How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times

a path to savoring is to feel a sense of anticipation before enjoying something.

On top of the extra free time, I found that I focused on more fruitful things—my work time became more productive, and my personal time became more meaningful, almost immediately.

The experiment wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, mind you: during the first two weeks, old compulsions took time to fade away, as they will for you, if you decide to do a similar experiment (and you should). At the start, you may find that your mind is restless and craves distraction. You may also notice all of the various cues that lead you to pic

Digital-only activities. We can only do these activities in the digital world, like refreshing our social media accounts, playing video games, and checking for new email. Analog-only activities. Activities we can only do the analog way, like taking a shower, sleeping, and drinking coffee. Activities we can do in both worlds. Examples of these activ

After choosing a time period to do it for—I’d recommend at least two weeks, as it takes our mind around eight days to begin to settle into a new, lower level of stimulation—notice what changes.

First, we can reduce how much chronic stress we face. Remember that while burnout has traditionally been defined as a workplace phenomenon, personal stress contributes to burnout, too. The more chronic stress you can tame, the greater the inroads you will make in combating burnout.

Turn to this list whenever you’re looking for something to do. The more substitute activities you identify, the easier this experiment becomes.

Here’s the trick to this advice: when we want to do an activity efficiently, we should do it digitally, and when we want our actions to be meaningful, we should do things the analog way.

By using downtime to lower our height of stimulation, we reclaim calm. I would even go so far as to say that lowering our average stimulation height is the purpose of downtime.