Sacred Synchronies: How to Restore Rhythms that Make us Human
Sacred Synchronies: How to Restore Rhythms that Make us Human
Beyond digital fasting, resurrecting reality, and a way forward
Note: For those of you who prefer to read off paper rather than the screen, we have converted the post into an easily printable pdf file. Paying subscribers to
can access the file here, and subscribers to can access it here.I have found the liturgical season of Lent to be a fruitful time to examine my online habits and habitations more carefully and to seek better rhythms to carry forward.
After taking eight weeks of strictly limited screen time, I not only found myself feeling less stressed but also more alive. I never truly realized how much time I, and others, spend their lives in a world that isn’t real.
The motivation to join in was spurred on by the realization that I was more interested in scrolling Instagram than playing with my daughter. I was also consuming so much content, podcasts in particular, and it was great content, but I was often feeling anxious, agitated, unsettled, and restless.
Part I: Sacred Synchronies (by Peco)
Sleep and wake. Inhale and exhale. Pump blood in and pump it out. These bodily rhythms originate in and around one of the oldest parts of the human brain—the brainstem, which is ironically shaped like a joystick—and suggest something fundamental about our nature. We are creatures of synchrony.
While these are biological synchronies, we also experience interweaving rhythms in our mental and social lives. We work and we rest; we talk and we listen; we are active and we are still.
If our nature was purely biological, we wouldn’t have to worry about our rhythms, since they would be automatic. But God did not say, “Let us make humans in the image of an automaton.” We think. We choose. We are pattern breakers who can disrupt our rhythms.
Our technologies can disrupt them too. In the case of sleep, the blue light emitted by screens can interfere with our circadian rhythm. Using devices toward bedtime can also wind up our thoughts, making it harder to fall asleep.
It doesn’t end with sleep, of course. Being tethered to our phones and devices for hours each day means we’ve added an extra body part to our body. But this digital organ isn’t synched with the biological clock ticking inside us, or with the lifestyle patterns that keep us attuned to the world around us.
If anything, this digital organ is “synched” with other devices—which only adds to the de-synching we actually experience. Our “smart” devices are dumbly unaware of just how much they disrupt our biological, social, and emotional lives.
Beyond digital fasting
How do we protect our core rhythms against the disruptive stimulation that surrounds us? We aren’t the first people to ask this question. In the third century AD, Saint Anthony the Great gave away his enormous wealth, left the city, and went off to live in the desert as a hermit. He once said that “whoever sits in solitude and is quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking, and seeing.”1
Saint Anthony here is referring to very basic forms of stimulation: the noise of human activity. Almost two thousand years later nothing has changed, and everything has changed, as the three wars of “speaking, hearing, and seeing” are raging constantly around our fingertips, ears, and eyeballs in the form of notifications, pictures, video clips, films, podcasts, songs, emails, posts—or even in our thoughts about these things. Our device-conditioned minds can salivate with pings of dopamine simply in the anticipation of using our devices or just knowing they’re nearby. The three wars have thoroughly encircled us, inside and out.
In the struggle to survive the three wars, hermits and monks enjoy a couple of advantages. One is they can remove themselves from unwanted stimulation by cloistering themselves from the outside world. Caves, cathedrals, and monasteries are anti-technologies of silence.
A second advantage is that the lives of monks and hermits are structured according to a specific pattern of daily activity. In the case of communities of monks living together, everybody participates in regular prayers, work, and contemplation, and in a coordinated way that keeps the community operating in synchrony.
Most of us will never be monks, but we too are creatures of synchrony. We each have patterns in how and when we sleep, work, play, pray, eat. And yet, for the structure to hold together, to acquire a stable and energized rhythm, it must be attuned to certain aspects of our own nature and situation, while minimizing the disruptions of digital stimulation.
Many of our readers recently completed a digital fast during the Western Lenten period, while our Orthodox subscribers are still fasting according to the Julian calendar (see Part II of this post below). Although fasting from devices and certain forms of online activity are often experienced as beneficial, one of the downsides of digital fasting is that the benefits often don’t last beyond the fast. As observed by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen in The Distracted Mind:
...there is no evidence that extended tech detoxes actually work. Sure, you might feel better for an evening, a day, or even a weekend, but when that detox time is over you are right back to your information-foraging behavior, frantically dividing your attention to catch up with all that you missed out on while technologically disconnected. Just like short-term diets and drug or alcohol detox programs, unless you work to change your environment and routines, it won’t be long before you return to the same old habits.
And not only that. The authors point out that digital detoxing can lead to digital splurging as we try and catch up on everything that we missed during the fast.
