My life was full of serendipitous events, real-life meetings, Frisbee, bike rides, and Greek literature, Verge writer Paul Miller explained after his year away from the Internet. After Baratunde Thurstons month unplugged, he gushed in Fast Company that, There were movies, there were food trucks, there were friends, there was mulled wine. There was brief consideration of a mulled-wine food truck. But above all, there was an expansion of sensations and ideas. And David Roberts, a prolific political blogger known as Dr. Grist, put the initial effects of his offline hiatus like this: I discovered that calm was like a drug. It felt so good, so decadent, just to sit in the early afternoon with my feet propped on the windowsill, watching wind brush the trees in the front yard.

I read these reports from the offline world with the drooling envy of an armchair traveler. I want Frisbee! I want bike rides! I want window gazing and food carts and mulled wine! I want to discover that calm thats like a drug.

But heres the thing: I have a job and a life that make it impossible for me to go offline for any extended amount of time.

What if the very same phenomenon we blame for all these issues, digital technology, could also help solve them?

I will admit that my daily work regimen--which involves two computer monitors, four simultaneous columns of chatter on TweetDeck, a Slack chatroom, two email accounts, and dozens of simultaneous tabs open in two different browsers--isnt doing much for my peace of mind. And research seems to be pointing in a pretty clear direction. One study found screen time somehow interferes with childrens ability to read emotion in others. Another, a correlation between multitasking and less gray matter in the area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional functioning. Heavy multitasking has been correlated with an inability to focus, stress, depression, and anxiety. Studies even suggest multitaskers are, ironically, worse at multitasking than their single-tasking counterparts.

Unplugging, though, can't be the only answer. What if the solution to my tech problems was actually more tech? What if we don't need to hatch elaborate plans to lead analog lives?

This fall, those questions arrived on my desktop with the familiar dopamine rush of a new email notification ping. Eliminate distractions! the subject read, adding parenthetically, But not this email, it's important. It was a PR pitch for a neuroscience-based productivity tool that streams personalized music tracks and sounds to subtly engage your brains fight or flight response, allowing you better focus without your internal distractions. Maybe the claim was dubious, but it also seemed, oddly, worth a shot.

Like the digital rehab patients before me, I decided to embark on an immersive project: the inverse of unplugging. For a month, I would try a myriad of new products--sensors, brain-wave readers, breathing monitors, meditation apps, online happiness courses, and just about every focus tool I could get my hands on--in pursuit of a digitally enhanced zen.

Anxiety about technology has been around for as long as technology itself. When Henry Thoreau pioneered the unplug memoir more than 150 years ago--longing for the very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages," arguing that men have become the tools of their tools--the first commercial electronic telegram had just been tapped out in Morse code. Socrates famously argued that the most promising new technology of his day--the written word--would create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories.

This is way, way before Google.

Continued here:
Plugged In: My Month-Long Mission To Beat The Effects Of Technology With More Technology