Load Management Day

You are on email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et. al. well before you do anything meaningful for the day. Every day. Here’s how taking a single day break from digital attachment shifts your entire week.

Stop me when this doesn’t sound familiar. You go to bed vowing “tomorrow”you will spend more time with your family, kids, hobbies, goals, passions, reading, writing, learning — anything but what you still know you will likely do — which is to be glued to your phone and social media with every 15-minute interval of wasted time. Yet every day, without fail, it doesn’t work out anything like that. You are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram well before you have your first face-to-face contact, run, time spent reading or writing, or talking on the phone with someone in your personal life. So you vow you’ll do better the next day, ad infinitum.

It almost doesn’t make sense at face-value because this cycle of “not doing what you would rather be doing” sounds so easy to break. It sounds self-destructive. In fact, how did you caught in it in the first place? But let me use myself as an example, because that cycle I repeated for years. And I’ve broken free and found a solution with just a day a week of forcing myself out of it. Here was the issue at its most simple and abusive form.

On any given day, people — often some I don’t know or have ever met — can reach out to me through the following platforms: email (about 50-350 a day, give or take), Reddit (about 10 messages a day), YouTube (maybe 10 a week), Instagram (another 10 a week), LinkedIn (up to 50 a week), Twitter (roughly 20-30 messages a week), Facebook (mercifully only friends but still maybe 10 direct messages a week), or text messaging (maybe another 100-200 a week). I probably am missing a few more, but you get the point — actually, you likely feel the point. Even if you exclude phone calls, I am often “messaged” up to about 400 times. In a single day. 

Part of the problem is that it doesn’t happen overnight, so it is insidious. You don’t go to bed one night with the goal “I am going to be burdened with social media and email for the rest of my life” and wake up the next day a wild success at digital attachment. In fact, I would bet no one has ever had that goal. Yet here we are. And it is abusive. If you want to skip the science of just how abusive, my personal solution is immediately below the embedded research. But I think the science is compelling and illustrative too. This from endurance athlete and author Christopher Bergland in Psychology Today:

Face-to-Face Connectedness, Oxytocin, and Your Vagus Nerve

Face-to-face social connectedness fortifies the “tend-and-befriend” parasympathetic response and engages your vagus nerve. This improves vagal tone and counteracts stress responses associated with "fight-or-flight" mechanisms. Social connectedness has also been clinically proven to improve heart rate variability (HRV), which is the measurement of variations within beat-to-beat intervals and indicates a healthy heart.

As I described in the introduction to this series, your vagus nerve is the prime driving force of the parasympathetic nervous system which regulates your “rest-and-digest” or “tend-and-befriend” responses. On the flip side, to maintain homeostasis, the sympathetic nervous system drives your “fight-or-flight” responses. Ideally, within your autonomic nervous system, the ongoing tug of war between these two polar opposite mechanisms creates a "yin-yang" type of harmony marked by homeostatic balance.

From an evolutionary perspective, one could speculate that our ancestors relied on the sympathetic nervous system to kickstart cortisol production and other neurobiological responses necessary to hunt, gather, and ward off enemies. Conversely, the parasympathetic nervous system probably relied on oxytocin to fortify our innate drive to nurture close-knit human bonds, procreate, and build survival-based cooperative and supportive communities, as well as romantic partnerships.

Unfortunately, the Toffleresque “future shock of the 21st-century digital age (marked by too much change in too short a time) is causing many of our ancient evolutionary biological systems to short-circuit. All too often, social media and other modern-day factors are reducing face-to-face social connectedness and exacerbating feelings of perceived social isolation or being an outsider who is unworthy of love and belonging. 

That is just one small excerpt from one of thousands of articles. Social media has hit us too fast and too furious. The resulting consequence you are well aware of. People are walking around stressed, lurched, and constantly distracted. Per Bergland:

Hopefully, identifying the ability of excessive social media use to exacerbate feelings of perceived social isolation (as marked by a reduction in HRV and vagal tone) will serve as a reminder that you can create an upward spiral of positive emotions by "tending-and-befriending" others through face-to-face social interactions.

Here is what I have done. On Sundays (which happens to be today as I write this), I start the day early, at about 3:30 AM, just as I do every day. I blogged about the advantages of that other liberating aspect here. But after a morning deluge of emails and a few social media responses, I do this following:

I delete every social media app on my phone.

I put my laptop in a different room.

I spend time with actual people. I read, run, learn, LIVE. 

The above leads to a pretty obvious outcome: I have a good day. Highly predictable — I almost was assured it would happen as long as I could put the technology away. Which incidentally is going to be the most difficult part of all of this.

But here is the happy surprise I didn’t expect. Or even think to predict. On Monday, my parasympathetic nervous system is still winning the battle. We’ll say if it is 90/10 parasympathetic versus sympathetic on Sunday, it is still 80/20 on Monday. I am noticeably much more calm responding to the 350 messages I missed on Sunday plus the new 400 Monday messages. I am more productive. I have more energy. On Tuesday maybe I’m at 70/30, and then by Wednesday 50/50 — which still isn’t bad place to be at all in today’s world of digital attachment. Arguably from an evolutionary perspective you may want to be around 50/50 every day. But you aren’t. You have far too many days of sympathetic nervous system overload. All you are doing now is balancing out the week. Enter “Load Management Day,” and it doesn’t last just a day. It puts me ahead for the week and gives me at least two additional days of what feels like a break — no matter how much I am working. 

I’ll end on a running analogy, no surprise there. One lap around a track is 440 yards/400 meters. When I was at my all-time competitive best I could run that in, I think, between 47 and 49 seconds. Now, at 48, I’d be hard pressed to break a minute. What if I could start 25 yards down the line? I would absolutely break a minute, and my instincts tell me I could run it in 47 seconds. I can’t do that in any real-life running event today of course, but I can do that now in life. Every week, I start off with that 25 yard head start. Which lasts the entire length of the week (or the analogous lap). Which makes my load management day by far the most important day of the week. I very much invite you to try it. In fact, let me know if you do. I’ll respond any day but Sunday.