If we want to maintain our fast for the long term, then we need more than a rule about what we don’t want to do. As Gazzaley and Rosen point out, we must work to change our environment and routines. Like monks and hermits, we need a new structure for how to live, one that replaces what has been removed with a pattern of life that accords with our nature as creatures of synchrony.
Cultivating synchrony
According to Haidt, social synchrony fosters connection between people, while synchronized behaviors during childhood play—singing together, skipping rope, clapping games between partners—is essential not only for social but also physical development.
Synchrony can also be found in our lifestyle patterns. Most of us tend to have habitual rhythms in terms of when we work and when we play, when and how much we sleep, exercise (active versus sedentary), need for cognitive stimulation (high versus low), social activity (being with others versus being alone), eating (when, what, and how much), stress management practices (present versus absent)—among many other activities that form our overall way of living.
Some of these things—like sleep, physical activity, stress, and diet—have been found to be major determinants in our health and longevity. To that extent, we all share commonalities in important areas of lifestyle.
At the individual level, our daily patterns are driven by personal preferences, our beliefs and values about how to live, external factors such as where we live and who we live with, and even our biology. Leonardo da Vinci needed just two hours of sleep per day2, but another genius, Einstein, needed ten. Each of us is unique in the activities and patterns that make our lives coherent and creative as opposed to scattered and unsatisfying.
At one level, then, developing synchrony in our lives is an individual effort at figuring out the pattern of living that “fits” with our intrinsic needs and context. But, unless we are hermits, we usually can’t live by our own rhythms alone.
Within a household, each person must to some extent adjust their own rhythms to the other members of the household. When are meals eaten, so that people can eat together when possible, and what’s the diet that works for everybody? When is sleep time, so that nobody is doing aerobics after midnight and waking everybody else up? When is the time for prayer, for ritual, for conversations, for shared activities?
So it’s not enough that we each enjoy our own personal synchrony, isolated from others. Although a home can’t function with the orderliness of a monastery (at least, not if there are kids!), some shared coherence is needed among the different members of the household, a degree of synchrony between the individual variations of life. This synchrony will never be perfect, and trying to force perfection will almost certainly backfire. We don’t want to be like the cogs in a timepiece, ticking in rigid unison, but more like geese flying in a flexible formation.
Part of this gooselike synchrony will include shared rules around device use. Are there certain times when devices must be set aside (like mealtime, bedtime, prayer time, conversation time)? Where are they set aside (a box, a shelf, a cabinet)? Does everybody follow the same rules, or are there exceptions? Is more conversation needed as members of the household grow older (as in the case of children) or as life situations change (like starting college or a new job)?
Anybody who’s asked these questions knows how challenging it can be to establish agreed-on patterns of living in a household that accommodate everybody from the middle-aged father who wants nothing but quiet to the energetic teens who want nothing but stimulation.
Still, if we can arrive at a synchrony in how we live, and where devices fit within that pattern, we’ll have a shared sense of accountability about our device use, which can lower our chances of relapse into old habits.
A kind of social facilitation might be partly at work here. Individual effort is strengthened by the awareness of others participating in the same effort. Cyclists cycle faster in a group than alone. Weightlifters can lift heavier weights when they have an audience.
Social facilitation can work even when the people around us are merely imagined or virtual. So, just by reading an article like this one, knowing that people around the world are looking for ways to reduce their device use and restore synchrony to their lives, can give us a boost of inspiration and added commitment.
Of wayward hearts and geese
Living in synchrony with others means making adjustments to our personal rhythms. Flying in formation with the other geese might require efforts we didn’t expect—like leading when we’re feeling too tired to lead, or having to follow when we’d rather go our own way. If the formation is flexible enough, it might be able to accommodate much of our uniqueness, weakness, and quirks. But if it’s excessively focused on our individual needs, the formation won’t hold.
One of the peculiarities of Western society, and which has been aggravated by our device use, is our drive toward more and more individuality. In our experience as part of a family, the effort to synchronize the personal rhythms between husband and wife, and then between parents and children (including teenagers), is a constant work-in-progress. Funnily, our last name, Gaskovski, is derived from the southern Slavic word for goose (guska), yet that hasn’t given us any special advantage. Our geese regularly drift out of formation.
We pretty sure we aren’t alone in this. Much as we try to synchronize our lives with each other and the environment around us, the attunement can be tenuous, and asynchronies can break in easily—a petty argument at the supper table, a lost night of sleep, days that pass sitting in a chair doing work without any exercise, days that pass without deep prayer. Suddenly our lives become discordant.
