Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In
tldr: Looking for ways to turn off, tune out and drop in. To reclaim our nervous system. And to do it together. First an email from Jamie Wheal, then my thoughts.
The other day I got an email from the inimitable Jamie Wheal. Another one of those heterodox thinkers that I’m paying a lot of attention to.
Jamie says that Tim Leary had it backwards. That instead of: “Turn on, tune in, drop out” we should be thinking in terms of:
Turn Off
Tune Out
Drop In
I couldn't agree more.
Which is why I’m thinking about this as we turn towards September. As we pick up our pace and our devices suck more and more of our attention into that terrible dance between work and work avoidance.
I’m sharing a good chunk of his email here. But what I am especially struck by is how hard it is to peel our attention back for ourselves. How seemingly impossible it can be to reclaim our breath, and our bodies from the limbic hijacking of our devices and our “systems of production.”
More on this after Jamie, but first, here is what he has to say:
________________
What if what we need right now is the opposite of that hippie-dippy invitation to trip out and check out?
Turn Off (our digital distractions and constant addiction to screens)
Tune Out (culture wars, rage tweets and doom scrolling)
Drop In (to our bodies, our relationships and Nature)
It's not too much of a stretch to realize that each of those moves are kind of essential right now.
And the longer we go without taking those basic steps, the more deeply we get sucked into imbalanced, unhealthy, unsustainable living.
As Krishnamurti famously said, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society!"
We really can't consider ourselves remotely in the driver's seats of our lives if we haven't unplugged our digital leashes, and raised the level of our information feeds from kittens and outrage to deeper, richer, more considered sources.
(Sapiens author Yuval Harari famously commits to only reading books on subjects he wants to study–no articles, no social media).
Just try this at home: commit to leaving your phone charging in the kitchen and indulge yourself by going to bed 30-60 minutes earlier than normal, and have a kickass physical book of page-turning fiction on your bedside.
No kindles.
No self-improvement.
Ripping yarns only!
See how it feels to cozy up in bed delighted to disappear into a story that transports and inspires instead of binge-watching until your eyelids droop.
And see also if you can resist picking up that phone in the kitchen in the A.M. until your first hour awake has passed.
In less than a week, your nervous system will start to recalibrate. You will move from unconsciously seeking the next dopamine squirt towards a saner steady state.
But the final part is crucial too.
Dropping In
We've become such disembodied heads-on-sticks that we're pretty much shut off below the neck.
Very little input, very little perception.
If you think about it, we're startlingly close to that Pixar movie Wall-E where we just float around sipping Big Gulps in Lazy-Boy recliners.
I mean, how much of our days, from bed, to car to work to couch aren't we sitting down?
And perceiving the world through flat screens less than two feet from our faces?
All in a climate-controlled environment that barely fluctuates with the seasons.
It's crazy, and not at all normal.
Hence, our recent biohacky, Tough Muddy, Wim Hoffy fascination with totally contrived hardships: ice baths and sweat lodges. Intermittent fasting and primal movement.
We're intuitively yearning to expand our neurophysiological Overton Window—the permissible range of our bodies and brains...
From 72 degrees, constantly fed, upright and linear movements on groomed surfaces with near-focus screen vision and consistent prefrontal cortical executive function and beta wave EEG activity...
To
freezing and sweating, fasting and feasting, bi-pedal and quadri-pedal scrambling, (swinging, hanging, and hopping), to near/far visual range including distant horizons and peripheral eye tracking (like spotting snakes on a rock or a route through a trail), to transient hypofrontality and the shutdown of our inner monologues into alpha and theta wave contemplation....
AKA Flow states.
I mean, that's not so hard is it?
And that sounds kinda fun!
Almost like being a kid again.
So as we're all feeling kinda overwhelmed these days, flipping the script on Leary's catchy tagline can give us a way to reclaim our centers.
Try some or all of those tips for even one week, and see if you don't start feeling a bit more like your old (younger) self.
__________________
Back to me now…
But it is actually hard. It’s actually really hard.
I just went through a bout of fatigue unlike any I had experienced before. Thank God it was short lived. It feels so good to get rest, and to have a full bodied sense of being restored.
But when I hear Wheal say “go ahead and go to bed 30-60 minutes earlier than normal,” my first thought is “who is he kidding?” Even though I know more sleep is exactly what I need.
More rest is exactly what WE need.
Still here we are, in bondage to our screen. Seduced by self-righteousness in a culture war. Doom scrolling instead of tuning out. “Living” in our heads instead of our bodies. With little time for relationships. And with no sense that we ourselves are part of nature.
So what will it really take to take back our nervous systems and still be able to function in a world that is coming apart?
I am happy that terms like boundaries and self-care have become part of daily discourse. But I am also aware that we keep approaching these things from a very individualized perspective. We are inadvertently feeding the same mindset that took us away from each other in the first place.
I do my best to keep healthy and keep growing as a person. But I always do better when we are working on it together.
There is no single one of us that can withstand the violence of a cultural wave defined by distraction, disembodiment and separation. The richest and most powerful corporations on planet earth are devoting their vast resources to the extraction of our attention.
Religious and cultural communities often stand a better chance, simply because they keep coming together, week after week, season after season. And because they are held by the idea, a belief: “people like us do things like this.”
This is the place I come back to again and again. And the place so many of you are responding to.
We need some way of coming together that says we are here to turn off, tune out and drop in. We are taking our attention back. We are nourishing our nervous systems. We are developing the strength, power and capacity to turn towards the volatility and uncertainty that will continue to define our days.
We will not only support each other through practice, and re-learning ways of being. But we will break bread together, have fun together, and be in fellowship together. We will find ways to experience collective effervescence. The magical aliveness that comes from dance and from song and from being with each other in a way that truly matters.
You keep saying yes to this, and I keep putting it out. I’m still collecting names. Making room. Trusting that we’ll find a way.