Taking Back Control - Part 2

Gist

Three months ago I watched a video about reclaiming our lives in this over-stimulating attention economy. There were a bunch of steps I set out to take, to do just that. Now, a quarter of the year later, I thought I should write a follow-up post, and go over what worked, what didn’t, and how I can keep making steps towards a permanent change.

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Starting off, I have a confession. My previous entry, “Taking Back Control” was one of the founding ideas that led to the creation of this blog, or digital garden , so to speak. To me, there was significant meaning in this whole venture. This ‘wiki’, was just an excuse for me to start documenting and curating the knowledge I gathered from all sorts of sources, and in turn use them to create something of myself. Emergent connections, patterns, an ever-growing knowledge-base, and ultimately - unprecedented personal growth.

That’s what I had hoped for, at least. But the reality of the situation isn’t ever that simple, is it… If anyone actually looked, they’d notice how updates to this blog all but ended about 3-4 weeks in, and it was all-set to becoming another one of my started in earnest but never finished due to a general lack of direction and dedication to an end goal that I believed in type of projects.

And that in itself should answer some questions already. Did I manage to take back control of my life since my last entry? No. Did I try? Most definitely. Was it worth anything? Perhaps the most important takeaway so far - yes, it was; and I don’t think I’d have ever returned to make this follow-up if that weren’t the case.

I’ve always been so uncertain and quite frankly scared about exactly what I can share with the outside world. The whole concept of a blog didn’t entirely stick with me for this exact reason. It can often feel like I’m setting myself up for failure by putting it all out there for people can see; or, in a case such as this one where my main goal was to build something that grew in value and emergent connections the more I added to it - it felt like it would never really be ‘ready’ to share, at least not until I had posted a LOT and gathered a whole bunch of knowledge.

But enough of that. With this post, and some other general refinements to this site, I’m going to be sharing it with the world, finally. With that said and done, let’s go into some serious detail about my last 3 months attempting to change.

What I set out to do

I set 4 goals for myself initially:

1. Journaling - I wanted to make an entry everyday - no matter how short. The idea was that by channeling my curiosity and creativity by means of digital disconnect, I might create something truly meaningful, at least at a personal level.
2. Disconnect - The aforementioned digital disconnect. The main barrier to claiming back our attention and minds today is without doubt to resist the temptation to succumb to infinite on-demand distraction.
3. Exercise and Hygiene - I wanted my physical health and wellbeing to thrive along with my mental, and also as a supplement to it. Exercise and general self-care has been tried and tested a million times over throughout human civilization, so that’s what I set out to do.
4. Tracking - This one was certainly not as important, and more of something for myself to see if I could quantify the benefits this regime would bring me, but in essence I wanted to keep track of my efforts to the above and try to get some insight out of it. Okay, so how did I fare? Let’s dive in 🤿

Journaling

This was probably one of the bits that was a huge goal for me. For one, there was the curation and creation aspect, which was something the creator of the video I embedded on the original post spoke about a lot and that I wanted to nurture in myself; and, rather impressively, I did manage to do it everyday for a month

I wrote about a lot of things, and a lot of times my entries would be just 2-3 lines long, but that was fine by me. At the time, despite my enthusiasm for the project, I wasn’t quite as keen on as much of a detailed logging of information as I am right now. Besides, there’s seldom time between my day to day to dish out 3 paragraphs of nuanced thought for a daily journal entry.

Every entry would have at the very least, logs of whether I did a digital disconnect that day, how long I slept the previous night, and a percentage rating of my mood for the day. This was of course, to facilitate the tracking bit, but also to give a minimum content template to what goes into these entries.

Beyond the first month though, things fell off quite quickly. July saw me make an entry on only 10/31 days. A quick reading of the entries reminds me that I had some emotional trouble; My girlfriend and I have been long-distance since I moved to Japan for this job, and there’s been some very major effects on the way I processed and coped with my emotions.

Unfortunately, one of the most major ones has been that I tend to shut down any habit streaks, participation in group activities and socializing in general, and it becomes very difficult for me to direct my energy into anything other than thinking. For that reason, I think I should’ve predicted that my next lull emotionally would need special consideration in this whole attempt to change my life. But I digress, to speak about how August after that, there were zero entries lol.

That said, I don’t see it as a complete failure either, because that’s just how life is, and I actually took up something else in its stead - reading. After many years of being unable to finish a book, I decided something had to be done about my mind running to all the places I didn’t want it to, and bought some books instead.

Over July and August, I finished the 3 books pictured above, and have since been working on Yeat’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. I’ve loved taking up reading again, and it’s been a pretty unexpected result from this whole exercise; and I do say that it’s a direct result of this exercise, for reasons that I’ll get into in the next section.