Some might say an element of discord is fundamentally always with us. According to Saint Anthony, “whoever sits in solitude and is quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking, and seeing,” but then Anthony added: “Yet against one thing he must constantly battle: his own heart.”
Perhaps that’s part of the reason why we’re so tempted by devices. The entrancing flow of stimulation doesn’t just distract us from the outer discord, but the inner discord. But that distraction is only temporarily effective, and the feeling of flow is really a digital dark flow that isolates us from real life rather than synchronizing us with it.
The way forward is to embrace the struggle for synchrony. We need to embrace any discord we encounter too, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the patience we develop as we work through it.
More than that, we struggle for the sake of our heart. Devices and emerging technologies often find their way into our lives first by capturing our attention, then by selling us a story about why they’re so essential, and then by creating a compulsive dependence on them. All this happens through the mind. But the mind is just the entry point. The heart is the ultimate prize.
The monks and hermits have always known this. We forget it at our peril.
Part II: Resurrecting Reality (by Ruth)
“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harnessing the power of synchrony, Peco and I invited readers to join our Communal Digital Fast at the beginning of Lent. We had a tremendous response, with individuals, families, and even whole communities committing to join in this endeavour. Before embarking on this common effort, we encouraged participants to develop a “game plan” that would help to specify usage rules. For us, this meant that Peco hardly made any changes to his already ascetic tech habits at all, only using online time to check media sites once on Fridays and once on Saturdays. I admire (and envy) his self-control.
My own rules included using the computer for a slice of time before breakfast to check e-mail, read some Substack articles, and respond to messages. Having this activity focused into a single sitting was extremely helpful and saved me from frittering time away on limitless distractions. I don’t own a cell phone, so this thankfully made my task a lot easier. The largest challenge was ironically posed when publishing an article on Substack, which apart from the many hours composing the piece, also entailed interactions with reader comments that simply did not fit into my hoped-for schedule.
At the end of the fast we invited participants to share their experiences which you can read here in full (as well as in readers’ personal Substack posts listed at the end of the article). These I printed out to highlight relevant observations which I then copied out by hand. You may wonder why in the world one would go through this trouble, but for me this helps to somewhat “unmachine” the interactions with our readers, as I not only pay closer attention to their words, but also deeply reflect on their thoughts as I re-write them in my own hand.
Long I’ve had a dream to throw my phone out my window one day in a fit of righteous indignation - maybe this will set me closer to this goal.
Drawing the Line
The usage rules that participants decided to follow differed somewhat, but had large areas of overlap. Many included deleting social media: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Pintrest, Reddit, Substack Notes, etc.; limiting number of e-mail checks; using the internet during one specific time during the day etc. Here are some specific examples readers shared:
“I initially set a limit of 20 minutes of Internet access twice a day. That seemed like enough time to check messages, emails, etc. I used an alarm to keep to time. If I was really immersed in something, I could hit the snooze button for ten more minutes: thus the absolute maximum was an hour a day online. I also made a rule that I had to do something else in the morning before going online- going outside, doing tasks etc., and set a cut-off time of 8 p.m.I don’t have a smartphone…that has been my main strategy for controlling internet use.”
“Keeping Safari off my phone is a helpful boundary and results in me using my nursing time to pray or read more often. I also don’t google things when I’m anxious. This is a keeper.I have realized I need some more stringent guidelines with Substack…my rule of not getting on until after 1 pm is a very good one. I had to do this with Instagram as well when I was on. And while content wise, I find Substack more wholesome, it’s just as much or more of a time suck. So I think I’m going to experiment with taking 2 days off entirely…I just need more time to forget that the Internet exists.”
“…my digital fast included: 1) No podcasts except 1-2 on Sundays. 2) No social media except Facebook during work hours. 3) No tv. 4) no phone use from 9pm-10am and 4-8pm.” “I took Facebook off my phone. Within one day, my mind felt cleaner. By the end of Lent, my mind and my soul were cleaner.”Joseph - “Gave up Youtube and social media videos in general. It was incredibly painful in the short term but I was delighted that a mere 10 days in and the sense of brain rot mostly reversed.”
“For Lent, I cut my Substack reading to my favorites, ignored the NYT, television, and radio, and read magazines more thoughtfully. I also eliminated podcasts and spent my time driving (not so pleasant) and walking in nature (much better) in silence.”
Physical Removal Practices
“What worked for me was a spiritual conviction to bettering myself by maintaining presence and staying in the moment. I suppose also putting my phone away helped too. Not just in my pocket. Away. In a different room. In a drawer. I think the more actions you must take to use the phone, the more precious seconds you have to put a small amount of distance between yourself and the impetus to use it. Seconds count.
