157. The Creative Power of an Analog Summer

What would happen if you stopped documenting your life long enough to actually experience it?

In this episode, we explore the growing cultural movement toward an “analog summer” — intentionally stepping away from constant digital stimulation and reconnecting with slower, more tactile, deeply human ways of living. From knitting and painting to playing cards, baking, reading, walking, and spending time in meaningful third spaces, this conversation is about reclaiming attention, creativity, and presence in a world designed to fragment all three.

Amy shares reflections on wanting to be fully present during her son’s last summer before college, the surprising relief of taking several days away from her phone, and the neuroscience behind why our devices are making it harder to focus, create, rest, and connect.

This episode also explores:

• the psychological cost of constant scrolling
• dopamine loops and digital overstimulation
• attention fragmentation and “brain rot”
• the loss of third spaces in modern life
• why multitasking is damaging to the brain
• stress hormones, cortisol, and emotional overload
• how excessive screen time impacts creativity and cognition
• rebuilding cognitive reserve through novelty, art, movement, and mindfulness
• practical ways to create your own analog summer

You’ll also hear simple, realistic strategies for reducing screen time without perfectionism or shame:

• switching back to a traditional alarm clock
• leaving books and art supplies visible around the house
• replacing scrolling with tactile activities
• creating environments that make analog living easier and more appealing
• intentionally seeking out novelty, beauty, and in-person experiences

This episode is ultimately an invitation to reclaim your attention and return to the kinds of experiences that nourish creativity, emotional health, and meaningful connection.

Because creativity is one of the most analog experiences we can have.

In This Episode

• Why your phone feels impossible to put down
• The neuroscience behind compulsive scrolling
• What happens to the brain during chronic overstimulation
• How digital life has replaced many of our third spaces
• Why boredom, slowness, and novelty matter for creativity
• Small shifts that can dramatically improve focus and mood
• How analog experiences help regulate the nervous system

Mentioned in This Episode

• David Sedaris
• Architectural Digest
• Enso drawing
• Fine Points yarn shop in Cleveland
• Kitty Cotton’s “55 Ways I’m Unplugging This Summer”

Reflection Question

What would an analog summer look like for you?

What are 55 things you could do instead of looking at your phone?

Support the Podcast

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Transcript

55 ways to go analog this summer

Undoubtedly you have heard about an analog summer. Will you be having your own analog summer this year? It is the phenomenon of getting away from our digital devices and reconnecting with the usual old fashioned ways of being. And I think a major challenge that I have noticed is the lack of third spaces. And I'm perfectly happy sitting at home in my office socializing online. However, I'm noticing the cost to doing that, and the lack of third space is a large part of it. When we were kids, we would spend time at the library or we would go to the playground. As teenagers, it would be the mall or the library, places we could go that were not home, that were not school. The third place where we felt comfortable to hang out. As adults, we need these third spaces. They are not work. They're not home. They're just an environment where we can enjoy being. And it requires time away from the digital, the technology and going out in the world to find that third space. It also requires us a slower return to pleasurable analog activities like knitting, painting, baking, mending the holes in your clothes, the things that are not digital, that are necessary in life, and they can be done with greater appreciation and a nice focus on our lives, instead of the frenetic activity of consuming online. 

