A truly wonderful thing happened on an otherwise truly normal fall morning in Tallahassee.
I got my brain back.
That’s what it felt like, anyway.
My usual morning walk around our neighborhood lake felt like my walks down the beach when we lived in California, my mind turning over deep and quality thoughts, my creativity humming in the form of designing drills and practices at Florida State or sketching the outlines of a chapter of a book I’d write later that week. I’m a morning person, so those still and quiet hours of pre-dawn and soon after the first rays of sunlight begin to slip above the horizon are my peak in terms of thinking, writing, and doing anything creative.
For years, this was how I operated.
For the last year or so, it mostly came and went, to my frustration and agitation.
Now, it’s back.
What changed?
Many things, of course. Having two children under three years old will throw any routine into a paper shredder, leaving little of what resembled of the old. My old routine, pre-kids, in retrospect, was unbelievable, one that allowed me to wake up around 6 a.m., walk for 30 minutes to an hour, read and write for a few hours, go practice beach volleyball until noon or so, grab some lunch — and then, only then, turn on my phone.
That is, frankly, not possible in my current stage of life.
Throw in a regular lack of decent sleep from infants and toddlers that also took its toll on my brain’s functioning, a new job that moved us cross country and a dozen other shifts in lifestyle and it’s easy to peg a few of these variables as to why my creativity and ability to think deeply, without distraction, is a fraction of what it once was. Gloria Mark, a professor who has spent years studying the science of interruptions, agrees: “If you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions.”
Children are interruption machines if you’re trying to get anything done that is not paying attention to them. But I didn’t give my kids away in the months since my brain returned to its flowy form. The only variable that’s changed since I’ve felt my brain is back to its usual self is that I mostly got off social media.
It was a move I’d been wanting to make for most of 2025. I noticed in February or so that when I’d post something on the SANDCAST Instagram page, before I drove into work at Florida State around 8 a.m., just the sheer act of getting on social media would take a bite out of my thinking. I didn’t have to be on it for long, and I frequently wasn’t. I’d simply download the app, post whatever it was we were posting that day, respond to a few comments and messages, and then delete the app again. It would take 10 minutes.
It would take an entire day.
This phenomenon was difficult to put into words. How could five minutes on Instagram with mostly pleasant interactions take my creativity for a ride, hijacking my thoughts for longer than I’d care to admit?
Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Anxious Generation, put it into words for me.
I love – repeat, love – Haidt’s work. He may be one of the most important individuals in society today. I’d read his excellent books, Coddling of the American Mind, and The Happiness Hypothesis, and loved them both, extracting no small bit of value from them.
But in tearing through his most recent book, The Anxious Generation, I read one of the most impactful books in recent memory – which led me straight to Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, another book that drew back its fist and threw a haymaker from its pages and hit me square in my lost attention span.
Initially, I picked up The Anxious Generation because as a parent and coach of young women at Florida State, I want to be equipped with knowledge of the immense damage social media is inflicting on our youth, and how we can mitigate it.
What I came away with was an explainer for what was happening with my own mind, particularly when coupled with Stolen Focus and several other books, namely Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Slow Productivity, both of which I read in quick succession in 2025.
My ability to think and focus for extended periods of time has always come easy to me, regardless of my environment. It’s aided me in my ability as a commentator and podcaster to store and recall tremendous amounts of information with no notes, because all of the information is secured, safe and sound, in my hyperfocused brain. My indistractability is, I’d argue, my greatest strength as an interviewer, writer, and coach, allowing me to have deep conversations or a deep dialogue both with others and myself in which I craft and structure stories, weaving in complex elements in a hopefully elegant fashion, often on walks or showers or drives with the windows down and no music.
For much of 2025, that hadn’t been the case.
As our modest channels at SANDCAST grew, so too did its engagement. This, I know, is what the algorithms reward: Engagement keeps folks on the app longer; more time spent on the app means more data to sell and more money from advertising; more money keeps the media world turning. I wanted the channel to continue growing, so I willingly engaged, responding to comments and messages and posting regularly. The creep of this was gradual, but somewhere along the lines, as James Clear would aptly describe it in one of his newsletters, I was playing a game I never intended to play in the first place.
