Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch
Our brains crave connection. But sometimes disconnecting from technology 
is the best way to reconnect with each other, and ourselves

Picture“Honey, it would have been rude not to have included all of us, you, me, and your BlackBerry.”























by Tiffany Shlain

It’s Friday evening. The smells of rosemary chicken and freshly-baked challah bread fill the house. My daughters, three and nine, sigh as I gently detach the iPads from their laps. One by one, our screens are powered down. My husband, Ken, is usually the last holdout, in his office, scrambling to send out just one last email before the sun sets. Then he unplugs too. We light the candles, and sit down to a sumptuous meal.

I’m prepared. I’ve printed out the next day’s schedule, along with maps and phone numbers that live on my cell phone. Most people in our lives know they will not be able to text, tweet, email, Facebook, chat, or Skype with us for 24 hours. If they want to reach us they can just come over.

And so it has gone, every week for three years. Our “tech Shabbat” lasts from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday. Inspired by a National Day of Unplugging, Ken and I decided to institute something we had tried in fits and starts since we met: unplugging for one full day every week. What we call our “technology shabbats.”

Albert Einstein said that “time is relative to your state of motion.” With all this texting, tweeting, posting, and emailing, we’re making our minds move faster, which accelerates our perception of time. It seems there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t end up thinking, “How did it get to be 5 p.m.?”

And what is the one day I want to feel extra long? Saturday. During our Tech Shabbats, time slows to a beautiful, preindustrial pace. We are able to engage in all those activities that seem to get pushed aside by the lure of the network. 

We’re Jewish but not orthodox. We drive our car, turn the lights on and answer our landline in emergencies, so ours is a modern interpretation of a very old idea of the Sabbath. Our Saturdays now feel like mini-vacations—slow living that we savor like fine wine. We garden with our kids, play board games, ride our bikes and cook and I write in my journal. 

Every week, it’s like a valve of pressure releases from the daily bombardment of interesting facts, articles, and tidbits I consume daily as I travel on this info-rocket of discovery, procrastination, productivity and then, eventually overload.

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that social networking produces a burst of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for bonding, empathy, trust, and generosity. I sometimes imagine that every post, tweet, and text is flooding the planet with oxytocin, making us more empathetic and more inclined to share and collaborate. Maybe this is why collaboration is on the rise.

But the technology we’ve created also takes something away from us: being present, focused, and in the moment. Have you ever faked a need to use the restroom to check email? I have. More than once. Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse have compared the sense of technological dependency—the feeling that we must be accessible and responsive at any time and in any place—to that of drugs and alcohol.

That’s why, even though on  sundown on Saturday, we often can’t wait to get back online, still, every week we remember the most important thing about technology: It has an off switch.
More Information:
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www.sabbathmanifesto.org
Story from Greater Good, The Science of a Meaningful Life
Posted March 2014

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