation (I don’t think a joint is supposed to feel like it’s filled with rocks?). I live in California, so a visit like this usually always involves some kind of well meaning but unsolicited/unscientific health advice. After masterfully adjusting my shoulder, the chiropractor took my pulse, suggested my gall bladder was sluggish, that maybe I needed a heavy metal detox, an epsom salt cleanse, more daily water at least.
“How is your head? Are you cloudy in the morning? Do you ever feel ‘clear’?”
I never know what to do in this kind of situation. I did not say “I’m a middle-aged lady living in late-stage American surveillance capitalism. My brain is about as sharp as oatmeal,” though it’s what I thought. Instead I told her that I felt perpetually fogged but also agitated, at once itchy and anxious and lazy and bummed out. I didn’t really expect advice, at least not any I would follow. I just wanted someone to know.
She looked me square in the face, furrowed her brow just a bit, gave my wrist an extra squeeze. She’d seen my kind before. Truth is, I’ve been overworking as an escape again, or at least working dumb, spending too much time staring unproductively at my laptop when I’d be better off out in the world; scrolling everything, everywhere, hypervigilantly racing to keep on top of the news, while simultaneously trying to digitally outrun the sad.
“Huh, maybe what you need is a good multi-vitamin,” she said, pausing. “But honestly the best thing you could do for your health is to get off all those screens.”
On her recommendation, I picked up an $83 tub of something called SP Power Mix (tagline: “your active life needs power!”) and went on my way.
Over the weekend, I put Freedom back on my phone. I’m limiting social media/news/doom-scrolling to 45 minutes a day. I plugged my bedside phone charger on a different floor than my bed and am trying to tuck my phone there at least an hour before sleep. But I want to do more for focus, to stimulate my head in the right ways, to stave off the screen addiction and seriously commit to being fully present and slowing this foggy decline.
I want my brain back!
I know I’m asking this through a screen FFS, but: Who has tips?
I have been going on a shit-ton of walks and all without my phone. Of course, I miss it but it puts me in the present. I told my friend that I would only be sending my Wordle score to her and none of the other time-wasting games I spend an hour playing in the morning. I also took Apple News off my phone. I have freedom installed on my phone, too, but I still find ways to waste time.
I was listening to Search Engine and one person said that he has his phone charging on a long cord by a chair when he gets home and it’s where it remains until he leaves the house. Essentially, his phone becomes a land line when he’s at home. I may do that.
Jenn, your brain fog is my clarity. You’re doing great from my vantage point!
I’m trying not to look the phone first thing in the morning. As I have coffee I journal (I’m currently making my way through the 100 prompts in The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad) and/or reading 10 pages of nonfiction (right now that’s How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell —ha!) Not lighting my brain on fire with the news first thing is helping my brain feel a little less broken.