Clickbait title: Call your trusted parental figure and tell them what you’ve been doing all day.

Warning: Autobiographical

If previous articles on personal feelings weren’t enough, I’m now writing about a revelation that comes straight out of the self-help section of the book-shop of life.

This video is obviously currently going apocalypticly viral. For people who don’t trust my nebulous links (safe internet browsing!), here’s the summary which incidentally reveals more about me than the video:

It’s an elegant business professor type calmly telling his children (viewers) that they should be bored sometimes. Boredom activates the “default-mode-network” (I am not a psychologist) which creates many ideas. And we are not bored because its scary and we scare that away with our phones. (those darn phones!)

Right on, so use your phone less. Duh. Dumber people with less fancy dress have made the same point. Wait let’s make it personal: How I learned I should use my phone less. That’s gonna get me viral, I’m sure.

Now this video has unironically helped me in discovering some very instinctual behavior patterns of mine where whenever I was anxious I would pull out my phone. Why? Well because the default mode network runs on anxiety like a group of escaped monkeys run on a banana-greased road. So better turn that shit off, listen to some music, or even better watch some benign YouTube video.

Now as someone who gets stressed easily, a lot of these stress scenarios are very very slow tigers. So is there something else to do than to pull out my phone? If the tigers were fast, then the solution is to fight, i.e. deal with the problem. If the tigers are really slow, then why stress about it already?

Of course stress is not an emotion that can be turned off with cold raw logic most of the time. Rather, what is concerning that the only way I seem to feel safe is the phone. It has become the main source of comfort. The tangent about attachment theory follows here.

The solution I have picked out for myself basically aligns with the business guy in the viral view about pulling yourself up by your mental bootstraps. It is important for me to build comfort for myself in my default mode network. This has manifested itself as deliberate efforts to recognise when I am trying to escape this boredom with my phone and instead just putting the phone down. The brain (worst liar I’ve ever known) of course likes to frame this to me as “so we’re just not gonna do anything useful”. But you would be surprised just how quickly it will consider other options which involve housework, friends or projects to be excited about.