An At-Home Retreat Was the Best Thing I Could Have Done
Before going into lockdown, I always thought my biggest problem was my need to rush from place to place, never having enough time on my hands.
Suddenly, I had no place to be and more than enough time on my hands, and realized that these things were never my actual problems.
Early in my days of self-isolation, I also noticed myself becoming more and more easily distracted, turning to social media and compulsive googling whenever I had a spare moment, and often when I didn’t.
It got so bad that my attention would be pulled away every five to ten minutes, making it impossible to get anything done either at or outside of my day job.
I’d then fault myself for all of the writing, all of the personal development work, that was left undone. The guilt wouldn’t make me more focused or disciplined, at least for long. If anything, it fed into these habits and kickstarted a vicious cycle.
As a result, I wasn’t particularly enjoying my time in lockdown, and I wasn’t getting anything done either. It was the worst of both worlds.
I realized what I needed to do was (counterintuitively) nothing. But not “nothing” as in not making an effort to change. This had to be a deliberate nothing. A nothing that would center me, helping me become less harried and happier.
I’ve written about the benefits of doing nothing before, but I have a hell of a time taking my own advice. So I came up with the idea for an at-home digital detox and do-nothing retreat.
Setting the goals
The premise of the retreat was simple. I cut out all distractions, but I also cut out all forced “productivity.” This was not meant to be a time for my usual task-mastering. I couldn’t use it as an opportunity to checkboxes so that I could feel good about myself.
I wanted to avoid the trap of walking out of the retreat feeling “successful” from hours of writing and meditation, only to fall back into my own mindsets and habits. In fact, I had to rewrite the definition of “successful” entirely, aspiring to do as little as possible.
I tried to internalize the fact that this time was for figuring out which boxes I actually needed or wanted to check. It was about self-reflection and inner work rather than making progress on outer goals (that, mind you, themselves shifted from week to week).
I aimed to do the following:
- Find and develop my life’s purpose
- Uncover the things that bother me and address them
- Improve my baseline mood and mindset
You know, the easy stuff.
How to structure the at-home retreat
There really wasn’t a lot to it. In fact, I deliberately tried to make the retreat as unstructured as possible. My MO is to over-structure everything in my life (imagine carving out time for laundry on your Google calendar) and I knew that following a schedule would only keep me in the same task-mastering mindset.
Instead, what I needed was to break my mindset.
I’ve been to weekend-long meditation retreats before. While it looks like there’s a lot of sitting around from an outsider’s perspective, many are also tightly scheduled. You always feel reassured knowing what you’re doing next, and a friendly sounding bell will signal the time to do it.
Of course, every time I returned to the “real world,” all that serenity vaporized. This time, I thought that if I forced myself to adopt new habits at home, it may make me more likely to follow them when things go back to “normal” (of course, I also have no other choice of venue).
My rules were the following:
- No internet, compulsive googling, email, calls, TV, or social media
- No reading (except for Zen and mindset books, and even then sparingly)
- Check missed calls and messages once per day
- Hide all clocks
In order to successfully restrain myself, I knew I would need a few layers of protection from temptation. So I did the following:
- Turned off all phone and desktop notifications
- Turned off the internet connection for all devices
- Stored my phone and TV remote in my mini-safe
Of course, my ideal retreat may look different from someone else’s, because the unconscious routines and habits of thought that I needed to break were unique to me. A good strategy would be to figure out what your major habits and distractions are and try to alter or suspend them, all for the sake of experiencing a new way of living.
However, I would universally recommend a loose structure and large amounts of unscheduled time, as those were helpful for not only breaking my over-scheduling habit, but for identifying things that I didn’t even know I needed to do.
With enough sitting around, issues I’d shoved to the bottom of my subconscious rose to the surface. My intuition suggested things that I could do to address them. I no longer did things because I felt compelled to do them. I sat, and when I felt I genuinely wanted to do something, I did it.
In short, my default mode became non-activity rather than busyness.