Before I knew it, my thoughts were turning to those surface-level interactions as opposed to the deep work I consider the majority of my value to stem from. I was, as Cal Newport wrote in his book, Deep Work, “in the shallows” rather than digging into the longform storytelling I so love — the game I had originally signed up to play. Those shallows dominated my thoughts. Even after deleting the app, those comments and messages were left in the backburner as open loops, and I’d wonder what the responses would be and how I’d respond to those hypothetical responses, playing out in my head how these conversations would go. I had turned into a manager, not a maker.
Reading Hari’s book comforted me more than I care to admit, for on page 5, there he confesses the same thing was happening to him: “I had just turned 40,” he wrote, and “wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration, as if it was a friend who had vanished one day at sea and never been seen since.”
And again, most of these interactions on social media were positive, pleasant back-and-forths to have – but there were just so dang many of them, and none of them existed in the real, tangible world. I wasn’t fighting with people; we were exchanging pleasantries! I also, of course, had actual conversations happening, both in person and not, through email, texting and the occasional WhatsApp.
I’d be at meals or meetings, and those open loops would be running in the background. I was very much in the shallows, a highly distracted creative whose best work depends precisely on not being distracted.
Wright Thompson is, to me, the greatest writer alive at the moment, although I’d accept an argument for Mitch Albom. Thompson quit Twitter in 2014 and never went back and never felt an inclination to, in spite of many in the industry claiming it is a necessary tool to have.
“Twitter is stupid and I will never get back on,” he said. “What is the value of being on the internet? Even if you do win an argument, who cares? And every single person, me and you included, are the distillation of our worst selves on Twitter… There is nothing I miss about it. It doesn’t help you in any way.”
Haidt put it perfectly when he said that even when teens are not on social media, they are “forever elsewhere,” their mind focusing on those thousands of open loops of comments and messages and notifications pinging in their pocket.
So I mostly quit, in the form of hiring my sister-in-law, Kelsey Knudsen, to run our social media. I’m toying with taking a page out of the Outdoor Boys book and disabling comments from our YouTube Channel.
Is there a trade-off? Absolutely.
As the co-founder of a digital media company, I understand that there is value in social media, both from a literal financial sense and a brand-building one. It is an undeniably powerful disseminator of information, be it podcasts, videos, or stories I write. YouTube accounts for a decent chunk of our revenue, and much of the growth of our podcast can be attributed to social media. I’ve even learned quite a bit myself by scrolling through social media, coming across excellent, informative, sometimes inspirational clips, cribbing drills from other volleyball accounts, and so on and so forth. The beach volleyball community is a small but mighty one, and the conversations in our comment section are frequently productive, a place I can answer questions or even get corrected by well-meaning viewers and listeners.
Parents of recruits will often tell me that they feel as if they know me from the podcast and my Instagram. That is an unequivocally good thing, and in the first draft of this story, I wrote: “So I’ll continue monitoring it here and there to communicate with recruits and put out videos and anything else that showcase what Florida State beach volleyball – and my coaching and personality – is about.”
The more I think on it, the less sure of that I am.
Every time I log onto social media, I willingly sub myself into playing the wrong game.
The hardest part of this for me to swallow is I know better than to do this, and I’ve known it for a long time.
During my freshman year of college, studying journalism at the University of Maryland, I had a summer internship covering sports for the Carroll County Times. Struggling with a lead for a story one day, my editor, Bob Blubaugh, handed me his copy of the 2006 Best American Sportswriting series, told me to pick a story, any story, and give it a read. Then go for a walk.
You’d be surprised, he said, how the writing will come to you.
I do not know if there is any science behind this, maybe mirror neurons or something, but reading excellent writing seemed to prime my brain to write an excellent story. Taking that walk, without a phone or input, allowed my brain to examine the puzzle pieces of the story I was writing and put them all into order.
