The first thing I do when I wake up

Now that I don't pick up my smartphone

For 15 years — over half my life — the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before going to bed was look at my phone. There were some interruptions, of course. A zealous first attempt at The Artist’s Way.¹ Seasons of outdoor work, cut off from cellular service. But they never lasted very long.

The desire to check my phone was very strong and, in those moments between sleep and wakefulness, I was very weak. Who isn’t vulnerable at 6 o’clock in the morning?The flow state of dreaming fed into the flow state of scrolling, and the flow of information woke me up as surely and essentially as coffee.

The screen was like a rope I could use to tug my way into consciousness. I used to make biscuits and pie crusts and great vats of gravy for a breakfast restaurant downtown. I would wake up before 5 a.m. and blink at the blue light until I was awake enough to drive down the mountain, once dodging a deer, once taking a hasty turn when a cop spotted my blinking headlight. When it came to waking up, I appreciated the help.

After switching to a flip phone, nothing much changed, at first. The Nokia 2780 has a news app, eBook store, and podcasts. 2048. Whac-A-Mole. I would pop on The Rest Is History and read headlines for as long as the phone could sustain it.

But KaiOS isn’t really built for this sort of thing. The apps crash. Tab-hopping and passive scrolling are more or less impossible on a 3-inch screen controlled by physical buttons. So soon enough, I lost the habit altogether.

I wish I could say I do nothing, now. Meditate. Write my morning pages. Spring up promptly to make coffee and breakfast. (This was my secret hope when I tucked away my iPhone: that the 5 hours a day of screen time would be returned to me, shiny and productive, filled with dishes and chores.)

Ha, no. I still wake up feeling like a salted slug. I rehydrate and recaffeinate and read in bed. The only difference, really, is that it’s books instead of Reddit comments (and Tumblr posts, and half of ten articles).

The only difference, but a big difference. There is a stack of finished books on my nightstand now. I chose them without algorithmic influence. I know more than I did before about psychoanalysis and Britain in the 1950s; less than I would have about, say, Kristen Bell’s marriage.

The only problem is the dark. Lately, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, too anxious to fall back asleep.² Scrolling is no longer an option, but neither is reading, not without waking my husband up with light.

In those moments, I really am forced to do nothing. Or, at least, nothing but think. I work my way through each all-caps thought, until they are lowercase, and then deleted. What would happen to them if I simply submerged them under the static of my smartphone? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m waking up and silencing them myself.

1. For the uninitiated, you are supposed to write three pages, longhand, before you do anything else.

2. I’m in the last phases of revising a novel manuscript, and my mind jolts me up with thoughts like: CHANGE YOUR MAIN CHARACTER’S NAME and CONSIDER BEEFING UP THE THIRD ACT WITH AN ADDITIONAL SUB-PLOT. Once I’m awake, I also start thinking things like: HAVE YOU CONSIDERED HOW COMPLEX YOUR TAXES WILL BE THIS YEAR and THAT COFFEE SHOP BACK HOME CLOSED WHILE YOU WERE GONE AND WILL NEVER REOPEN AGAIN.