Starting the day glued to your phone

Even before Donald Trump was elected U.S. president, but especially since, my early morning routine has mainly been to open my eyes, roll over, reach for my phone on my bedside table, and check to see if the world is still standing.

Then while drinking my coffee, I end up following what often is a toxic trail, mainly on Twitter, as one geopolitical disaster, argument or misunderstanding, real or imagined, unfolds after another.

Oh yes, I do say good morning to and converse with my husband. And I read newspapers, both online and in print.

But often when I look up, more than an hour has gone by and my fingers are still mechanically working my phone. The birds that were chirping right outside my window when I started have flown off to a bigger brighter sky.

I like to justify this routine as a journalistic must.

But do I really need to know before I even have breakfast that Doug Ford doesn’t know how a government bill becomes law? That Jason Kenney, leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, thinks Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is monumentally stupid? That Donald Trump has — surprise, surprise — uttered yet another bigoted, inane or false statement?

I have concluded that waking up and absorbing ignorance, anger and invective, particularly on a smartphone, is a mental-health hazard. Face it, your smartphone is not a healthy or emotionally nutritious breakfast. I am not alone. More and more people I talk to tell me how spiritually crummy they feel beginning their day this way.

Many of us are familiar with that little display that shows what constantly drinking sugary cola does to your teeth. It’s on YouTube and it involves putting a tooth in a glass of cola and leaving it for a few days.

The result is not pretty — the tooth eventually becomes brown and shrivelled.

I’m starting to think that’s how many people’s souls, including my own feel — brown and shrivelled — after getting up each day and immediately subjecting oneself to a barrage of online tantrums whether it’s Trump-related or anything else.

I am not advocating being uninformed. It’s our job as citizens to know what’s going on, it’s stimulating to read great articles on your phone, and even if I were not a journalist, I would be passionate about the privilege — in healthy democracies — of being able to be informed.

But there’s being informed and there’s clicking your life away. If you’re throwing yourself full tilt on first waking up into what others are feeling, thinking or doing on social media, that leaves little room to get in touch with yourself and focus on what you need to have a productive and positive day.

Yet we can’t seem to distance ourselves from our phones. We are our phones. Everything that happens to us in life — be it schedules, appointments, work, adorable pictures of family and pets — happens on them.

Not too long ago Oprah Winfrey was asked during a television interview how she dealt with the current toxic political climate. Her answer was immediate. She doesn’t turn on her phone first thing.

So what does she do? As she recounted in another interview with harpersbazaar.com, after waking up, she does personal meditations, lets her dogs out in a backyard that resembles a personal park, and makes the perfect cup of espresso with just a touch of hazelnut.

But because she’s Oprah, she also has “stretchers.” That would be real humans who come to her home and enable her workout “two, sometimes three, people pushing against you as you push against them.”

OK, I don’t think that would work for me, financially or physically.

In non-celebrityville, where most of us live, my sister-inlaw tells me of a business associate, a single mother of teens, who recently instituted a family rule that no phones were to be turned on until after breakfast. She says it’s been lifechanging and everyone — including her kids — seems happier.

I believe it. I just got back from a 10-day vacation in France and Italy, and with limited phone data, I no longer could follow my morning routine. It felt both wonderful and like an amputation. I was no longer able to absorb every single piece of toxic political drama as it unfolded in real time.

Some events were morally important to follow — the murderous mess in Gaza comes to mind. But other arguments and feuds and pseudo happenings, especially as they related to Donald Trump? Pfft.

You might say I went in search of a view — a moody sky at sundown over the Arno River in Florence, some yellow roses at a country inn in Tuscany — instead of a viewpoint.

Did it change me forever? Not quite. I woke up on my first day back and went to my phone. But I spent less time on it, clicked on fewer enticements, and made sure I was aware of what I was doing.

I also compiled a list of very early morning activities I might try before firing up my phone: a phoneless coffee in the garden, reading one quick chapter of a book, doing 15 minutes of Pilates.

It’s called living. Instead of phoning it in.