Rediscovering the Art of Relaxation in a Digital Age

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings."

There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us.

What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That’s why we’re looking at this week. 

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Script | 381

Hello, and welcome to episode 381 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. 

How often do you completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages? 

And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did? 

It seems we’ve found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you’ve listed somewhere that you think you must do. 

It’s a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there’s more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we’re supposed to call this person or that one. 

And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it’s as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep. 

The problem here is that it’s not something you suddenly start doing. It’s a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You’e got to check right? 

And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn’t in your hand or near you. It’s then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It’s time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses. 

And that’s where this week’s question comes in. And that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with. 

Hi Maggie, thank you for your question. 

You’re right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it. 

As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you’re a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do. 

Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend’s text message or your boss’s email. 

If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it’s really a horrible existence. 

Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten. 

The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers. 

What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river. 

Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with. 

And family meals were important. 

The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner. 

I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it’s still a good practice to do—you know, washing your hands before eating your meals. 

Currently, I am reading the enormous series of books by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the co host of the excellent podcast The Rest is History. 

Sandbrook begins this series of books in 1950s UK and I am currently up to 1970, having just finished reading his excellent book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of The Populist Right, a book about how US culture changed in the 1970s. 

The books have chapters on how families lived and the activities they did in their spare time and as I was reading these chapters I felt a sadness that many of these activities seem to have disappeared. 

For instance, in the UK, there was in almost every town and village a working mens club. Yes, today that would be considered sexist, but when these clubs started they were established for the men who worked down the mines or in the factories. 

One of the clubs I used to go to would have a guest act on every Sunday night. Sometimes the act was a musician other times it might be a comedian. These clubs would be full of husbands and wives having a drink, playing bingo between the act’s sessions. 

It was a wonderful evening. I remember never once worrying about work, or even talking about work. It was families talking about where they were going on holiday, playing bingo and watching the acts. 

I never experienced what we called in the UK “Sunday night blues”—that depressing feeling of knowing you had to go back to work tomorrow. 

I only ever experienced that when I stopped going to the club on a Sunday and instead sitting at home watching TV. 

Somehow, we’ve sacrificed human activities—going out with friends and family three or four times a week—to sitting on sofas watching TV or scrolling through endless feeds in social media. Often feeling jealous of the fake lives people put on there. 

And certainly not engaging with other human beings in the same room as you. 

And the word “Hobby” seems to have become a quaint old-fashioned word. I mean, who’s got time for hobbies today? 

And that to me is where people need to start. Have a hobby that does not involve a digital tool. 

One of my rediscovered hobbies is collecting books. Real books. I’ve always enjoyed reading. It’s been a big part of my life. 

I remember before I got an iPad in January 2011, I would spend weeks deciding which book to take with me on the plane when I travelled. It became an annual ritual. A week or two before I was due to fly I would spend a Saturday afternoon at the bookstore in the local shopping centre looking for something I could read while I was on holiday. 

After January 2011, I no longer went to a bookstore. I downloaded books from Apple Books or Amazon. Accidentally, something I had found immensely pleasurable—spending an afternoon wandering around a bookstore, to simply hearing about a book, finding it on a digital bookstore and buying it. 

The pleasure of aimlessly wandering around a bookstore was ripped away from me for the sake of convenience. 

I can fully understand why the sales of vinyl records and record players have exploded in recent years. The lack of convenience and a limited record collection makes listening to music a genuine pleasure. 

Those of a certain age may remember creating something called a “Mix tape”. This was where you recorded from a hi-fi system records to a tape cassette that you could play on a cassette walkman or in the car when going on a long journey. 

There was was something deeply pleasurable in make those tapes. I used to do this when going on family holidays. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. Just looking through your records (and later CDs) for songs and then recording them, in real time, to a cassette. 

You had to sit and listen the whole song before pressing pause on the tape and choosing the next song. Completely inconvenient by today’s standards, but that wasn’t the point. It was relaxing, enjoyable and there was a sense of pride when finished of a job well done. 

And that’s where I think we should be looking for activities that help us to switch off at the end of the day or at weekends. Activities that take us away from the digital noise.

For example, this year, I’ve made it a habit to spend a minimum of thirty minutes reading a real book after I finish my evening coaching calls. 

I close down my office, grab the book I am currently reading, and go through to the living room, settle down on the sofa with the book and read. While I will read for at least thirty minutes, I often find myself still reading after an hour. During that time, it’s just me and little Louis lying next to me. 

It’s quiet and incredibly relaxing. 

Another “hobby” I began this spring was to have a bedding box on the terrace outside my office. In this box I’ve been growing flowers. It needs watering and the occasional weed needs pulling out. This had led me to want to add more flower boxes for next year. 

I’ve been sketching out on paper ideas of where I’ll put these boxes and what flowers I could grow in them. I’ve even considered growing my own vegetables too. 

All non-tech hobbies that have brought some real enjoyment with them. 

Other activities you may wish to consider are knitting and needlework. I’ve remember teaching myself to sow buttons onto shirts and jackets—great fun but can be equally frustrating. 

Water colour painting. There’s an initial cost in paints and paint books, but again great fun when you get going. This is a particularly good hobby if you like to get out into the countryside. 

Winston Churchill used painting as a way to destress at weekends and on holidays. 

While I’m not a big fan doing digital detoxes or restricting use of digital tools, that’s just a waste of time because you end up finding excuses to check your digital devices. 

What I have found, though, is if you have a hobby or activity that is non-digital, you lose the temptation to “check” for messages and notifications. You become engrossed in the activity you engaged in. 

Perhaps you could have a Saturday or Sunday morning family walk. Give it some added interest by including some bird spotting or trying to find new routes around the park or woods. 

When to comes to switching off, look for activities that don’t involve phones or computers. Puzzles are good, learning to detail a car (my current hobby) or some gardening—which can large or small. 

I hope that has helped, Maggie. Try to use things to switch off that do not involve a screen and you’ll find yourself relaxing and rediscover some lost pleasures in life. 

Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.