Welcome into the Modern Creative Women podcast, where we are here for the art and science of creativity and creativity is the most analog experience you could possibly have. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. I'm getting ready for an amazing summer. It's my son's post-high school summer before he heads off to college. And more than anything, I want to be present for him and for myself to really savor the last bits of life with three. And I know he'll be back. Of course he'll be back. Yet this feels like a really important time for me to be present. So I've been thinking a lot about analog life, and I do a lot of things in kind of an old fashioned way. I will mend my own clothes, I do knit, I like to paint and draw. However, there is a urge I'm having to get off my phone. And I mentioned earlier in a previous episode about taking five days off from my phone while we went on a family trip to LA, and it was so nice. And after 48 hours, I did not miss it and I no longer had the urge to keep picking up my phone. It was incredible. So the idea of an analog summer. This Gen Z trend is really about a lifestyle trend of people experimenting or unplugging from the technology that has absolutely taken over the third space in our life. The philosophy essentially is doing things with your hands, with your mind, with the people around you that you care about instead of filtering through a smartphone. And I notice when I'm having a really great time with friends, we tend to forget to pull out our phones. I would love to document every time that I'm out and about with friends. I went and saw Mean Girls with my friend Ken and it was hard to remember to take a photograph. We remembered when we went past the velvet rope and there was a photo background, and the person behind us said they would take our photo. It's so hard to remember when you're just having a great time, when you're fully immersed in the moment, you're not at all worried about capturing the right environment or getting that exact shot behind the red velvet rope. For us, it was just documenting an incredible moment. Most of the time we forget to document because we're having a great time. There are other times when I realize my phone is interfering with having fun. When I think about reading books I love to read, I read so much for my work. I'm really always trying to stay up with the research, and a lot of it happens online. I use a worldwide database to gather research articles to share with you. I certainly use a lot of the art therapy journals, but it's so much online, so I do read a lot of paperback or hardback books, but not nearly as much as I used to. So I'm leaving books all over the house a little more intentional, and I'm reading things that are not just for work, and that's exciting. Another area where I feel like I'm struggling is first thing in the morning to not get at my phone. I have an alarm clock, but I've been using the one on my phone lately and I don't know why. Because the first thing I'm doing in the morning is picking up my phone, which makes me want to have a look at it, check some things. And so, going back to my try and true alarm clock that plugs in. I love playing cards. I'll play solitaire. I play rummy with my son, and being able to spend that time just chit chatting while there's something to do, which is play cards, it's really great and I want to do more of that. If you're ready for an analog summer, let me tell you the benefits and then I'll share some ideas. If you are checking your screen time, as you should every week on your phone or on your computer, you'll find you're spending more time than you think. And if you're also wondering why you haven't finished a project or a book, or why you don't seem to have enough time, your phone is probably the answer. We do not have as much time as we used to when we're spending all this time on our phone, and it makes us feel this insufficiency of time, and it gives us the impression that time is moving too fast. We've all been around people who get so absorbed in their phone that they really are losing track of what's going on. And if you've ever looked around a restaurant where one person's on their phone and the other person has put their phone away, it's sad. The person on their phone gets absorbed. We spend way longer on our phone than we really intend to. If you set your alarm on your phone for five minutes, it goes by in an instant. Our phones are designed to keep us using them. They use all the psychology tricks to capture our attention intermittent rewards, novelty, stimulation, beauty, bright colors, all the things that make us want to keep looking. One of the main costs to scrolling on our phone is attention fragmentation. So the person who's sitting at the restaurant, also looking at their phone, is there, going back and forth between conversation and their phone. And what we've known for decades and decades is that multitasking is impossible, and we leave attention residue on each of the tasks when we go back and forth. So to do two tasks at once takes way longer than just the time for each one. It's extending the time that we're spending on these. Focusing on the brain rot, which is a phrase I love staring at your phone too much. It also includes chronic mental fatigue. The research has been very clear that there is a reduction in the brain's gray matter. That's really the coating around the brain helps things move the way you want them to. And when we are losing gray matter, we're in trouble. It starts to reduce around age 50, a little less than 2% a year. However, if you're exercising, just even walking every day, you're going to be able to make that up. It requires this conscious focus on keeping your brain active. However, if you are getting your 10,000 steps or even 5000 will help you with gray matter, and then you go sit on your phone for hours. You're not helping yourself. You're kind of cancelling all that out. There is also another challenge, which I think is particularly concerning, is that that dopamine driven feedback loop that happens when we're staring at our phone, we want to keep looking. Even if I tell myself, I want to put my phone down, I'll just one more, one more. Let me see what the next thing is. It this dopamine driven loop? More dopamine. We're craving it constantly. We love the thrill of the next post. What that does is it damages our ability to focus and it damages our internal