The Physical Toll of Daily Blogging

when your body speaks

you better listen to it

heed its messages

My vision is blurry.

I’m a sucker for a great metaphor, but this time I’m being literal.

The words on the screen are blurry. My eyes can’t bring them into focus.

Do I need a stronger prescription for my contact lenses, or is it just fatigue?

Possibly a little of both.

And also, perhaps this is a message.

The body speaks to us.

I’ve been writing and publishing to this blog daily for over 4 years. I do most of my writing on my iPhone or iPad. Not only is that a lot of screen time, it’s also a lot of time looking at a small screen.

Even before COVID sent us all to our screens for more hours of the day, I was already pushing my screen time limits.

My iPhone screen has “burn-in” from the keyboard. When the screen is white, you can see the faint outlines of the on-screen keyboard. I didn’t even know that was possible.

When COVID started, I began doing virtual co-working on top of other scheduled Zoom meetings. More time looking at screens.

All of this after I had already learned the hard way — after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in 2015 — about what screens do to our brains. I endured years of post-concussion syndrome — where the world around me would go white after too much time looking at a screen.

It took a few years before I finally resolved those issues. I’ve learned a lot about how screen time affects the brain and the nervous system, as well as the impacts on my physical posture from so much typing and reading on screens.

I knew better. I know better.

When does “knowing better” translate to “doing things differently?”

The body speaks to us all the time. I have spent most of my life disconnected from my body and its messages, ignoring the signals if I was even able to hear them in the first place.

Having learned to attune to my body, I am now hearing its cries.

I have a callus on the top of my left pinky finger from where the iPhone rests as I hold it in my hands. I have a repetitive stress strain in my thumbs from the amount of typing I do.

The habitual posture that I spent over a year rehabilitating has returned, along with the movement dysfunctions caused by misalignments. And I cannot see the words clearly on the screen.

Just because I’m not spending my days scrolling social media, just because my screen time reports show that I’m using mostly “productivity” apps, doesn’t mean that my screen time is productive.

My body is telling me what no screentime monitoring app can:

I am spending too much time in front of my screen.

This is a message I don’t want to heed, but I must. Something must change.

I don’t know what that change will be, or how it will play out. I’m listening for the answers, feeling into how to proceed.

That’s all I can do. When vision is blurry, rely on the other senses.