Disconnect

My next effort was to actively practice disconnecting; and I don’t mean simply turning off cellular and listening to my offline playlists either. No, I know myself too well, and I would absolutely find some horrible offline application to keep my brain pacified instead of let myself think organic thoughts. So for me, I decided to use my commute time everyday (1 hour both ways, 2 hours total) to just put my phone and earphones away in my bag and not even check so much as the notification banners.

And believe me when I say, it was probably the most positive change overall for me in my life. Mom was right all along, it was the damn phones. Of course, this was one of the main points that the video I referenced last time was making - we need to teach ourselves how to detach from the constant onslaught of information and distractions, and cultivate a healthy diet of content that we can mindfully consume, without paying with our sanity and critical thinking ability.

In June, I clearly didn’t do it everyday; in fact it comes up to just 13/30 days. Looking at this, I initially thought I had failed horribly, but looking inwards at my consumption habits, I think it’s rather been a huge success. For starters, I want to clear right away that it didn’t entirely reduce my screen time. While I was avoiding those 2 hours a day of phone usage on weekdays, I’d usually make that time up by using it longer at night to catch up with all the texts and other events that I’d missed.

I did however, gain in some pretty significant ways mentally. One being, I actually started to have thoughts again! It might sound a bit silly, like “Akash, we think all the time”, but do you though? At least in my case, I feel like I barely had anything beyond transient, fleeting thoughts, or rather, reactions to whatever nonsense it is that I was consuming. Whereas after this change, by virtue of not having my phone with me, I started noticing the people around me, the effect the weather had in how much I enjoyed the Japanese architecture outside the train windows, how the kids here spoke so differently than back home; and I started to really think about it all, about human nature, about some new technology I’d heard recently, all that stuff.

I mentioned earlier that my renewed desire (and ability) to read books was almost definitely a direct result of this exercise, and this is exactly what I meant. With all this new free time and desire to see, hear, read new things, I found it in me to pick up books again, to really comprehend the words on the page beyond just their intended meaning, but also what I felt about it all on a deeper level.

Well that was June, so how about July? Promise me you won’t laugh 😶

I’m sure this next bit might sound a bit like cope from the outside looking in, but I don’t think I was completely failing my goal with disconnecting here either. What I noticed - and this isn’t 100% true for every day that I used my phone of course - is that even if I did end up keeping my phone in-hand instead of stashing it away in my bag, I was still far more mindful of what I did with it.

Based off my recollection alone (Since Apple’s built-in screen time app only shows you data upto 4 weeks in the past, wtf lol) I spent most of that time on my phone texting or on call with my girlfriend. But in the spirit of fairness, it’s worth noting that the mindless scrolling through Instagram reels and YouTube shorts isn’t exactly a memorable time of day, so my recollection alone isn’t a reliable narrator.

Nevertheless, I won’t go so far as to say I failed, because from just my newfound ability to jerk myself out of a doom-scroll before it takes up 2 hours of my day, I’m already leagues better than say the start of the year.

Exercise

Now this is what I’d typically say is the ‘big one’, is it takes the most physical effort of all my goals, and is just much more difficult by nature. In June, when I started this whole thing, I wasn’t unfit by any means. I’ve been chronically inconsistent with my workouts for the past 4-5 years, but I’ve been consistently inconsistent, if that makes any sense.

Which is to say, I’ve never been super regular, hit a 90-day workout streak, or been able to stick to a regime for a whole month. My will to exercise is largely dependent on 2 things. On an individual day-by-day basis, it’s simply about how much time and energy I have left at the end of the day. But on a more macro level, it’s how I feel about myself and my recent trend of success in taking myself to the gym. What that means is that the more days I end up being unable to make time for the gym, the more unmotivated and lethargic I get to do it even when I do have the time. This makes for a pretty potent and dangerous mix which keeps me consistently inconsistent. But enough about that, how’d I actually do?

Now June is a bit tricky to judge because I specifically remember constantly forgetting to wear my Apple Watch to the gym at night, leading to a bunch of workouts not being tracked. That said though, I don’t think I did any more than maybe 15 workouts total, since I was going to the gym an average of about 3 times a week, and doing calisthenics at home maybe 1 day of the week.

July was a lot better, and I found myself tracking much more of my workouts, both at home and at the gym.

In August though, I saw a lull in my motivation and energy to workout, and while trying to get back into a rythm in September, I definitely felt weakened by my lack of training last month.

You might notice that there’s exercise tracked even on days that I didn’t cross my goal of 60minutes, and most of those can be attributed to my walks to and from the subway station in my daily commutes. I walk a minimum of 2.5km a day just to commute, so at least I can say that I’m not entirely lethargic, even on days that I skipped the gym.

