When the Screen Went Green: What a Year Without a Phone Taught Me About the Mind
Guest Newsletter by Rose Eskafi
I’m part of the first generation to grow up online and the last to remember life before smartphones.
A 90s kid, shaped by pop culture in its golden age. Music videos on MTV, lyrics in Smash Hits, and mp3 players loaded with LimeWire downloads. My first phone was a Nokia. Then a pink Motorola Pebl. Eventually, an iPhone 3 at the age of fifteen.
I remember sitting in my school canteen at lunch, glued to the screen, checking the latest Facebook posts, which were from the night before. At that time, the internet still felt like a place you visited. People went online for a few hours after work or school, scrolling and posting from a desktop. But even then, it was clear something big was happening. The internet had begun its slow takeover. Not just of our time, but of our identities.
MSN, MySpace, Bebo - these platforms gave us new ways to connect and be seen. To experiment. To curate. All of a sudden, you could create who you wanted to be in public. A digital self was born. and it deeply influenced our friendships, romantic relations, ambitions, aesthetics, hobbies and other behaviours in real life. While Blackberry users were clicking away like morse code operators on BBM, some of us were busy syncing our ITunes and taking selfies.
We were the first to go into fight or flight because our crushes name came online or because we could see our friends secretly hanging out without us in photos. Growing up in this environment shaped how we manage stress and relationships, blurring the line between our real selves and our online personas. What seemed like everyday social media use actually rewired our brains during our critical emotional development years.
By the time I was twenty, so much of my identity was wrapped in pixels: my tastes, my beliefs, my self-worth, my sense of success. Looking back I see how deeply tied I was to parasocial relationships and online affirmation. It felt like self-expression, but it was actually self-surveillance.
We were all curators of a brand we didn’t know we were building.
When My Screen Went Green
Then one day, the screen on my gold iPhone 6 went green. And I just... left it.
I didn’t fix the screen. I didn’t replace the phone. I didn’t switch to a spare. I simply stopped. At the time, I had just graduated and was living with my parents. No job. No urgent responsibilities. If people needed to reach me, they could go through my sister, my partner, or not at all. And that moment, born out of apathy or fatigue or curiosity (I still don’t know which) changed everything.
What followed was a kind of unintentional digital sabbatical. In the silence left by that broken phone, I began to read again. I attended mindfulness courses, went on retreats, explored my spirituality. Eventually, I pursued a Master’s degree in Mindfulness and Compassion - not because I wanted to teach, but because I wanted to understand.
And all the while, I remained disconnected from the internet. No apps. No group chats. No infinite scroll. In hindsight, choosing me-myself-n-i@hotmail.com as my MSN addy might’ve been the earliest sign that I was destined for a life of introspection and mild identity crises.
What Happens to the Brain When We Disconnect
Studies from Stanford and MIT find that hopping between apps and tabs actually makes it harder to remember things and stay in control of our thoughts. In contrast, practicing sustained focus, like you do in mindfulness, works out your brain’s “thinking” center, helps you stay calm, and strengthens compassion and self-reflection.
Attention isn’t static. It is trainable, and what we do with our time matters.
In my case, I found I could concentrate again. I became more patient. More creative. Less performative. I was no longer living in constant comparison or caught in the emotional volatility of the internet. Instead, I had space to feel, think, decide.
When we’re not glued to screens, a part of the brain called the default mode network switches on. This is our natural resting state, where daydreaming, self-reflection, and imagination come alive. Even though it sounds like doing nothing, it’s actually when a lot of our most creative and meaningful thinking happens. But when we’re constantly scrolling, even through useful or inspiring content, the brain stays in reaction mode.
We lose the ability to imagine when we’re always stimulated.
Not just in the artistic sense, but in the ability to imagine different futures, possibilities, or responses to our current life. And to me that’s not a minor thing, it's fundamental to human agency.
After a year offline, I returned (cautiously!!). I bought a minimal phone, logged in occasionally, and eventually began sharing what I had learned. I now run a mindfulness-based business, and yes, that means I spend a significant portion of my time online again. It’s an irony I hold with humility. Because while I’m endlessly grateful for the life I’ve built and people I’ve met, I also remain clear about the cost of our hyper-connected age.
Looking back, I see that most of my screen time wasn’t about connection but about escape. Pop culture and the internet offered a welcomed hiding place. It was my nervous system doing its best to cope. But when we turn to avoidance, we start to lose touch with ourselves. Logging off helped me notice how often I used stimulation to escape stillness. Mindfulness showed me that attention isn’t just focus - it’s presence. And presence doesn’t need a performance. It just asks us to stay, even when the moment is quiet, uncomfortable, or unremarkable.
Practising Mindful Digital Hygiene:
Digital hygiene is about honouring attention as the important resource that it is.
Some simple, research-backed practices to try:
Turning devices to grayscale to reduce compulsive use (dopamine responses drop significantly)
Using app timers or removing social media from your home screen
Scheduling screen-free windows in your day (even just 10–20 minutes) to let the nervous system reset
Returning to the body through breath, movement, or grounding to interrupt dissociation from overstimulation
Sitting in boredom, rather than filling every pause, to let imagination return
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to throw your phone in the sea. But you do need to remember your attention is precious.
There is wisdom in the stillness. There is healing in the pause.
When the screen went green, I thought I’d lost my connection to the world but really, it’s when I found it.
Rose Eskafi is the Founder of Still Chill, and cofounder of Swana Healing & City Daze. She is also the author of the Still thinking Substack .