The phone is face-down on the table. You turned it over yourself, a small act of discipline you were rather pleased with. It has not buzzed. It has not lit up. And yet some part of you is sitting beside it, the way you might sit near a sleeping baby, listening for the first sound.
You are reading a page of a book. You have read the same sentence three times.
I have started to think of this as a radio left on between stations. Nothing is playing, exactly. There is no programme to follow. But there is a faint hiss in the room, and some part of the mind keeps leaning towards it in case a voice comes through.
It is a strange thing to be tired by something that did not happen.
There is a much-discussed study on this. Ward and colleagues (2017) asked people to complete tasks measuring working memory and attention while their own phone was either on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. In their experiments, people whose phones were in another room tended to perform better than those whose phones were on the desk, even though the phones were silent and nobody checked them. Later attempts to repeat the finding have not all produced the same result, so it is best held lightly. But the idea it raises is worth sitting with: that something can take attention simply by being near, by being the place we expect the next demand to arrive from. Ward et al. (2017)
I do not think the phone is the enemy. It holds your friends, your child's school, the map that got you home in the rain. Your mother's voice lives in there. It would be absurd to treat it as a villain.
But it may be worth noticing what it costs to keep a door open all the time.
When every room has a door that might open, part of you is always standing near it. You are never quite seated. Your own thoughts get the second chair, the one by the draught, and they learn to speak quickly and quietly in case they are interrupted. Over months and years that becomes a habit. You stop expecting to finish your own sentences.
The signal, the small knowledge of what you want and how you are, is still broadcasting. It is simply hard to hear over a hiss you have stopped noticing.
So the ritual this time is very plain. It does not ask you to delete anything or to go anywhere remote. It asks you to carry the phone into another room for a while, the way you might put the kettle back on the stove after pouring. Not to punish it. Just to let it be somewhere else.
Then come back and sit down.
The first few minutes may be uncomfortable. The hand reaches for a pocket that is empty. The ears listen for a sound that will not reach them now. This is the hiss fading, and it can feel oddly like loss. There is nothing wrong with you for feeling it.
Then, sometimes, a different kind of quiet. You hear the clock, if you have a clock. The tap dripping. A neighbour's door. Your own breathing, which has been going on underneath everything all day without asking for anything.
And somewhere in that quiet, the beginning of your own voice. Not a revelation. Usually something small. I'm hungry. I'd like to go outside. I miss my sister. I don't want to do the thing on Saturday.
These are not grand messages. They are simply yours. They have been waiting for the radio to go off.
Ritual Invitation
Choose twenty minutes this week. Carry your phone into another room and leave it there, sound on if you need to be reachable. Sit somewhere you like. Do not try to do anything special with the time. Notice the moment your hand reaches for it, and the moment the reaching stops. Then notice the first thing you hear from yourself.
Your Turn
Where does your phone sleep, and where does your attention sleep beside it?
What was the first small thing you heard from yourself when the hiss went quiet?
Keep the Thread
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Signal is the third Witch in Progress book: a small companion for hearing your own voice again under the noise. Read Signal
References
Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462
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