One thing that bothers me a lot as I get older, besides the wrinkles and grey hairs, is increasingly not having sufficient time to focus on the many many many plates I have spinning through having less energy and more to do. Previously I would try to tackle everything telling myself it is good to keep busy and how unbeatable I am while blasting out Sia.

I have since learned, or rather just accepted after seeing the total failures from my attempts, that trying to spread myself too thin results in tackling more problems but doing a half arse job of them all and not really creating or doing anything worthwhile. To this end I decided to make some changes in my life and approach problems differently, as admitting defeat is positive thing if you can refocus with a new approach that works.

The main change was stopping using my personal trainer in February this year, mainly due to cost benefit ratio as I just do not have the time and focus to make sufficient headway at the gym and get the gains I want, making paying for this service a huge waste of money and making it feel like a chore when I did go. In the first instance this was very depressing losing what progress I had made and piling on the pudding, wishing I had the time now to tackle this problem and halt getting any more unfit that I already am.

I will return to the gym more regularly in the future, but need to clear my schedule a bit first so I can commit to the time needed to see results, as we all know this is what motivates us to keep going.

To aid my personal growth and keep me in a good headspace without the focus of the gym I embarked upon a wellness course for 3 months to help me achieve a bit more zen and sort my head out a bit more, as if I could not get a healthy body, then I could at least get a healthy mind. This involves a lot of different little changes in life, but one easy win for me was mediation for 11 minutes every morning and evening. This is a nice quick win and something I can do while in hotels and that does not require a great deal of time, if anything it is quite a nice thing to start the day off with and something to look forward to in the evening as I can do it at any time. This also makes me feel I am achieving something I have tasked myself to do.

A practise within the course and heavily linked to the meditation is the requirement to not look at or use your phone for the first hour in the morning or last hour before bed. I am not perfect at this, but have made a dedicated effort to try to stick to it and have to say I feel so much better for it, so much so that I feel compelled to explain my thoughts now I am a few months into this, looking at the negative impacts of our phones and how we are slaves to them.

When getting up in the morning for work, I have a lot of tasks to occupy my time away from wanting to look at the phone, shower, breakfast, ironing clothes, packing my bag for the day etc so it becomes easier to turn my phone facedown, ignore it and get ready for work, only looking once I sit down with my coffee before I leave the house.

On a weekend though, as a carefree single person living on my own in a house, when I wake up without any work structure to adhere to, that urge to immediately look at my notifications is huge, and for what though?

• To see who liked your meme of a cat you posted on Instagram, this just feeds your narcissistic tendencies.
• To read more comments of an online debate you got in with someone you don’t know on a news post about something controversial and perhaps respond back again, this just feeds your ego and confrontational tendencies.
• To see who has swiped right to you on Tinder and sent messages complimenting you, this just creates a short-term dopamine hit and encourages you to send an equally flippant short term flirty message back. There is also the desire to swipe through an array of filtered photos, making snap judgements about people’s looks, creating and fuelling a superficial approach to how you interact with people based on how attractive they look in a single photo.

There are more examples depending on what apps and similar you have on your phone, but you get the point. When you have exhausted your notifications, you then start the never-ending task of scrolling through all of your feeds on all your apps, getting a jumble of different content messages, that your brain once satiated with a quick dopamine fix, wants the next hit, so you keep scrolling. The end result of doing this as soon as you wake is this resetting your mind for the day with a baseline of what to want and expect, a scattered jumble of short-term desires and wanting gratification with a whole lack of any focus to where it comes from. You may not realise it but doing this everyday helps you lose focus and become more ADHD like in your daily routine

The content you consume first thing as I have described might seem banal, but I promise you, try not to look at your phone for the first hour when you wake as you lie in bed, and gauge the addictive desperation you feel through denying yourself this banal and unsatisfying content your mind is telling you it needs.

Now let’s replace scrolling through your phone with downing a Gin & Tonic or whatever your tipple of choice is, great for an after work treat, but imagine if you had the desire for a G&T within minutes of waking and gave into it every day. Do you think this would make you a more productive person starting your day off with a G&T?

If you can ignore your phone upon waking and instead try engaging in a healthy and worthwhile practise in the first hour of the day, I do a cross legged meditation with palms facing upwards clearing my mind, others swear by hitting the gym or going on a run when waking, but something productive that doesn’t involve looking at your phone. Try this and I promise you that you will notice a shift in your mindset and approach to the day.

I’m not advocating not to use your phone through the day, but try to break the habit of becoming a slave to it upon waking and see if you notice any changes in your behaviour.