Being constantly connected to our work and smartphones makes us feel vaguely stressed and anxious. It prevents us from focusing and thinking deeply, and from spending time on the things that bring us lasting joy. It’s good to take a break.

But taking a break can be hard to do, because our smartphones and social media and email are designed to be addicting. (If you think you aren’t addicted, I challenge you to take this quiz.) It doesn’t work for most people to just will themselves not to check their phones or their email.¹ Below are a few strategies to put some distance between yourself and the things that are stealing your attention.

1. Get an old-fashioned alarm clock and banish all devices from your bedroom. Your bed and bedroom are not for working (or checking social media, or watching Netflix). They are for sleeping and resting and connecting with your partner if you have one. Don’t let your phone, and potentially your work, be the last thing you do before you go to bed and the first thing you do when you wake up.

Say goodnight to your phone and computer at least one hour before you’d like to be asleep. Do this so that you are able to sleep deeply and wake up rested. Charge your phone outside of your bedroom, and set it to automatically go into do not disturb mode an hour before your ideal bedtime.² Set your computer up to automatically shut itself down at the same time every night.

2. Get a good book to read before bed. It’s important to replace the time you would have been on your phone with something that will capture your interest, but not keep you awake.

3. Plan and schedule two or three specific times to check your email — strategically — per day. Block off enough time to get all the way to the bottom of your inbox in one way or another. If you need five hours (or three hours, or twenty minutes) a day to deal with your email, fine, but make sure you’ve actually blocked off those five specific hours on your calendar (or three hours, or twenty minutes) every day. Now do the same thing for checking social media, if you want to do that every day, and for checking and responding to your texts.

 Download a Take a Break from Your Phone & Email Cheat Sheet PDF here

Set up an app like “Inbox When Ready” to deliver email only during your scheduled times. You’ll still be able to access your email (in case you need to retrieve a file or something), but you won’t be tempted to check for new emails until your scheduled time…because you’ll know that there are no new emails. This is like methadone for email addicts, because it takes all the reward out of checking.

4. Turn off all your alerts. Every. Single. One. Unless you are actively checking your email/texts/social media during one of your scheduled times, you don’t need to know what communication is coming in. So turn off all notifications for your text messages, email, and all of your social media feeds on your desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Vibrate counts; turn it off. Breathe. Even if, through the strength of your ironclad will, you are able to resist reading a message that comes in, if you see or hear or feel a message notification, your brain has still been interrupted by that alert. Even a millisecond attention hijack like this will make you less focused, less able to resist other temptations, and more irritable.

5. Reorganize your phone so that it is less addictive. This will help you stick to your scheduled checking, and will help you not get sucked in when you don’t want to be on your phone. Move all the most addictive apps (like social media and email — and anything you check compulsively or on a whim when you see it) off the homepage. Put them in folders on back pages so that you have to search in order to launch them. Don’t worry, they’re still there. They just won’t be constantly seducing you with their siren songs.

6. Tell your people what you are up to. Tell your friends, family, and coworkers that you’re going to be checking your email and messages strategically, at pre-scheduled times during the day. That way, when you don’t respond to their messages, they will know it isn’t personal.

Give people a way to get ahold of you if something urgent comes up. This is more for you than for them, so you don’t worry about what emergency you are missing out on. Finally, and this is the most important one, ask your people to help hold you accountable. Consider this a form of crowd-sourced willpower.

7. Practice bringing your attention back to the present moment. This is what the famous Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer termed being “mindful” more than 25 years ago. To Langer, mindfulness is the “simple act of actively noticing things,” and she’s shown that it results in increased health, intelligence, and happiness. So wherever you are, whatever you are doing, look around and really notice things: What is different in your environment? In the people you are with? In your own body?

8. Feel what you are feeling. Without email, social media, and messages as your constant companion, you’ll find yourself doing things like standing in line at the grocery store…just standing…staring into space. Perhaps dying to check your phone. This may be uncomfortable at first. Resist the temptation to numb this discomfort by, say, eating that whole box of cookies you’ve got in your cart.

Why? Because when we numb unpleasant feelings, we numb everything that we are feeling. So to honestly feel the positive things in life — to truly feel love, or joy, or profound gratitude — we must also let ourselves feel fear, and grief, and frustration.

If you are feeling anxious or excited or bored, let yourself FEEL that emotion. Surf your emotions like waves.

Where in your body does the feeling live? Is it in the pit of your stomach? In your throat? What, really, does it feel like? Does it have a shape, or a texture, or a color?

Breathe. You are strong enough to handle the feelings that come your way.

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 Download a Take a Break from Your Phone & Email Cheat Sheet PDF here

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¹ If you want to learn why, read Catherine Price’s excellent little guide called How to Break up with Your Phone.
² I actually turn my ringer ON at night when I put it in the charger. That way if one of my kids wants to get ahold of me in the middle of the night, they can call twice and “break through” the do not disturb mode.

Recently, I went to high school Back-to-School night with my first husband, Mike, and we ran into a colleague of his I’d never met before. “This is Christine,” Mike said brightly, and then he hesitated. “My, um, my…ex-wife.”