motivation. Now, the toll this takes on our brain is intense. So in addition to that attention span and focus, that craving fast paced, low meaning stimulation, it makes us struggle in these incredible ways with things that are like deeper or more complex or world world worthy tasks. When we have to do something that requires our attention, we've been training our brain to be engaged with kind of like junk food, and we're not ready for it. There's also dopamine burnout. And so this unpredictable nature of what happens on social media is just like a slot machine. And the slot machines are designed to keep you putting your money in and pulling the slot. It's like a cheap kind of dopamine keeps you going back, but at the same time it's depleting motivation and it's again making deep work feel nearly impossible. So if you feel like you're struggling to do complex work, it might be because of the time on the cell phone. Furthermore, excessive screen multitasking you're switching back and forth, looking at different apps or on your phone in between, um, chunks of work that you're doing at your desk and this kind of constant media consumption. The challenge of losing gray matter is specific to areas like the anterior cingulate cortex. And if you remember what that is from your psychology classes, this is a part of the brain that is regulating emotional control and empathy. So you start to put some things together. There's extreme hostility on the internet. If you start to read the comments on your favorite post, you'll see terrible things. So what's happening is this reduction of the brain gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex. It's causing this overall less ability to control our emotions and less empathy for other human beings. That's terrifying. I got one more reason you want to do an analog summer cognitive decline. Now, researchers are noting that, like habitual time on our devices leads to this thing called cognitive outsourcing. What is that? It's relying on your phone for basic tasks. We don't know anybody's phone number anymore, do we? We rely on GPS to get around our own town. I'm guilty of that one. This cognitive decline from scrolling on social media is also tied to brain fog. And this is a real problem already for women in middle age, perimenopause and menopausal. And we're adding to our own brain fog by scrolling on our phones. If you're struggling with sleep because of where you are in hormone cycles or where you are in menopause, guess what? The phone is contributing to that as well. More terrifying, these constant habitual use of our phone can really thin out our cerebral cortex. Our brain is decaying around our phone use. This is terrifying. And what we understand is that for the first time since we've been measuring intelligence. It's not going up. It's going down. It's always gone up on average because there's more to know. More interesting ways to know it. And now it's not increasing. It's going down. And it's this cognitive disruption from constant screen time. Are you convinced now that we all need an analog summer? I certainly am. You might be wondering why bad news always grabs your attention more than the good news, and it's an evolutionary feature to keep us scanning for danger. It matters that we stay safe, and certain parts of our brain are just wired to pay attention to danger. And that's how we survived. But every troubling post that you see gives your brain a bit of a dopamine hit, and it's tied to reinforcement. And it's why we can't stop scrolling even when we want to put down our phone and go to bed at 10:00 instead of 12:00. Another biological aspect that happens to us is stress hormones start piling up. The more you scroll, the more stress is kicking into your system. Now the amygdala, that's the part of the brain that is dealing with fear and emotions goes into overdrive. Do you know the hormone that is released? It's cortisol, of course. And if cortisol in our body is staying high for too long, it negatively impacts your mood, your sleep. And guess what? Even your immune system. It's like just leaving our brain in emergency mode all the time. And it lingers even after you've put your phone down. The good news is, when you put your phone down, your brain starts to calm down and your stress hormones will begin to lower. And the idea there is that you can start to feel more in control of yourself. When your stress hormones start to lower, that cortisol is disintegrating your prefrontal cortex, the frontal part of your brain that helps you plan and make decisions, can take back control from the amygdala. When the amygdala is in charge, you're thinking and planning is not really functioning. Which is why, as I mentioned before, I want to go to bed at ten, not 12. And yet here we are. Has this ever happened to you where you're using your phone more and for longer periods of time than you had planned? That's the language that is in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health. And it's the language used around addiction, increased use and using more than we had intended. But taking a break will give you a noticeable difference over time. When your dopamine pathways are able to have a reset, you'll start feeling better. And by better, I mean a better mood. You'll have a sharper concentration. And if you've noticed that you feel edgy or on alert. That will start to slow down too. It can seem extreme to delete all your apps, turn your phone to grayscale, make it less interesting to look at. But all of those things will help you break the demand your brain has for looking at your phone. But even smaller steps will help. Time limits scheduling your news instead of scrolling all day long to look at the news. And here's where analog summer really matters. Replacing the habit of your phone with something else. Anything else? Stretching. Reading. You can get a book that is like short chapters, or a humor book that just requires you to read a few pages. Anything David Sedaris has written fits the bill. You can just have a look through a few pages, get a laugh, put the book down, and you're not having to spend 20 minutes to get to the next paragraph. Um, you don't have to look up words. It's one of those kinds of activities that I think is easy. It's fun. Coloring pages. Just leaving coloring pages out can have a huge impact on your mood. It requires very little planned intention. You just pick up your sharp