Overall though I still feel as though my attempt to exercise regularly has been more of a failure than a success, since I definitely didn’t put my all into it, and I can recall dozens of instances where I ended an otherwise-decent workout earlier than planned, simply because I didn’t feel like working hard beyond a point of light exhaustion. That said, the bare minimum that I’ve been doing has kept me fit and healthy and free of major sickness.

Tracking

Lastly, tracking. From the images I’ve attached in earlier sections it may seem like this was a huge success actually, because this is far more data about myself and my routines than I’ve ever had in the past. However, I personally feel as though it left a lot to be desired, as one of the main things I wanted to track - the correlation between my sleep, digital disconnect & exercise and my mood - fell flat on account of my irregular journaling (and thus, tracking of mood and habits), the presence of many external life events that greatly influenced my mood, and also some pretty crazy working hours in July that skewed sleep numbers despite me being overall pretty pleased with my days all things considered.

And so, although I can’t say with confidence that there’s any value in this last bit of data, here’s my sleep and mood (on days tracked) side-by-side for the month of June:

All the other data that I tracked to any usable degree has already been presented in earlier sections, so I won’t bother going over them again. Overall, I feel like I could have definitely done a better job tracking these metrics in order to have better insights into how my routine has affected my life in numbers, but I think the most important metric in the end is how I feel about this whole exercise; and I’m happy to say that I definitely don’t regret any of it, and it’s given me even more motivation to keep striving for the best life for myself.

Where Do I Go From Here?

That was a lot of yapping about what I’ve been upto the past 3 months, I know. But the question now is, where do I go from here?

More of the same, but different

At the very least I want to continue trying to journal everyday, or as close to everyday as I can. I think expressing my thoughts and feelings in this way has often helped me communicate my feelings to myself more honestly and thoroughly, rather than only catching flashes of random, scattered thought when my mind is racing. It forces me to sit with my feelings and really think about them, put them into comprehensible written text, and then process the final result which is often about what exactly am I feeling right now, and why?

I want to exercise more, but I’m still kind of conflicted about whether that means in intensity, or frequency. I think the main thing holding me back in this area is my lack of a concrete goal, which leads to me essentially flailing about it the gym until the disinterested voice in my brain tells me I’ve done enough and can head home. I’ll work on trying to set some real fitness goals and write back about it later.

I realize now that I didn’t touch on it at all today, but my I initially set my exercise goal in tandem with ‘hygiene’ - which is to say that I wanted to practice regular feel-good routines such as skincare, haircare, keeping myself and my room smelling nice and pleasant, etc. I’ve managed to be somewhat consistent with my morning routine, but going forwards I want to do more to ensure I always go to bed feeling fresh, clean, and 🌸 flowery 🌸

Tracking Plus Pro Max

Although my metrics tracking has left a lot to be desired, personally, I really enjoy the fact that I have all these insights to look back upon and analyze for myself, and this is despite me not putting my all into it. Moving forward I want to really pay respect and attention to the details of it all and, like this particular blog post, I want to put 100% effort into making the documentation of my life as thorough and insightful as I can manage.

Moving forwards I’ll try to track a few more habit metrics like supplementation and reading, and try to write these posts in a more professional and complete format.

Content Creation

An idea that I’ve been dancing with forever (and I mean forever) is that of content creation. I mean seriously, I’ve been making some sort of hobbyist youtube content, streaming on twitch, editing reels, producing music etc. for well over 7-8 years now, and the reason is simply that I really enjoy it. It unfortunately hasn’t stuck because I’ve never bothered to treat it as a serious part of my life and nurture and grow in it. But I want to change that, and work on cool things. This blog included.

Conclusion

These past 3 months have been a valuable chapter in my journey of self-discovery and growth. I’ve made pretty significant strides in improving my mental health and fortitude by being more mindful of my attention, and I believe it’s led to a renewed ability to think deeply and rediscover my love for meaningful habits.

My efforts in journaling, exercise, time management, and tracking has had its ups and downs, but change isn’t always linear, and that’s okay. What’s important is that I never give up on myself and always stay willing to try again.

Perhaps most importantly, I’m ready to share this journey with the world. By making this blog public, I’m taking a step towards my long-held aspiration of creating real, high-quality and high-effort content. It’s a bit scary, but it’s also exciting to think about the connections and conversations this might spark, even with myself.

This experience has shown me that taking back control of our lives in the digital age is an ongoing process. It requires patience, self-compassion, and a willingness to keep trying even when we falter. As I continue on this path, I’m grateful for the progress I’ve made and excited about the growth still to come.

Here’s to the next chapter of this journey – may it be filled with more insights, more growth, and more steps towards the life we truly want to live.

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Tokyo, Japan