Using my smartphone to help me give up...my smartphone

A man called Andy talks gently in my ear and I’m at ease with that. It’s part of a New Year’s Resolution.

Andy is the voice on an app on my phone. He’s teaching me how to meditate.

Strictly speaking it’s not a New Year’s Resolution. It was actually made in response to the failure of another one.

I had resolved to try and stay away from my smartphone for longer than 10 minutes.

I was doing well for a while but soon the cracks began to show. I would throw the phone way up at the back of a high shelf and within a quarter of an hour I was already looking for a stool to retrieve it. I had actual cravings to see if I had any new emails.

I knew it would just be special offers at DID Electrical or spam from China telling me they have processed my order for 10,000 ball bearings, but I had to check.

Something has changed in my brain’s ability to concentrate and I need to do something about it.

So I’ve started meditating for 10 minutes a day.

Ironically I need my smartphone to do that but sometimes you have to use the tools of the Devil to fight Him. (“Go ahead” says the Devil, rubbing his hands. “Let me know how that works out for you.“.)

Meditation gets a bad name. Many of us may have first become aware of it from a common trope in 1990s films.Usually the protagonist’s ex-wife has run off to join an ashram and she is next seen in tie-dye sitting cross-legged on the floor saying “OMMMMM.” She has to be rescued by Big Strong Man in a no-nonsense way.

There doesn’t seem to be any OMMMM on this app.

In today’s session, Andy tells me to imagine that thoughts are actually like cars passing along the road. He says our initial impulse when watching cars pass is to become agitated at their motion and to try and slow down or even stop them.This leads me to suspect that Andy must have spent a lot of time thumbing from Dripsey into town. But I let that pass and imagine the cars passing. I get distracted as I start to recognise a few people and then wonder where they got the money for a new car. Andy reassures me that the mind will wander and to just let it happen.

Even so, I do experience a sort of clarity. A sort of a flashback to simpler times. Like when I had the mumps and was confined to bed and it was the 80s so telly didn’t start until Live At Three.

So until Thelma Mansfield came on and did aerobics there were hours of just staring around the room. Counting ceiling boards — seven on the flat bit, six on the sloped bit — imagining that the patterns on the wallpaper formed a shape.

Back then it was the sheerest boredom possible.

But now in a world full of updates, notifications, alarms and reminders, ‘nothing’ feels like a respite.

I hope mindfulness and meditation become universally practiced. For example, I’d be interested to see what crimes mindful thugs would commit as opposed to mindless ones.

I imagine them, headphones in, as they flee the guards along the motorway listening to their apps: “As you embark on a cocaine-fuelled spree across a number of counties, take a moment to become aware of your surroundings.”

In the meantime, I think I am making progress. Now where did I put my phone?