How To Slow Down Time

throw your phone into the sea

How long has it been now that my days begin with panic and fright? I’m up this morning before the sun, and without thinking, I blindly reach for my phone to check the time.

It’s 5:03 a.m., lovely.
I did not need to look at a phone to know that it was too early; the lack of sun said as much.

It’s too early to be awake, but still, my thumb habitually unlocks the screen with no consideration of my cortisol levels, the rest of my body too dumb with sleep to protest, unable to fight the autonomous movement. With one eye open, I search the screen for a quick dopamine hit. My thumb can find no Instagram, no Spotify, no Depop, not even the Substack app to turn to—I have removed them all. It searches for something, anything, and lands on the worst thing, the news. It clicks through flashy, terrifying headlines. A shooting there, a stabbing here, oil tankers, Trump, AI, cancer research defunded. My squinting eye scans this between 5:04-5:07, three minutes of my life lost to anxious thought.

Mission of setting my nervous system to high alert complete, my thumb locks the phone, and I throw it under my pillow, squeezing my eyes shut against the horrors, but it’s too late—I’m wide awake.

Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger (1983).

I am constantly at war with my phone. Over the last few months, I’ve done serious work to detach—deleting social media, ending my codependent Spotify subscription, and even considering a dumb phone. These changes have reduced my screen time, but more importantly, they’ve made me aware of the habitual reaching—the phantom need to numb out.

The time I now spend on my phone no longer feels satisfying. I still reach for it automatically, but I’m consciously aware of the moment I do so. It doesn’t hold as much power as it once did; I’m no longer carried away. I may still scroll, but it ends abruptly. In that way, I’ve reduced my phone to what it should be: a phone.

I want my phone to be a phone—texting, phone calls, FaceTime. Only this. I don’t need it to be a supercomputer. I have a computer. I don’t want my phone to be my work, my bank, the place I consume all my media, or the only way I take photos. I don’t want to walk down the street with my eyes glued to a screen, the way I see so many of us do every day.

On any given day, I might be on a walk or stopped at a red light, and I see a kid step into the crosswalk, head bent at an unnatural angle, eyes fixed on his glowing rectangle. He doesn’t notice the cars whooshing past, the truck inching forward to turn right, blocking his path. He doesn’t look up at all. To me, he looks like an idiot. And I could so easily be him, I have been him! We all look silly, don’t we? Staring at our screens as the world passes us by. What kind of life is this? I can’t stay in this. I need out. I need something simpler, something real, away from the glow of the screen. I can’t throw my phone into the sea, but I can find more ways to detach. I need to.

Before I took certain measures to reduce screentime, my head throbbed, my heart ached, I was tired, and worst of all, I’d stopped doing the things I love.

Movies, workouts, journaling, reading, time with friends and family—these simple things are what slow down time. They are the things that make me most happy. I’d been guilty of replacing them with scrolling, which offers nothing but a dopamine crash and a heavy heart.

Now that I have all this precious time back, I’m getting back into journaling—which had been sporadic at best over the last few years—and it feels like a revelation: Oh! This is what I love doing. Letting my mind expand as I jot down every thought, moving freely without overthinking. I love writing, and finally, I’m making time for it.

Months away from social media and apps that once glued me to my phone have given me more time to do what I love, and it’s clear to me now that it wasn’t life that was making me anxious—it’s always my phone. It overstimulates my nervous system, steals my time, and leaves my days frantic and empty. Even having it in the same room makes my mind restless. Removing it from my life as much as possible feels like a reclamation.

I don’t want to rush through the things I love the way my phone has trained me to do. Always needing to move on to the next thing, my attention span shot from too many short-form videos on social media.

I want to experience life. Intentional meals, conversations, writing, walking my dog, other daily routines—I want them to carry weight and depth. I want to inhabit my life, not skim across its surface, distracted by whatever glows and promises to numb.

I’m replacing my consumer habits with creation. I carry my journal with me everywhere I go because I want to be present with my own thoughts again—even if they’re messy, unintelligible, and seemingly insignificant. Now I write without thinking—or the thinking is the writing—but I don’t focus on it; I let it spill out of me. I’m doing what I love—and time stands still.