In an earlier article on “How to Make Home for Humans”, I related that polling of 2,000 adults in the U.S. found more than 6,259 hours a year are spent tethered to gadgets such as phones, laptops and televisions3 (to put this into perspective: this translates to a stunning 44 years of life spent staring at a screen). Importantly, if your phone is visible, even if you are not actively engaged with it, it negatively affects relationships with others. It keeps the mind divided and signals that the conversation could get interrupted at any moment. In a study conducted by researchers at the University of Essex, “the mere presence of phones inhibited the interpersonal closeness and trust, and reduced the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”
One of the simplest and most effective strategies to reduce screen distraction, is to remove them from your immediate environment. Within our main living area, tech is stored in a wooden cabinet by the stairwell when not in use, away from the center of attention. Having it enclosed has the added benefit of reducing temptation to quickly check something online.
Another excellent strategy is separating the different uses of your smartphone and going “retro-tech”, for example:
Use a simple phone to make calls when at home.
Use an alarm clock (this one has a silent sweep second hand).
Use a high-quality CD player as a great audiobook solution for younger children.
“The answer for me is using older, perfectly adequate technology that does not remove my physical or mental presence. The best example for me is as simple as wearing a watch…The problem is when we check the clock on our “smart” phones, we inevitably see a notification or an email and before we know it we are wasting our time checking social media when we just needed to check the time.” “My wife and I plugged our phones in on a counter in the kitchen and left them there all day / night, excluding errands where they were needed. We didn't closely monitor usage time, because using them required standing in the kitchen: a pretty natural rate-limiter. I'd think: "Oh, I should look up X..." but then remember I had to go to the kitchen to do so, and my laziness was effective.
Just physically relocating the phone worked great for us. Just not having it on you, getting used to doing things without it, is fun; you realize how many little moments have become "phone usage" moments in your day. Finishing a task always makes me want to check my phone, for example!”
“I’ve stopped charging my phone in my bedroom (this I’ll keep!) and it’s helpful because now when I wake up (to an actual alarm clock) I don’t immediately reach for my phone to scroll on Substack or through emails. I think I’ll also be going back to using social media via my computer and not on my phone all the time, as well as time off on the weekends.” “Write down on a piece of paper what your are going online for; then cross off like a checklist and log off…having a clear sense for why I'm logging on and what I'm logging on to accomplish helps me to remember the technology is supposed to be there as a tool to help me with an intended purpose or task.When I'm good about doing it, there is a big difference. Not only in how much time I spend on the internet, but in how much actually gets accomplished.”
Feasting on the Real
“The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.”
from Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
The Communal Digital Fast included suggestions for “feasting on the real” that would help ground participants more firmly in reality such as meeting with friends / family / neighbours for face-to-face conversations, walking, reading, creating beautiful things, cooking etc.
Simple Acts of Sanity: A Seed Catalogue in which we had compiled readers’ anachronistic practices, provided a rich cornucopia of practical ideas to encourage and inspire participants to engage with their immediate surroundings.
Initially it was very difficult. I had so much more time on my hands and I felt cut off from my friends. However, after a week or two, I found myself picking up other pursuits. More actual reading of real books, more baking, gardening and knitting.
I didn’t specifically give up anything for a digital fast…What I did do was spend a lot of time on activities that are not tech-connected, like hand-sewing, crochet, dancing. It was an add in rather than a take-away.
These are some of my “feast on the real” projects: A wrap that I knitted from llama and alpaca wool my friend had made (thus for the first time I knew the actual name of one of the animals who produced the wool, in this case “Mr. Brown”); reading Middlemarch4 (just finished it today!), and baking traditional Swiss buns for Easter.
Continuing the Fast
The Communal Digital Fast produced much fruit and has sown seeds of more permanent change for many participants. It also came with challenges and struggles. Some readers related how they had to abandon their plans because of physical pain that kept them bed-bound; some missed not interacting as much with their online friends; others struggled with tripping into rabbit-holes; some faltered because they did not have a plan in place. Many of us will relate to Anneliese’s and Elizabeth’s observations:
“And, overall I have again observed the pattern that when things are difficult emotionally, or my kids are especially needy (or both), I tend to reach for escapism, and while it makes me feel a little better it worsens the overall tenor of things considerably.” “…my struggle with fasting during Lent isn’t primarily a struggle against unhealthy food or digital habits, but against my own heart’s inclination to seek fulfillment in places it cannot be found…I am not done yet with my digital fast, at least as a perpetual assessment of my digital usage and ongoing invitation to analog living…I wish that I could say that I’ve gotten myself all sorted out and am living in a digital paradise now, all garden and no wilderness. But I’ve still got work to do.”Yet there remained a fervent commitment to set failures aside, make adjustments, and continue steadfastly onward.
