Under The Law of Equal and Opposite Advice I’m going to say that some people spend too much dakka on things that are actively harmful and I’d recommend literally the opposite.
I use Google Fi so I can text/call from anywhere I have internet on any device and then I simply leave my phone off hidden in my car for emergencies. I keep a small pocket notebook for anything I need to write down. I do take my phone out for podcasts or audiobooks while cleaning but that’s it. If you have kids you probably do need to get a dumb phone to keep on you but otherwise no.
Phones destroy slack. They are not a compact cost and getting a smartphone was a horrible decision for me. Now I just write down what I’m interested in and check it when I get home. The things that were time wasters don’t make it on the list. I batch more so I only need to check things once. I take more time to sit and think and relax. This is the single best thing I’ve done for my happiness in the last year.
Sometimes you scrape your knee really badly and don’t notice. It’s nice to not feel the pain, but also you just bled all over the carpet and now your mom is mad at you because she has to scrub the carpet for 20 minutes to get the dried blood off it.
If you could notice you scraped your knee immediately, make a fair assessment as to what care the scraped knee needs, and then turn the feeling off that is a super power. Sometimes I do that and it’s awesome. But I don’t have the power to turn them back on. They turn back on when they want, not when I want. Now I’m stuck in a bad state until something shocks me out of it. Plus sometimes they turn off completely involuntarily like the worst habit one could ever have.
My symptoms might be slightly different than Hazard’s because I specifically relate to depersonalization symptoms but here are some negative things I deal with when I have involuntary disconnect.
1) Sometimes I try and move my body and nothing happens. I feel the sensations of movement, but my body doesn’t move. When my feelings turned off, so did everything else.
2) Sometimes I can’t empathize. I can logically say what someone is feeling, but I don’t feel any true empathy for them when I’m in that state. I can’t turn just my feelings off, my ability to feel other people’s emotions turns off too. It leads to me treating people like they are disposable. It leads to me not enjoying talking about other people, as feeling their feels is what makes that fun.
3) My memory is extremely bad. I don’t remember what I say when I’m depersonalized. If someone wants me to repeat something they liked, oh boy is that stressful because I have no clue what I said or if I could say something similar. I was completely unaware of how I treated people when depersonalized because I remember so little of it. I don’t really remember much from last August to this June to be honest.
4) Sometimes I feel inhuman. If I spend a long period of time not feeling anything, then I’ve kinda opted out of the human experience and it’s like why am I even bothering to be alive? I’m not suicidal, just kinda meh.
5) Sometimes I make a bad call when to turn it off on purpose. Someone will be upset, I’ll turn my feelings off so it doesn’t bother me, and then the problem comes back later when honestly if I had faced the feelings I would have come up with a solution to the issue.
6) I have a weird relationship with akrasia. Sometimes I am the master of akrasia, just turning off my feelings and doing it anyways! But then I stop caring enough to even do that. Until my system 1 turns back on my system 2 won’t even care enough to input a new command.
7) “Turn off feelings” for me is a bit of a simplification. It’s just like, the feelings were in notme (my system 1?) so when I separate from notme I don’t feel it but it’s still there in notme. And then when I reconnect with notme they’re calm enough that I don’t really notice them but they are still lurking around in very faint ways.
8) I stay in situations I shouldn’t. My natural reaction to a bad romantic experience is just to turn off my bad feelings and continue the relationship. Without the negative reaction there isn’t really anything pushing me to call things off. So I spend a lot of time sticking in things I shouldn’t.