Twenty-four-six (24/6)

Hello from me in 2022 (and in hope it isn’t another 2020×2)! I trust this new year has started off bright for you … and if it hasn’t don’t despair. May today’s newsletter ignite a spark to start – not only on the 1^st of January or on a dreaded Monday – but any day. Every day is a new opportunity to begin again.

The new year can bring about its own pressures as the external world bombards us with prompts to set goals and resolutions. With that, we either begin to frantically write the long list of goals (it is amazing how many goals we can come up with since we are carrying over 10 years of unmet targets) or we retreat due to it all feeling too much.

It is the reason I choose instead to come up with a theme for the year as a place to begin. Just a word that highlights my intention to assist keeping in alignment with my true internal desires and motivations. This way I can measure any goals, actions, choices throughout the year against the year’s theme and assess whether they help propel me toward or away from that intention. Below, in this month’s challenge, I have attached some theme options from Big Life Journal to get you working on what your theme might be. Often the largest barrier to achieving the life we want is due to not making the time to reflect and connect with ourselves. You can only see what’s in the water when it’s still. Stillness allows us to see what’s inside.

This leads me into the inspiration for this newsletter which came from my last month’s read – “24/6: The power of unplugging one day a week” by American film maker and author Tiffany Shlain. She describes how we devour tech and calls it ‘digital obesity’. Because we can do anything at any time we are doing everything at every time. Ceo of Netflix, Reed Hastings, was asked what his biggest competition was and he said sleep! How many of us binge on Netflix and deprive ourselves of the rest we need to be productive, energized and positive the next day (my hands up!)? Technology is good and bad and neither and all in between – just like us. Smart phones are the latest extension of our brains literally in our hands. We may not have created the iPhone or the internet but we do have the power to choose how we will use it. Dr Michael Rich from Harvard Medical School finds the term addiction unhelpful as it creates the illusion that we can abstain from it. Instead, he states that technology is like food – we need to use it and thus rather sees it as similar to binge-eating. You need to eat however managing your eating so it is healthy is about self-regulation.

24/6 suggests unplugging from tech for 24 hours one day a week – to create the mental space in this fast moving, overstimulating world, to process and reflect, and therefore choose well. I know the thought of it likely makes you cringe at how impossible it sounds, however consider instead what you might gain if you weren’t glued to a screen. What might you spend time doing that you just don’t do enough?

I’m in for the challenge and I hope you are too!