escaping a life of distraction

3 simple habits for reclaiming your attention and taking back your creative spirit

Zavia

Apr 22, 2025

Time isn’t slipping away from you. You’re just too distracted to experience it.

Instead processing our emotions we distract ourselves with tv
Instead of addressing health issues we distract oursleves with junk food
Instead of facing our disillusionment with life, we distract ourselves with social media.

We interact with distractions every day.

We can’t go one minute without a notification, alarm, or ad break.

So of course, we feel like time is moving faster when we spend most of our time doings in a semi-consciously.

One the biggest reasons why people feel so unfulfilled in life is because they spend all their time unconsciously doing meaningless tasks and feeling like they can’t control themselves when they do it.

It makes you feel powerless.

And for people who thrive off of freedom, this is devastating.

But don’t lose hope. As someone trying to carve out a life of freedom, I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching how to take back my attention.

Here are 3 simple habits that will help you reclaim your time and attention.

add AND substact

The first thing you’ve probably thought of was a dopamine detox.

While it’s helped some people, its more of a short term fix.

We live in the modern age, so trying to to full stay away from anything distracting isn’t possible for most people.

Instead we can identify tasks fruitful that replace all the scrolling and distractions. Ideally thing that take you away from the screen like:

Reading
Writing
Going for a walk
Stretching
Cooking/Baking

This may look like trying the recipe on the back of the box. Reading before bed. Taking a walk instead of scrolling for breaks between work.

We spend a lot of time on our phones, so if we don’t replace it with something, our minds will easily search for another distraction.

I call these fruitful instead of productive, because the goal isn’t to optimized every single part of life since we’re not robots.

Believe me it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of productive procrastination.

We want to enrich our lives, create memories, and focus on the things that matter.

dull the sword

Our devices are designed to keep our attention so we have to do everything in our power to level the playing field.

Things like:

Making your phone greyscale
Clearing your home screen
And using app-blocking app
Time-blocking

The first 3 make your phone less appealling (ie. less distracting) and the 4th gives you a bit of wiggle room.

Time blocking is an incredible tool because it allows you to schedule specific times for focus, play, and distraction.

I’ve been one to stay up late at night trying to make up for all the stuff I missed on social media. But schedule a designated time to scroll has given me so much more controll of my screen time.

There are plenty of tutorials online on how to “dumbify” your phone/devices and there are just as many apps to help you with the process.

Here are a couple that I found helpful:

Btw check out
Charlie Rewilding
they’ve been such an inspiration to me and they have a whole series about healing your relationship with your phone.

get lost in your creativity

To be honest, all of the habits don’t mean anything unless you have a strong enough reason to focus.

I’m starting my own business and building a community.

Two things that require a lot of hard work and focus.

And because I know doing those things fuels my creative spirit, whenever I catch myself mindlessly scrolling or procrastinating, I remind myself of my greater purpose.

Doing the work today means keeping a promise to my future self.