As soon as we walked away, he apologized. “I’m so sorry for introducing you as my ex-wife. It’s such an ugly term. I should have just said you were Molly’s mom, but he doesn’t know Molly, so I wasn’t sure what to say.” We have been divorced for ten years; we’ve both been re-married for five. I harbor no ill feeling about being called Mike’s ex-wife, but I was touched by his sensitivity and kindness. At the end of the evening, he even opened my car door for me.

Mike is just such a nice guy. We get along so well now that you’d never know that our relationship was once high-conflict, marred by anger and criticism.

I have hundreds of old narratives about what went wrong in our marriage, but I’ve never been quite sure which one is true, which one to believe. The narrative that haunts me the most is the one in which our divorce was my fault. I was too critical of Mike; I provoked too much conflict. I should have seen that my complaints about him were actually things I didn’t like about myself. I should have accepted that romance would inevitably fade, and, at the same time, I should have worked harder to keep the romance alive.

This narrative is laced with the fear that I behaved selfishly, and, as a consequence, I’ve harmed my kids irreparably. It inspires shame and regret, launching me down a slippery slope of self-criticism that leaves me feeling like I’m not good enough.

I’ve been thinking about this all week. September 10th was Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish New Year. My husband, Mark, who for the record is just as nice a guy as Mike, is Jewish, and I go with his family to services at their temple. For ten days after Rosh Hashanah, Jews show sorrow and regret for wrong done in the previous year.

I must have some catching up to do, because when I was reflecting on my regrets about this past year, I felt sorrow for mistakes I made a decade ago. It’s not that I regret my divorce; I don’t. I do believe it was the right thing for our family. But I could see clearly what I would do differently now, given the chance. It was time to let go of some old regrets.

Over the last 10 days, I moved through a few steps that have each been helpful.

1. Forgiving myself

Yesterday was the “Day of Atonement,” and it brought me some peace. I’d been reading about self-forgiveness, and Rick Hanson’s recommendations unlocked something in me. He advises us to acknowledge the facts surrounding the circumstances or behavior we regret, including those that are hard to face. I let myself remember the divorce, and all the people that it affected, both then and now.

Then, I thought about my mistakes. But Hanson recommends distinguishing between our moral failings and simple unskillfulness. This step was a huge revelation to me. As I look back on my failed marriage, I see a mess of unskillfulness. Even things that might be perceived by others as immoral—to some people, divorce itself is immoral—seemed to me to stem from my own lack of certain emotional skills.

It turns out that the list of things I’d do differently wasn’t that long. Ten years ago, I simply didn’t have the skills I needed to keep my marriage together. There is an innocence there that is easy to forgive.

2. Taking accountability

This sort of self-reflection can be really productive. It’s important to take accountability for our mistakes and our failings, and to repair the hurt we cause other people. How else can we do better?

Seeing that I behaved unskillfully allows me to take responsibility for mistakes that I made, rather than clinging to my judgments and justifications. At the same time, it helps me not let my mistakes define who I am. I am more than my missteps and bad habits.

It also gives me somewhere to go: I can practice now the skills I needed then. This approach helps me respond when well-meaning people—observing how well Mike and I now parent together—wonder out loud if we ever regret getting divorced. We are different people now than we were then. Getting divorced gave us ample opportunity to practice more skillful ways of relating to one another.

3. Practicing acceptance

Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: Acceptance is the precursor to atonement. I’ve finally surrendered resistance to my divorce and my unskillfulness, as well as the sorrow that I’ve felt about it all.

I’ve also, finally, found peace in accepting that there is a lot I don’t know. I don’t know if the marriage would have worked if I’d been more skillful. It’s easier to think that there is no way it would have, so it doesn’t matter what we did and didn’t do. For ten years, I’ve been constructing narratives that make my memories more black-and-white than they really are. These narratives provide me with certainty that I did the right thing. But only until they don’t.

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one”
―Voltaire

Certainty can be temporarily reassuring, but it can also turn on us, revealing its opposite. One minute I’m sure that my marriage with Mike would never have worked; the next I’m sure it could have, because look how well we get along now.

Accepting uncertainty is such an underwhelming alternative to feeling certain that you did the right thing, even if feeling right doesn’t last. But, ultimately, uncertainty is the lesser of two ills; as Voltaire wrote, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”

I do know one thing for certain, though: If I’d made different choices ten years ago, I would not have the life I have now. It’s a life that I love, one where I’m happy and fulfilled. I love Mark and his big, loud Jewish family. I love our marriage, even when it’s hard. I can’t imagine life without my amazing stepchildren, whom I love and adore beyond reason. I know my daughters can’t imagine life without their stepsiblings and stepparents. It’s a life that I would never consciously give up. But, ironically, it’s one that I was giving up, unconsciously, every time I harbored those old fears and sorrows.

Accepting the past and all its messiness has allowed me to let go of what I’d actually already lost. Already I’m better able to shift my gaze away from the past, to focus my attention on the present. The past, and my stories about the past, no longer feel relevant. There is no emotional hook. This, I’ve come to believe, is atonement.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes it’s easier to see how we can achieve fulfillment and contentment when we examine what we’re doing in to sabotage them. I hope you enjoy this flip on the Secret to Happiness from my presentation at Happiness and Its Causes in Australia.

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. — Anne Bradstreet