colored pencils and start working. Having your environment set up for things that are more interesting than your phone is really going to help. A short walk has a huge impact on your mood, your perspective, and your ability to solve problems, especially if you're struggling with something at work. A short walk resets your brain. As with anything that we're trying to make a change in, we need to focus on what we're gaining and why we want to make a change. I already told you my why at the beginning of the episode. My son's graduating high school, and this is our last full, free summer together. I want to be focused. I want to remember this summer my why is so important. I love him so much and I want to be present. That's motivation. When we can link what we want to our values and then add in other things. So it requires me to, of course, put down my phone, but it also means setting out things that will make analog experience better. So at present I got large drawing paper. I've been doing some Enso drawings. It's just sitting on my art table all the time now, and I got, um, a new whole bag of beautiful yarn when I was at the yarn shop in Cleveland. Fine points. And I'm also leaving a knitting project that I just need to sew the buttons on. Leaving that out, I pulled out my mending. I've really got all these alternatives, and so to have five minutes in between clients, I'm going to pick up these alternative things. I always have my painting on my desk, but I'm tempted to scroll with my phone. So these are the ways that I'm working on the environment so that I can have an easier time. I found a great article on Substack and I will link it in the show notes. And this woman, Kitty cotton, wrote 55 Ways that She's Unplugging this Summer. And it's a great list. And that's when I got to thinking about all the ways that I can strategize to have a more analog experience between now and the middle of September. I invite you to do the same. What are 55 things you can do besides look at your phone? And the more you find these appealing, the less appealing your phone will suddenly become. Because we're faced with cognitive problems from all of our phone use. I really want to encourage you to focus on things that will build up your cognitive reserve. So this includes looking at art for two minutes or longer. Making art 20 minutes a day is all it takes. That's the recommended dose. Meditating will help your brain walking and engaging in mindfulness while you walk. Not looking at your phone, but walking and enjoying what's happening outside of you. Walking with friends and finally engaging in novel experiences. This has a huge impact on your brain in a way that I think I cannot emphasize enough novel experiences. Challenge your brain in ways that you will grow. If you've traveled to a country where you don't speak the language that is a novel experience. Being there and everything that you want to communicate requires a little bit of effort. Everything is happening in the present moment. If you're trying to order at a restaurant, it requires all of your attention. You cannot drift off and order haphazardly like you might in your native language. You can get this similar kind of novelty by going to places you've never been before. Go to a meetup, join a club, go to a neighborhood or a community you've not visited before. Go to a museum you haven't been to before or you haven't been to in a really long time. The kinds of experiences that are fresh are really going to have a huge impact on you. If you go every year to the same vacation spot and stay in the same hotel. It's time for a switch up. The novelty of that trip is lost when it's the exact same. Every time you eat the same food, you stay in the same place. You're not getting the brain benefits, so anything you can do with novelty will have a huge impact on your brain. I've spent a lot of time looking at art lately, and it's because the art therapists who are contributing some art therapy projects to my upcoming book sent along art examples, and I've been spending so much time looking at what they created and really valuing it. And I can see it really makes a difference. When I read that you need to look at a piece of art for at least two minutes, longer is even better, but at least two minutes to start to have a sense of what's happening. It absolutely changed how I think of things and how I experience being in the moment, looking at art. Do you can do this? Just pick up a magazine and find a page that is interesting to you. I recently subscribed to Architectural Digest, beautiful pictures, and I can absolutely spend many, many minutes looking at some of the spaces. I truly hope this episode terrified you a little bit. When I shared the research about the cost to spending all our time on our devices all of this time, and using it like a third space, and it's terrifying to think about what we're doing to our brain. And you can make changes if you're struggling to make a change. Absolutely. A therapist will help you figure out how to stop compulsive behavior. It matters for your brain that you interrupt it as soon as possible. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to interrupt. I also hope you feel really, really inspired to return to some of the activities that you truly love. Last night on a random Monday night, I made cookies and it was so much more fun than scrolling on my phone. Whatever you do to add in interesting things to your life and go to these third spaces will improve your brain and help you rebuild what's been damaged in terms of the dopamine pathway, in terms of this overload of cortisol and the decrease in attention and the ability to stay focused on work. So now that you know all this, what will you create? Thank you so much for being here in the Modern Creative Women podcast. It really is a pleasure. And if you have yet to subscribe, just click the subscribe button so you don't miss a single episode. If you would like to contribute, you can be a sponsor of the show for just 3 or $5 a month, and you may have noticed you are hearing zero commercials. And it's one thing that really frustrates me with my favorite podcasts, so I always subscribe to get the commercial free edition, but here it's just commercial free, and if you want to participate, it offsets the cost of what it takes to put the podcast out. Have a wonderful rest of your day and I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.