Unchain Your Brain: Break Free From the Screen.

First things first: this is not about giving up your phone - so you can take a breath. I don’t want to give up my phone either and I don’t want anyone telling me that I ‘should’, I imagine you feel the same. This is about you giving yourself back the choice in HOW you use screens. Ask yourself, are you choosing the screen or does it choose you? Most of us reluctantly admit we are not always choosing and sometimes thats hard to say out loud as we throw it back at ourselves as a character flaw and then get on with watching those dancing cats.

You are not flawed, there is nothing wrong with you. Screen and digital content is designed to be as addictive as crack cocaine - you are an outlier if you do not have any screen habits that you’d like to change. I coach people for a living and this habit appears day in and day out - you are a human living in today’s world. This is why I’m doing this; my clients have asked for something specific. It’s a live course not a recorded off the shelf guide - we will be learning as we go. I’ll be doing it too, with you.

Many of us are sick of scrolling, losing minutes to hours to days on one screen or another? Sick of flicking through the eleventy-nine-thousand channels and settling on something you don't give two hoots about? Netflix and scroll? Doom-scrolling, comparing your life, constantly checking email, messages, likes, shares, browsing, shopping, falling down a YouTube rabbit hole? Constantly checking your phone, during dinner, a date, conversation, a movie, the gym, work and even 'me time'. Constantly drawn into social apps when just nipping in to check the weather. Even, checking the weather continually…. Even though we don’t really like to admit we’ve been consumed, we know it’s affecting our overall well-being and for those with families of kids and teenagers, it’s becoming an increasing worry. If this resonates and you don’t want to give up your phone then join me.

I invite you to join me and a supportive group in January on a month long guided and supported conscious effort to reduce your non-essential screen time and getting time back to add in 'stuff' that matters more to you.

For you:

This might be a “Challenge Month”, to cut out completely and hard reset for a month.
It could be an experiment in reducing some things a little or a lot.
It might be an exploration into what makes you draws you to the many screens you use.

For most of us, it’ll be a bit of all of these; you can decide.

I'm an experienced, MA qualified and EMCC Accredited Senior Practitioner coach with hundreds of hours of coaching under my belt. I will guide a small group through coaching and self-reflection for the month of January. You might be doing this for you, you might be doing it to pave the way for the family to follow, you might be doing it to be able to share with your kids, friends or colleagues; I'll be doing it too, with you, and experiencing it all along side you!

Here's the format:

Schedule & Content
Live zoom calls are at 8pm UK Time (9pm CET)*
1. Monday 6th January 2025: Create. Build your 'plan' for the month.

2.  Monday 13th January 2025: Progress and refining the plan: Challenges, triggers, noticings, sharing experiences (optional).

3.  Monday 20th January 2025: Progress and support: What’s workign, what’s not, what would you like to do more and less of.

4. Monday 27th January 2025: Re-entry. Reintegration back into "life"; how do you want to use screens now?

*Calls will be available for one week after live recording. Break out groups are not recorded.

Inspo and reminders: One email from me each week
Pre-start email with details and 1st call link.
Emails on Tuesday 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th January 2025.
These will contain the next part of your workbook, the link to the recording and to the next call.

WhatsApp Group: A support group for adhoc questions, sharing of experience, encouragement and support. Participation in this is optional and the group will be closed and deleted a few days after the end of the month (you can all continue as a group if you wish). There’s something very powerful in the group experience, so I’d encourage participation and it’s entirely up to you.

Other materials: An E-workbook and guide. Recommended reading; books, articles, interesting blogs, podcasts etc which are optional reads and listens.

Your investment £135.00

10% of proceeds (minus running costs) will go to Mind, the charity for mental health.

*Non-essential screen time is the time you spend on screens that's not directly for work or required to care for yourself an others - you know what your non-essential screen time is and if you're not sure, you'll find out in January.

Breaking Free From The Screen

Imagine this. You currently scroll, flick, check a screen for say a total of 90 minutes a day, maybe a bit on your commute, in your break or whilst you should be 'working', over a cuppa, waiting in line for something (that's fairly modest by-the-way, they say it's more like 3 hours for UK adults 😫 and way more for the youngsters). Across just the month of January those 90 minutes add up to almost 2 x full 24-hour-days or 5.5 x 8-hour working days of your time; scary, right? Across a whole year thats almost 23 full days! I’d quite like to get some or all of that back thank you very much!

Screen use is at an all time high. There are so many options available to entertain and distract us and they are all designed to be stimulating and highly addictive, flooding us with dopamine - and yet we are left feeling quite empty and out of sorts after an hour of scrolling.

Infinite availability every moment, it’s a Martini Marshland right at your finger tips, any time, any place, any where. In our hands, on our phones, tablets and lap tops. On our home TV's in the living room, bedroom, kitchen. They know us so well! The algorithms tailor our viewing, giving us just the right amount of comedy, intrigue, drama, outrage, conspiracy, perfect product placement, doom, tragedy and trauma to scroll, flick, click or autoplay the next video, show, clip or episode. The algo’ never forgets you. The cliffhanger plays right into our brain's need to close the open loops.

We do know this is going on as there is a dissatisfaction and an emptiness that leaves lingering questions:

Is this how I want to spend my time?
How much choice do I really have in this?
How much of this has become default habits?
What's the benefit of consuming all this media?

Imagine a month without reduced non-essential screen time?

Retrain Your Brain

So what's missing?

It might just be a break, a re-set, a perspective or an experiment in reducing non-essential screen time that helps us answer that very question.

This month of reduced screen time could give us all the space to ask ourselves:

• What relationship do I want to have with the screen?

• What am I missing whilst being hijacked by media?

• What could I add in; what do I want to do with my time? What do I love to do?

• What have I been sidelining for ages?

Why Don't You

Switch off the TV set and go out and do something less boring instead.... Join me and a small group of like minded folks who also want to change their relationship with the screen in their lives AND don’t want to give up their phone entirely. We just want to take back control and re-set.