Vox Meditantis

How do you manage screen time for yourself?

Thursday, 6th November 2025

The room has the late‑evening blue again – the kind that makes a screen look louder than it is, as if light could clear its throat and ask for just one more minute of your eyes. The question underneath tonight’s errands is simple and insistent: what does attention owe, and to whom, before the first tap of a finger.

The harbour quiets differently in November; gulls keep their counsel, and the boards give back a colder echo to footsteps, as if wood, too, rehearses restraint. On the walk home, Tom lifted two fingers from his wool cap – a benediction of habit – and asked whether the wind would keep up through the night, which is another way of asking whether the town will sleep. It will, mostly, if we let it.

There’s a phrase that has been working on me: leave a little room before the reply. That room, this evening, begins in the hallway where the phone lives after eight – exiled with affection, like a beloved guest who’s better company from the next room once the washing‑up is done. It isn’t austerity, it’s hospitality; boundaries as a way of saying to one’s own mind sit, stay, there’s a chair for you by the window, not a leash on the floor.

The day itself was busy without fanfare, which is the texture of most useful days. Rajesh and I traded an hour around a knotty case – two minds walking around the same table, noticing different grain – and agreed that sometimes the most ethical intervention is to slow the tempo rather than add another instrument. Between sessions, I watched the harbour’s colour turn from pewter to ink and thought of how often we try to backlight our doubts with a glow designed for shopping lists. Attention doesn’t like being shopped; it prefers to be seated and served.

Practicalities, then, because romance needs working hinges. Mornings are paper‑first until nine; even the news reads better when it crackles, and the kettle sounds like a small promise kept. Messages receive triage by intention: clinical, community, kin – urgent only; everything else is answered in batches, as if they were errands on the same street rather than alarms in the same room. If a message deserves nuance, it earns a draft on paper before the keyboard, which slows the mind just enough to hear what not to say.

Marcus slid a cup across the counter at noon with the sort of accuracy that makes choreography jealous, and asked, without asking, whether I’d broken my own rules yet. I told him the truth: rules don’t work for me; rituals do. A rule says no, a ritual says now; one resists, the other returns. He laughed and topped up the mug, which is the café version of clinical validation.

A family message chimed mid‑afternoon – one of those check‑ins that contains nothing urgent and therefore everything important – and I let it sit until the last appointment had its own unhurried ending. When I answered, it was from the window, not the desk, because posture is part of tone. Screens flatten distance; our bodies unflatten it again if we let them.

The question everyone asks, eventually, is how to stop the reach that happens before you notice the hand. Here’s what helps in this house, humble and portable:

• Put the device to bed in the hallway by eight; let the room keep its shape without a second moon.
• Before unlocking, ask three questions: what am I seeking, can it wait, and what would five minutes of quiet give me instead.
• When the itch persists, walk the block without pockets; absence teaches faster than discipline.

None of this is punitive; it’s a way of being a good host to a nervous system that likes chairs with backs and conversations with endings. The body keeps the minutes better than any app – eyes that stop sanding themselves, shoulders that lower without permission, breath that returns like a neighbour with a key.

In clinic, the same principle applies with kinder names. We talk about windows of tolerance as if they were architectural features – and in a way, they are – but most windows also have curtains, and it’s permissible to draw them. A patient asked today whether putting limits on doom‑scrolling makes a person naïve; I suggested it makes a person brave. Bravery, in ordinary life, is often the art of deciding what not to know until morning.

Priya waved from across the crossing with a rolled plan under her arm, the city’s future tucked like a baguette, and shouted something about light pollution at the harbour. We grinned – the professional overlap between an architect and a psychiatrist: both of us, in our way, arguing for sightlines. Clarity is not the same as brightness; the brightest rooms are sometimes the hardest to rest in.

I’m thinking, too, of my students and former supervisors, their old counsel arriving with the patience of post. Slow the frame when the subject blurs; lower the volume when you want to hear the line. The secret, if there is one, is that attention is relational – a pact between setting and self.

So the phone is in the hallway now, politely unavailable, and the window is doing the small theatre of night. A ship horn finds the low note that makes the cupboards hum, and somewhere down the street Tom’s porch light goes out like a reliable star. I’ll try the three questions once more before bed, not to pass a test but to keep company with the person choosing – tonight that will be enough. And if tomorrow forgets and reaches first, there’s always the graceful art of putting it back and starting again – civilised life is mostly the practice of beginning without drama.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.