But, I also found that beating myself up and acting like it’s too late is a bad strategy, if I slip up, that’s okay. I recognized that, was able to forgive myself, and noticed just how ick being online made me feel again.
A Way Forward
Changing the pattern of our lives demands intentionality. That can take time, and stepping back, to see the ways that devices might be disrupting our daily rhythms of activity. The more common areas of disruption can include:
sleep
mealtimes
work
education and learning
time with family and friends
time in nature
time spent in physical activities
time spent in spiritual practice
In each of these areas we can ask:
- What is the impact of device use, if any?
- How can I eliminate or limit device use in problem areas?
- Are there people within my household, or in my community (including my online community) that I can share this effort with on a more permanent basis?
The practices that we have discussed here may seem simple or too modest. You may wonder, will it really make a difference if we replace checking social media with reading a book, going for a walk, or spending time in quiet? Will it matter that we put our phone away while playing with our child, that we use a wristwatch, or create a screen-free living space? But we shouldn’t underestimate the power of small, consistent change. And if we can make that change, we also become part of a growing synchrony of people everywhere who are striving in the same direction to restore the rhythms that make us human.
If you found this post helpful (or hopeful), and if you would like to support our work of putting together a book on “The Making of UnMachine Minds”, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber, or simply show your appreciation with a like, restack, or share.
Please share your questions, reflections, successes and struggles with tech use in and out of the home in the comments below.
Above all, share how you have restored important activities and rhythms in your life.
We can all benefit from hearing others’ experiences, encouragement, and guidance.
Readers shared their experience of the Communal Digital Fast:
Seeking Reality and Better Rhythms by
Digital Fast: Reflections and Digital Fast Part 2/5: Music by
He’s alive, but where is he? by
Forty Days at the Drawing Desk by
Yet Grace Abounds - Fasts, Feasts, and Lessons Learned from Lent
Mixed Media - A digital update with an analog flair by
4 lessons from our recent digital detox by
Further Reading
Can You Raise a Teen Today Without a Smartphone?
How to live without your phone by
An Internet Independence: An Experiment in Disconnectivity by
Why I traded my smartphone for an Ax by
For A Visual Guide to “Random Acts of Anachronism” see:
You can also support us via our brand-new Unconformed Bookshop , as far as we know, the only one dedicated to books on unmachining.
Da Vinci slept for two hours each day by taking twenty minute naps every four hours.
The average U.S. household boasted an average of 11 connected devices in 2019, some statistics suggesting that this number went up to 22 devices per household post-pandemic.
I actually achieved Middlemarch ³: I was exactly in the middle of Middlemarch in the middle of March.
Thank you for your writing! I'd like to share my experience of deleting my Instagram for those that may want to but are having trouble doing it. I was very active on Instagram for over a decade and had around 300 posts, many of which were thoughtfully taken photos with longer stories and reflections in the captions. I felt that I needed to delete Instagram completely, but was having a hard time with the idea of deleting all of the photos I'd taken and words I had written. But I did it around 2 months ago and I'm so relieved. There is a way on Instagram, in your account settings, to download all of your data. It's everything: photos, captions, dates of posts, stories you posted, messages from the message folder, etc. I did that and then began making a photo book of all my posts (photos, captions, dates). It's a big photo book! But I think it will be nice to have a physical book of my photos and words and it helped me feel like I could delete it without regret.
I have found myself reading a lot more! I've been cruising through Wendell Berry's Port William books. Playing Dutch Blitz with my husband when we're bored. Walking. Reading my Bible more.
I asked my husband if there's anything he's noticed in me since I deleted Instagram and he said that when I had it I was more irritable. For instance, he said when he would interrupt me to talk to me while I was scrolling I would be irritable with him, but now when he comes to talk with me I'm, "less sharp/harsh." Specifically, he said that when he interrupts me when I'm reading or doing another pastime I'm more interruptable than I was when my pastime was Instagram.
This was wonderful to read, thank you! The success and failures of my fellow travelers gives me a sense of community in fighting this necessary battle. When I read these posts, I always find a new strategy that I want to try out in my own life. I'm still far from my goal of putting the machine in its proper place but I'm closer than I was a year ago. I feel hopeful.
I've been pretty vocal with friends and family (and even the odd person in the check-out line at the grocery store) about de-machining and have been pleasantly surprised by their reactions. I've realized that so many people are longing for this type of conversation or even confession and are looking for a way out. It's like we have discovered a map that shows one how to get back to this beautiful land called REALITY. Onwards and Upwards!