Here at Second Avenue Learning, we are passionate about the ways technology brings us closer together, accelerates learning, and creates access that was never available before. At the same time, we know that as educators, parents, and professionals, we need to have balance and model the way of the right use of technology. We thought it would be useful to pause and highlight ways to strategically unplug.
Why You Should Find Time To Be Alone With Yourself
Choosing to spend time doing things by yourself can have mental, emotional and social benefits, but the key to reaping those positive rewards comes from choosing to spend time alone. In a culture where we often confuse being alone for loneliness, the ability to appreciate time by ourselves prevents us from processing the experience as a negative thing. In fact, getting better at identifying moments when we need solitude to recharge and reflect can help us better handle negative emotions and experiences, like stress and burnout, said Emily Roberts, a psychotherapist.
Why You Should Find Time To Read Fiction
At the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab, psychologist Diana Tamir has demonstrated that people who often read fiction have better social cognition. In other words, they’re more skilled at working out what other people are thinking and feeling. Using brain scans, she has found that while reading fiction, there is more activity in parts of the default mode network of the brain that are involved in simulating what other people are thinking.
Why You Should Make Journaling A Discipline
Journaling, I believe, is a practice that teaches us better than any other the elusive art of solitude — how to be present with our own selves, bear witness to our experience, and fully inhabit our inner lives. As a dedicated diarist myself, I’ve always had an irresistible fascination with the diaries of artists, writers, scientists, and other celebrated minds — those direct glimpses of their inner lives and creative struggles. But, surely, luminaries don’t put pen to paper for the sake of quenching posterity’s curiosity — at least as interesting as the contents of those notable diaries is the question of why their keepers keep them. Here are a few perspectives from some of history’s most prolific practitioners of this private art ~Maria Popova
Why We Need To Reinforce The Value of Being Human
We know the part of our brain that processes cause and effect is injured by so much technology. Our ability to have empathy is impacted by technology. As a result, we are losing our ability to scenario plan, our ability to gain perspective, our ability to know ourselves, and our ability to empathize. These four things are what separate us from the gadgets. It is important to remember we are the killer app ~ Jennifer Sertl
Why We Need to Take A Day Off A Week To Recalibrate
The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing. As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.
_Tiffany Shlain_
