Are you numb enough?

Phone addiction. It's called "hang out with me" not "hang out with your phone". Get off your fucking phone. - oil on canvas by Zephyo

The other day I had a dream in which I was surrounded by people. They were all rushing around, and nobody could hear me.

It’s like when I say something to someone in the gym, and they cannot hear me because they have their tiny earplugs inside their ears. Sometimes it takes me a moment to realise that they cannot hear me. I literally have to tap them (or like in my dream: shake them) for them to hear me.

I must admit, I find it exasperating.

They say that dreams represent some part of waking reality, and I dread to say it but I often feel like this in everyday life. It’s like being surrounded by disconnected and disembodied people floating around. Zombies on autopilot.

Let me explain.

When something is unpleasant, we want to disconnect form it. Using distraction is one way of disengaging. For example, if I do a task that I find boring, and that doesn’t feed my soul, because let’s say I chose to do it to impress others, I’ll keep checking my phone for those quick moments of dopamine hits, just to keep me going.

The problem with that is that it accrues a certain ‘brain damage’. I’m quoting here the podcast with Erick Godsey which I strongly recommend you check out.

Apparently, the average amount of time a person checks their phone per day is 200 times. That’s every 4.5 minutes. If you take into consideration that it takes about 10-15 minutes for a person to get in the flow and focus on a certain task, we are never in the state of flow. We are always distracted. And that distracted, restless state then further increases our ‘brain damage’, our concentration span shortens, our memory shortens and our need for distractions deepens further, making us even more restless, craving those dopamine hits even more.

Our phone is an easy example but really, anything that we do without giving it our consent (meaning: consciously making a choice of doing it), like filling the gaps in our calendar with some tedious bullshit, is pulling us away from the state of flow and accruing more ‘brain damage’. We crave filling out the gaps. We crave that restlessness even more.

The Buddhist philosophy says, craving or attachment creates suffering (because we are not satisfied, we are missing something). It also puts us in the state of fight-and-flight as we’ll do anything to satisfy that craving. When I have an urge or craving, I can immediately feel my anxiety tightens its grip.

And how do we satisfy a restless mind? In most cases, we feed it more restless junk.

Restlessness disconnects us from our body, our mind and from everyone around. People often tell me that they are busy. No, you are not busy, you are restless.

Spending my formative years in Poland, I do struggle with small talk. These days the small talk becomes even smaller. It’s all about superficial quick fixes, black and white scenarios, loads of meaningless noise. Maybe that’s why we are all running around blabbering a lot of nonsense, just to override and disconnect us from that noise? Like a kid covering his ears: “La la la, I’m not listening!”

Or maybe because of our accrued ‘brain damage’ we are not able to dive into deeper topics? We become a meme, a Tik-Tok clip, an emoji.

I miss speaking to people.

I don’t mind receiving a voice note once in a while when something needs to be actioned. But I miss speaking to people. In real time. When we are both in the flow. When we (literally) see eye to eye. I dread the superficiality of the world that we are all inadvertently creating by our unconscious restless choices.

Maybe my dream is in fact a living nightmare. We all became numb. And deaf. Lost comms.

I have to say, one reason why I love Olympic Weightlifting so much is because it forces me to focus. You cannot really listen to music or podcasts when simultaneously throwing weights above your head that could potentially kill you. My loaded barbell is like a Jedi light-sabre that induces a state of a flow. Ninety minutes of being here and now. I am totally present. I am in my body; my mind is razor sharp. I love this state. The state of flow is when we follow our soul, and our soul resides in the space of our heart.

Now that I understand what it means to be in this flow state, this place where everything seems aligned, and which I’m able to tap into more often and when on my command, I dread numbing my mind.

I only want to numb it when my mind is a jungle. Although, little by little, I’m getting better in not getting myself tangled in such head space. I also found ways to deal with the jungle state without having to pull the plug (numbing, disconnecting).

The truth is, the more I sit myself down and quieten the mind, the more I can hear what my heart has to say. And the more I follow my heart, the less I want to disconnect.

Photo: Thea Bee Photography