Your mind needs airplane mode sometimes. Nothing important crashes while you’re offline.

Being reachable at all times keeps a small process running in the background. Part of you stays on call, which is why an hour of scrolling can leave you more tired than an hour of work. Almost nothing arriving on that screen is actually time critical. It only feels that way because everything arrives with the same urgency, whether it is a friend in trouble or a video.

Take one hour offline this week, properly, with the phone in another room. Tell whoever genuinely needs to reach you where you are. Notice what you reach for in the first ten minutes when your hand goes looking and finds nothing.