So… what did you actually do?
Every one of my friends to whom I described the retreat asked me this question with incredulous expressions. They couldn’t even wrap their minds around so much idle time.
Honestly, it’s hard to say how time passed, especially because I didn’t keep track of it.
I slept and rested a great deal throughout each day, something I’m sure my body sorely needed. On a normal weekend day, I’d rush from place to place and not notice how tired I was until the end of the day. I’d do this day in and day out, then wonder why I never seemed to have enough energy. On the retreat, I could rest blissfully, without guilt for not doing all the things I wouldn’t have been doing anyway.
And yes, there was a lot of zoning out and mind wandering. There was a bit of meditation, a bit of journaling, a bit of cooking, and a bit of writing (though again, not forced).
One day, my mind kept returning to a few people who had been bothering me over the past few months, and I felt a strong desire to write letters to them. I spent hours (presumably) doing this, though I never intended to send the letters.
However, the mere act of writing them caused me to uncover the secret reasons I felt bothered in the first place, the ones I didn’t want to admit to myself. The issues weren’t 100% resolved, but I felt significantly more at peace.
Another day, I felt compelled to do gratitude journaling to a much greater extent than I would on a normal day. Instead of dashing off five things before heading to bed, I listed dozens and dozens of aspects of my life I was thankful for. Doing so markedly improved my mood and gave me a more naturally positive outlook.
Was I bored, you ask? Well, an interesting thing I learned about boredom is that it’s not necessarily a bad feeling until it turns into restlessness. As long as I wasn’t bothered by the lack of stimulation or productivity, I was actually fine with just zoning out. While I began the retreat with many compulsions to “check on” things or google my worries away, I eventually relaxed into the void and began to enjoy it much more.
Getting rid of time
I’m one of those type-A, hyper-efficient people who want to maximize every second of every day. I have a deadly fear of wasting or losing track of time, even if I’m not doing anything productive. For some reason, even if I’m procrastinating, I need to know exactly how long I’ve been unproductive.
I had always thought that “time management” was one of the things that stabilized my life and kept me sane. Turns out, the clock has actually been a source of underlying stress for me, so I knew I would have to get rid of all clocks entirely during the retreat. Otherwise, I’d spend five days looking at them every 2–3 minutes. I wouldn’t even last a day.
In fact, getting rid of clocks was the single most difficult aspect of the retreat. I used clocks to determine when to sleep, awaken, and eat. I used clocks to gauge the minimum amount of time I should sit and write or the maximum amount of time I could procrastinate. On a normal day, I probably consulted a clock hundreds of times without realizing it.
By contrast, it was strange to eat when I was hungry and sleep when I was tired. I started and stopped doing each thing when I felt like it, moving from one activity to the next without worrying about how long anything took. It should have felt natural, but instead felt bizarre.
Think I’m crazy? Go one totally unplanned day without knowing the time the entire day. Then tell me how much it messed with you.
Actually, even accomplishing this is quite difficult. I learned I couldn’t even remove the clock from my iPhone lock screen without some dubious-looking hacks that I wasn’t willing to try. Instead, I put my phone where it would be inconvenient for me to reach it, and kept reaching for it anyway like a phantom limb. Some habits really die hard.
Watching what comes up
Compared to most of my millennial brethren, I considered myself a pretty focused person. I prided myself on the fact that I rarely binged shows or scrolled through social media. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t unconsciously reaching for distractions, oh no. For me, this retreat was a rude awakening.
Seemingly every thirty seconds of the first day or two, I would get the urge to get up and do something else, to escape the uncomfortable feelings that arose. My head was full of reminders, people I needed to call, things I needed to google. I wrote a few of them down to attend to post-retreat, but most I realized were unimportant and I let them go (though not without great difficulty).
Then came the worries. I worried that friends would get angry that I hadn’t messaged them back, that all of my relationships would somehow fall apart over the five days. I worried that all of my accounts would be hacked without my knowledge. But I eventually let go of those as well.
