Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Intentional Living

I Gave Up Podcasts for Two Weeks. Here’s What Happened.

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What’s not to love about podcasts? They’re educational, entertaining, and free. I’ve been a fan since I downloaded my first one on my iPod Nano back in 2008.

I’ve listened to countless hours of Radiolab, This American Life, Invisibilia, Serial, and S-Town. I’d recognize Jad Abumrad’s voice in a crowded room.

I’ve also listened to amateur podcasts about arcane topics. I may admit to streaming them if I remembered the titles.

I’ve discovered interesting books and authors through podcasts. I’ve stumbled on topics to write about and people to interview. Podcasts helped me stay entertained during long nights pacing with crying babies and harried days at home with two little boys.

So why would I take a break from podcasts? In December, I was assigned to write an article with the title: “Is it Bad to Listen to Podcasts All Day?”

My immediate answer was, “No way! That’s my dream life!”

But then I dug into the research and reflected on my podcast habit.

My total listening added up to about one to two hours a day, or 7 to 14 hours a week. That put me in the super listener category, according to Edison Research. I usually listened when I was doing something else, like getting ready in the morning, cooking, walking, or driving.

I thought of my listening habit as a good thing. I love learning new things.

But as I revisited the research on multitasking, I wondered if trying to listen to podcasts while I hustled through life was causing me mental stress and fatigue and was actually dumbing me down. (Multitasking does that.)

Plus, some of the podcasts I was listening to were about how to live a more mindful life. And multitasking is, ahem, the opposite of mindfulness.

So I decided to do an experiment. I gave up podcasts for two weeks and replaced them with silence. Just me and my wandering mind. What happened next amazed me.

I felt relieved.

The first time I stepped out the door for a walk without glancing at my podcast feed felt like a vacation. Then I had the same sensation when I got in my car.

I wasn’t expecting to feel relief, because I thought of podcasts as something I enjoyed. But, like most people, I’m bombarded with choices and decisions constantly, which is draining. Not having to scan through feeds and find a podcast was refreshing.

Plus, it felt great to turn off the chattering in my ear (even if in this case, the chattering was entertaining me with well-crafted stories and occasional profound insights).

I live with two chatty little boys, who enjoy listening to Taylor Swift songs at high volumes. Our house is noisy when we’re all home. When I’m home alone, I read, research, and write a lot, so my mind is a busy place.

Quiet sounded so good.

Of course, this shouldn’t have surprised me. I’ve experienced enough quiet in my life to know it’s restorative.

Silence is regarded as holy in most religions. Spiritual people of all traditions herald the importance of quiet contemplation. Mother Theresa equated silence with prayer.

And scientists have discovered the power of silence accidentally when they used it as a control in research. In one study, researchers discovered that a two-minute silent pause in a piece of music was more beneficial for the body and nervous system than relaxing music.

In another study, two hours of silence a day caused mice to grow new functioning neurons in the hippocampus region of their brains. Imke Kirste, the lead researcher, theorizes that if the same results are found in humans, someday silence may be used to treat conditions like dementia and depression

But sometimes you have to immerse yourself in quiet to remember how healing it is.

Everything got easier.

When I turned off the podcasts when I was doing housework, the residual backlog of dishes and laundry at our house disappeared. I zipped through making dinner, even complex recipes. And I felt calmer and more engaged when I was with my kids. (I didn’t usually listen to podcasts when I was hanging out with my family, but I often felt in a hurry to get back to the chores so I could listen to one.)

Writing also felt easier. I attribute this to having more free time to think. The brain goes into its default mode when it’s not concentrating, where it wanders and self reflects. This state is just as essential to learning as concentration. In my well-intentioned attempts to learn more, I may have been shortchanging myself of going into this just-as-important brain state

You may think that listening to a podcast while doing something else isn’t really multitasking in the way that driving and talking on the phone is. But listening to a podcast is actually hard work for the brain. The brain is five times more active when listening to a story than when listening to a list of facts. Add sound effects, multiple characters’ voices, and a relatively fast pace, and the brain is busy.

When people were hooked up to MRI machines while they listened to Moth Radio Hour for a study, “Widely dispersed sensory, emotional and memory networks were humming, across both hemispheres of the brain,” according to Benedict Carey of the New York Times.

In hindsight, it’s funny that I thought I could listen to a complex story at the same time as I was making a new-to-me recipe or navigating an unfamiliar route in my car.

