Experimental June: week four

It’s Sunday 29th, which means my experimental June is coming to an end. I’m aware that June ends tomorrow but I think four full weeks is a good timeframe for this type of life experiments so I’m happy to consider it done today. If you’re new to the blog and you’re wondering what the heck this experimental June is, here’s a short recap.

Back in May I decided to try mess with my life in two ways: I turned the digital consumption knob down to as close as possible to zero and I also brought back meditation into my life. The reason for this experiment is simple: I wasn’t happy with where my mind was and I felt I had to do something so the combination of detaching from digital consumption and the refocusing of my attention on creative output, meditation and book reading seemed like a reasonable choice.

I dragged Kevin into this and Luke joined as well. They had slightly different rules set for themselves so I encourage you to keep reading what they went through on their respective blogs.

To keep track of how the experiment was going we all posted weekly updates and I’m gonna leave links here for your convenience if you want to go back and read those:

Since this is week four I think it’s time to draw some conclusions. The first thing I’m gonna say is that I’m incredibly happy I decided to go through this experiment. I think messing with my life is something I should do more often because it’s incredibly easy for my brain to slip into stupid routines and then accept those new routines as the way things should be. I can give you one concrete example: for the longest time I was unable to go to sleep by myself without something playing in the background. And for my brain that was totally fine. But now, four weeks later, I’m the exact opposite. I’m now so terribly distracted by anything playing in the background while I try to sleep and I want my silence.

Over the past four weeks, I also managed to do some 4+ hours road trips without listening to anything. No podcasts, no music. And it was an enjoyable experience. If you told me that back in May I’d have thought you were insane.

My self-imposed rules were to keep the digital consumption as close as possible to zero and I did manage to get fairly close to that goal. Over the past 28 days I:

The goal was to redirect my focus towards reading books, creative output, and meditation. In terms of reading, I did finish three books in June and I’m currently reading two more. I also hit my—very low I have to admit—target goal of 12 books read in 2025. That brings me joy.

Creative output wasn’t terribly high but that’s partly because I spent a lot of time finishing client projects and after months of being swamped with stuff to do I’m now free-ish. I have one project going at the moment that is in its final stages and that’s it. That also brings me joy. Not having client projects will also bring anxiety in like a week but that is a problem for future me to deal with.

The meditation part of the experiment was a massive success. Why did I stop meditating? I’m such a fucking idiot at times. I started the month doing the daily meditation—roughly 10 minutes—once a day. A few days in I decided to start the introductory course from scratch on the Waking Up app (if you want to give it a try you can use my 30-Day Guest Pass). It’s a 28-day course and by Friday 6th I was already doing two days at once, one in the morning, one in the evening. Sunday 8th I logged 30 minutes of meditation, Monday 9th 41 minutes. The entire second week I meditated twice a day every day, spending between 21 to 26 minutes on the cushion. The third week—even though I got sick—I meditated twice on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, the other days I did one session. By the end of the week I was done with the introductory course and I was back on the daily meditations. On Sunday 22nd I changed the default length of the sessions to 15 minutes, on the 26th I pushed it up to 16 minutes. The plan is to slowly keep pushing it up until I get to 20 minutes and then stay there for a while. I’d love to get to 1 hour of daily meditation by the end of the summer and I think it’s easily doable.

I’m using the How We Feel app to track moods and I can see how the combination of meditation and lower digital consumption has impacted my mental health. I’m logging fewer high-intensity negative emotions and overall I feel a lot better.

The other thing I paid attention to was my phone usage and screen time. In my week three update I mentioned how my mind tends to seek distractions when I feel sick which was an interesting thing to observe. Another interesting observation is that my phone usage is all over the place in terms of screen time. But this morning I realized something while looking at the information available on the screen time page: the first app used after pick up is 95% of the time a communication app, either telegram, messages, or mail. But once the phone is in my hand, the muscle memory kicks in and I start doing other things on my phone even though the reason why I picked it up in the first place was for communication. And so that tells me that the reason why screen time is high is simply because of that stupid muscle memory loop. Also means I have my target for the next life experiment, more on that later.

So, with the experiment coming to an end, there are a few changes I’m gonna implement in my life based on the findings of the past four weeks. I’ll bring reading blogs back because I miss reading what all the other wonderful people out there are publishing but I am not going to reinstall Reeder on my phone. Content consumption will only happen when I’m sitting here at my desk.

I am also not going to bring back the podcast app on my phone. I decided I’m gonna leave those mostly out of my life. That said, if there’s something I want to listen to, I can do it but only if I’m also doing something useful for myself in the meantime which means either training or doing stretching. That’s gonna be my new rule going forward when it comes to podcasts.

Youtube, who gives a shit. I should probably open that site once every 6 months and see if those 3 channels I care about have posted something and then forget about it for another 6 months.

News, I don’t want them back. I know this might be considered a privileged position—and I do have a blog post coming about that—but I honestly feel a lot better without them.

As for movies, TV series, and gaming, those were already so low that it’s not even worth paying attention to them. I watch maybe two movies a year, I don’t even remember the last TV series I watched and gaming is basically non-existent at this point in my life so I don’t think there’s anything worth changing on that front.

I’ll keep meditating two to three times a day for the foreseeable future. I’m absolutely loving the practice and I really feel stupid for having stopped at some point. What was I thinking...

With June almost over it’s time to think about what to do in July—other than celebrating my birthday—and I decided that with my next experiment, I’ll try break the muscle memory related to my phone usage. When I’m at home, my phone is not gonna leave my bedroom in July. Why my bedroom? Because that’s where I meditate so it will stay there, in the corner of the room, on the floor. I’ll only take it out of the room if I’m leaving the house. If everything goes according to plan, July’s screen time should be, on average < 1 hour a day. That’s the goal at least, we’ll see how it goes.

And that's it for the June experiment. This was a lot of fun, so glad I decided to do it. Life experiments are always incredibly interesting to me, and definitely something I should do more of moving forward.