When I returned to my desk, my fingers flew across the keyboard. Within 10 minutes, I had not just a lead, but the entire 750-word story written.
It was like magic.
That has been my routine as a writer ever since. Every day, before I sit down to write, I take a long walk with no phone, make a cup of coffee, and read good writing for 15 to 30 minutes. And then, armed with a second cup of coffee — my writing coffee, as I call it — and still no phone, I hopefully write something wonderful.
There’s a reason myriad writers, from Emerson and Muir to Stephen King and so many in between, write at length about the power of walks and the creative engine it allows you to become. The foundation of Hari’s book is a three-month sabbatical he took to Province Island in which he didn’t have access to the internet. The result?
“One day,” he writes, “I left my iPod at home, and I decided to simply go for a walk along the beach. I walked for two hours, and I let my thoughts float, without my spotlight settling on anything. I felt my mind roam — from looking at little crabs on the beach, to memories of my childhood, to ideas for books I might write years from now… In that time, I felt more creative than I had since I was a child. Ideas started spinning out of my head. When I would get home and write them down, I realized I was having more creative ideas in a single three-hour walk than I usually had in a month.”
With every page I read, it felt as if Hari was writing directly to me.
“Where do new thoughts and innovation come from?” Earl Miller, a professor at MIT, asked Hari in Stolen Focus, to which Hari replied, in writing, “They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given undistracted free time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath your level of conscious mind, but this process is how new ideas pop together, and suddenly two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship. A new idea is born.”
Haidt prescribed to his students at NYU the exact routine my editor once did, and the results were exactly as I, and clearly Hari and Miller, would have expected.
“I told my students to listen to the podcast [in which Dacher Keltner describes what he calls awe walks] and then take a walk, slowly, anywhere outside, during which they must not take out their phones,” Haidt wrote in The Anxious Generation. “The written reflections they turned in for that week’s homework were among the most beautiful I’ve seen in my 30 years as a professor.”
There’s a reason one of the prevailing bits of wisdom at the moment is to allow yourself to be bored. The mind is at its best when it is still, when it is not in a constant state of absorbing input after lousy input. Because it isn’t just about the quality of those inputs, but the quantity as well. Indeed, Hari references studies of speed readers, and even the professional ones – yes, professional speed reading exists – retained far less information than those who took their time. And that’s just reading. When taking into account all of the normal distractions pumped in by our phones, it gets much worse. Hari cited a study at Carnegie Mellon in which a group of 136 students were split into two groups: half had their phones on and were receiving intermittent text messages, and the other half had their phones turned off. The students who received text messages during a retention test performed, on average, 20 percent worse, and other studies in similar scenarios have found outcomes of 30 percent.
“The best we can do now,” Miller the MIT professor explained, “is try and get rid of the distractions as much as possible.”
I’ve witnessed the power of this in person, with a several-years-long unofficial observational study of my wife. When we were dating, and even early in our marriage, she used her phone more than I thought necessary, regularly succumbing to the siren song of a doom scroll, and I’d poke fun of her for it. When our kids came along and she retired as a professional athlete, she neither had time to be on her phone nor any desire to do so. She felt her creativity boom in a way she hadn’t before. Recently, more than a month into the longest government shutdown in history, she had no idea the government was even shut down in the first place. She felt bad, sort of, in how ignorant she was to what seems like a relatively sizable event.
Then again… she couldn’t do a whole lot about it, could she?
In getting off her social media and, to a large extent, her phone, she’s made a clear distinction between, as Stephen Covey describes it in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, our sphere of influence and our sphere of worry, and what really matters. She lives in the real world immediately around her, and the real world only. She’s more at peace, despite the severe sleep deprivation that comes with feeding an infant overnight and manning a manic toddler and that infant during the day, than I’ve ever seen her.
That, in a way, is what I’m aiming to return to.
The Anxious Generation, and Stolen Focus, were the final nudges, the 1-2 combination I didn’t realize I needed. The knockout blow was this line from Haidt: “We need to take back control of our inputs. We need to take back control of our lives.”
So I am.
