The Escape We Carry in Our Pockets

It has become almost automatic. A flicker of discomfort, a moment of stillness, a hint of unease, and our hand reaches for the phone.

In seconds, the feeling that was beginning to rise is drowned in a flood of movement, colour and sound. Scroll, swipe, like, refresh. It feels like connection, stimulation, reassurance. But more often than not, it is a soft, constant avoidance, a quiet turning away from ourselves.

We now carry a form of escapism so closely that it is almost becoming a part of us. The phone becomes a buffer against thought, a distraction from what might surface if we were to stop. It offers a world of “anything but the self” content, images and words that tell us how to be, what to buy, who to follow, and what we are missing.

It keeps us busy.

It keeps us out there.

And it keeps us away from what might need attention in here.

We used to have small moments in the day when time would simply unfold. Waiting for a bus, sitting in a waiting room, standing in a queue, or arriving early for an appointment. Moments when there was nothing much to do but be. These spaces once offered a quiet kind of pause, a few minutes to drift into thought, to observe, or simply to notice the world moving around us.

Now those same moments are rarely empty. When there is space, the phone appears in our hand. We scroll, we read, we fill the gap. Perhaps we sense a small rise of anxiety at the thought of doing nothing, at meeting the self without distraction. It happens so quickly that we often miss the feeling altogether. What have we lost? What are we avoiding? Where has this taken us?

Perhaps it is taking us towards a life increasingly dependent on technology and, more sadly, decreasingly dependent on ourselves. We are looking outward to what is shiny and enticing, rather than inward to what is real and ours. We are being fed a world that is not our own. Left unchecked, we will neglect ourselves, if we have not already done so.

What we permit to be here and there matters. In our pockets, on the table, in our hands, or over by the window, how we allow technology to be present is a choice. With boundaries, we can refocus on the positive aspects that technology can provide, without allowing it to take over and consume ourselves.

In therapy, silence is not an absence. It is often where something true begins to form. In life, that same silence is harder to find. Our screens fill every gap, soothing us before we can notice what we are feeling. But it is in those small gaps, the waiting, the pauses, the quiet, that we meet ourselves again.

Perhaps the work is not to banish the phone, but to notice when it becomes an escape. To approach this with curiosity and ask, what was I trying to avoid just then? And to allow, for a few moments, the space we might need to lead us somewhere deeper.

Hannah Downing |Enter Therapy

🌐 www.enter-therapy.co.uk