Instead, I let myself sit and feel uncomfortable for a while.
Here’s the thing: miraculously, that on-edge feeling faded relatively quickly when I gave myself the space to feel it. Once it passed, I was relaxed, neutral. I had fewer cravings and compulsions and took my time doing things like cooking and taking walks (not to mention, enjoyed doing them more).
Then, after sitting with the emptiness, other things began arising. These weren’t anxious thoughts or to-do lists. They were gentle reminders. Grievances I’d been shoving down that needed to be addressed. Foods I’d been eating that I needed to stop eating. Aspects of my daily routine that I needed to change. I even had spontaneous insights related to work, writing, and relationships.
I was beginning to listen to that deeper-within voice. I was addressing my real needs, not things I thought I had to do based on reading articles and talking with friends. Until then, that voice had been drowned out by everything else. This watching what comes up was one of the most valuable things I experienced.
The paradox of inactivity and productivity
Until the retreat, I was very bought into the mindset that activity = progress. Entries in a calendar and checked-off tasks on a list were things I could use as reassurance that I was “getting somewhere,” validating my self-worth. I often felt like time spent doing nothing was “wasted” somehow, because the results of it weren’t tangible.
And when problems arose, or I sensed a gap between where I was and where I wanted to be, I always felt the need to do something, and do a lot of it. To get anywhere, it had to feel like I was thinking hard and working hard. I over-analyzed and strong-armed everything, even if it meant I was doing more wheel-spinning than anything else.
Turns out, this wheel-spinning may have been preventing me from discovering real solutions, especially when it came to inner work like mindset-shifting. By doing nothing, I’ve become calmer, happier, and more goal-focused than I have via any forced effort to change my habits.
And, as I mentioned before, solutions to problems I’d been dealing with for months suddenly arose with no effort. Tons of googling, diagramming, and brainstorming hadn’t helped. My thoughts had been going in circles, and my solution had been to think harder.
What’s more, I realized my need for frenetic activity was in itself a problem. Not only had I measured myself by my output, but the activity had given me a sense of control over my outcomes, even if the control was illusory.
As a result, I over-planned my hours and days and lost track of my years. It’s much easier and feels better to optimize hours and days, but was I really “getting somewhere?” And was this “somewhere” even a place I wanted to go? I realized frivolous accomplishment is almost as bad as, or perhaps worse than, frivolous time-wasting.
The surprising result
Everything we do is driven by, and in turn reinforces, a mindset that we have. Our mindsets are difficult to change because we are so deeply rooted in our habits. However, a major disruption lets us begin to reexamine the mindsets we’ve been building over our lifetimes. Often the disruptions are forced upon us, but sometimes we can catalyze them.
In my case, I realized I have a huge bias toward 1) identifying “problems” in my life to solve and 2) using some sort of strong-armed “intervention” to solve them.
The thing is, neither of these practices improve my quality of life. At best they are distractions. At worst they actually serve to make my life more miserable, especially when I care about things outside of my influence or pursue things that I don’t really want. More than anything, the retreat has shown me how to focus on, and move in the direction of, my true desires.
Though I have resumed “normal life,” I am more conscious of my inputs, not bombarding myself with meaningless “stuff” in the form of distracting activities and thoughts. I check the time and my inboxes less often and try not to over-schedule myself. I check my compulsions, slowing down and taking a breath before moving onto the next thing, asking myself, “Is this worth focusing on?” As a result, I’ve gained a lot of focus and clarity.
Many of my friends said, “Five days is a lot of time to do nothing!” But when I think about all the months and years that I have been floundering around, unfocused, uncentered, and anxious, taking five full days to do nothing but re-center myself is really the best thing I could have done.
Of course, I haven’t fully let go of my need to be busy or embraced the counterintuitive benefits of inactivity. Doing nothing is, in fact, a skill, and I’m still really bad at it. Hopefully, as a result of this retreat and the ones to come, I will get a little bit better.
