This is an excerpt from Finding Mastery #094 with Thrive Global CEO Arianna Huffington in which she shares how she navigates her relationship with electronics.
Michael Gervais: Do you have a couple really influential ways that you’ve shifted your practice to value recovery? Are there some things that you’ve done?
Arianna Huffington: Yes. Absolutely. The most important thing is navigating my relationship with my devices because the truth is that we are all wired 24/7 and we need to declare an artificial end to the day and…
Michael Gervais: I love that thought.
Arianna Huffington: Because our day never ends.
Michael Gervais: It used to end at sundown.
Arianna Huffington: Yes or it used to end when we left the office. Now, none of that is true. So for me, I believe in ritual. I believe that we all learn through ritual and build habits through ritual. I believe in building a transition to sleep, the way we do with children. You know you read them Good Night Moon, you sing them a lullaby, you give them a bath. We need to create our own ritual.
Mine starts with picking a time – ideally 30 minutes before I’m going to turn off the light, but it may be 10 minutes, whatever is possible.
I turn off my phone and charge it outside my bedroom. We’ve created a charging station that looks like a phone bed – actually we have one here right in front of us. It has room for 10 phones and two iPads and we put them under the little blanket and tuck them in and say good night.
It’s a great ritual for me. This is the end of my day. I know that I won’t see my phone until the morning after I wake up, meditate, set my intention for the day, and then I go to my phone.
Listen to full podcast here.
This post originally appeared on findingmastery.net.