Good call: Robert Ashton’s digital detox

‘Switching my phone to flight-mode is a vital step in my preparation for worship.’

Most Sunday mornings I meet a couple of Friends for coffee at a café near to the Norwich Meeting House. We discuss the issues of the day and share news from the past week. Then we walk together to Meeting for Worship, where I find our conversation provides a good starting point for my thoughts and reflections.

Before leaving the café I always turn my phone and iPad to flight mode. That way, there is no risk of the silence of Meeting being broken by the rings and pings that punctuate the rest of my day. Having grown up in the era before mobile phones, the internet, social media and messaging, I still marvel at the multitude of ways we can now communicate with each other.

I’m no Luddite, and most weeks I chat with my son in London via Facetime and my daughter in the USA via WhatsApp. But I do appreciate my Sunday morning hour of digital detox. It reminds me of the importance for making time for the here and now, and not being always available to others. I spent the first ten years of my career selling to farmers, and because they tended to be out in the fields during the day, and only indoors near the phone in the evening, I would spend my days off-roading with my company car in search of distant tractors. Now of course all farmers carry mobile phones; if selling today, I would barely need to leave my desk.

The war in Ukraine has highlighted to me the importance of making more time for digital detox. Doom-scrolling through the live BBC coverage can quickly become addictive, and only serves to highlight my powerlessness to influence events taking place 1,000 miles to the east. Experts tell us that doom-scrolling is bad for our mental health, heightening our feelings of anxiety and precipitating depressive episodes or worse in those already struggling. But as I sit at my desk, temptation is just one click away and can be almost impossible to avoid.

Reflecting on my Sunday digital detox, I’m beginning to see it as a healthy antidote to doom-scrolling. Just as on a plane we are disconnected from events on the ground, so too is Meeting for Worship an opportunity to step away from the distraction of world affairs and focus on something deeper, more profound. Perhaps if we’re lucky, even sacred. On my own, I am likely to weaken and check my phone, but in the collective stillness of Quaker worship I am as isolated from distraction as I am when 30,000 feet above the ground.

Switching my phone to flight-mode is a vital, conscious and important step in my preparation for Meeting for Worship. I commend it to you, and I think I will try to make more time for digital detox in my working week. Then, and only then, can I be truly creative.

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