But that’s the strange thing about multitasking. We think we can do it, even though the brain can’t focus on two things at once.

Research suggests we lose 40 percent of our productivity and are four times slower at learning new things when we multitask.

I certainly felt 40 percent more productive when I stopped. But this seems to be a lesson I must learn repeatedly. I hope I finally got it this time.

Real life was more interesting.

What could be the downside of listening to a steady stream of well-crafted narratives and conversations designed to make you feel a deep sense of awe? Real life and real conversations can feel a little ho-hum. There are relatively few earth-shattering revelations, profound insights, and moments of realization in everyday chitchat.

Worse, listening to podcasts can give you the illusion you’re already socializing, which makes real socializing feel less essential. Pamela Druckerman, a self-confessed recovering podcast addict, writes in the Atlantic: “Podcasts gave me the illusion of having a vibrant social life. I was constantly “meeting” new people. My favorite hosts started to seem like friends: I could detect small shifts in their moods, and tell when they were flirting with guests.”

I hadn’t thought much about these downsides of listening to podcasts until I gave them up. Within a couple days, I felt more eager to run into people and chat. And when I was conversing with people, I felt more refreshed and engaged.

Plus, when I went for walks without a podcast, even around my neighborhood, I was blown away by all of the beauty: murmurations of starlings, fog twisting through the hills, delicate patterns etched across iced-over puddles. Had I really been missing all this before? Oh right, my brain was busy listening.

I felt happier.

I felt notably calmer. I slept better. I felt more present and engaged with my family. I noticed fewer moments of stress or anxiety.

Plus, at times, I had a feeling of spacious expansion that I haven’t felt since I was a kid. One day I was bringing books up to my son’s room. It was raining, and I laid down on his bed and listened for awhile before I returned to my chores. Another day, I sat down and read poetry, which I haven’t done for years.

My time was mine again. I could just focus on what I was doing. Or just be.

Of course, changing any habit can be hard, and giving up podcasts was no exception. I felt symptoms that felt like withdrawal (similar to when I quit drinking coffee awhile ago). I especially felt antsy when I was cooking, which is strange because cooking requires a lot of focus (and some inherent multitasking). Fortunately, preparing food in the quiet got a little easier as time went on.

Going Forward

Of course, podcasts are fun and interesting, and I miss some of them. Will I listen going forward? How much? To what?

I’m not sure yet. But I know I’ll be more mindful about what I trade my quiet for. Plus, I’m swearing off multitasking (again). Lesson learned (again).

Will taking a break from podcasts (or social media, radio, or television) change your outlook as much as it did mine? There’s no way to know except to try. If you do (or if you have in the past), leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about it!

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these similar posts:

7 Reasons to Join the Urban Homesteading Revolution

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My article about urban homesteading was featured on CustomMade’s blog, accompanied by some beautiful graphics. I’ll have lots more articles coming out soon! Jump on over to my portfolio or Contently page to see my latest published work.

7 Reasons to Join the Urban Homesteading Revolution

By Abby Quillen

I grew up in a fairly typical late-20th-century family. We lived a few blocks from the center of town. We bought all of our food at a chain grocery store—and much of it was instant, frozen, or packaged. I’d never spent much time around livestock or farms, but at a young age, I longed to grow a garden, bake bread, and cook from scratch.

When I was in college, I pored over back issues of Mother Earth News and devoured Living the Good Life, Helen and Scott Nearing’s memoir about homesteading in Vermont, which helped launch the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s. At the same time, I loved living close to a city center—riding my bike and walking everywhere, spending the afternoon at the library or swimming pool, going to book readings and events, and living close to my friends. It was hard to imagine leaving all of it behind, although I always thought I might.

When my husband and I were considering buying our first house, we realized we might be able to combine the best of urban living with the best of the back-to-the-land movement. We weren’t alone: Around the time our son was born in 2008, a lot of people were talking about “urban homesteading.”

What is urban homesteading? In short, it looks different for every family. For mine, it means we live in a regular, ranch-style house in the city. In our backyard, we have a small flock of three chickens and a large vegetable garden that provides us with peas, greens, tomatoes, corn, squash, beans, and herbs. We compost. We cook nearly all of our meals from scratch, including bread, tortillas, and pizza crust, and we brew beer. We chop wood to heat our house, and we hang our laundry on a clothesline. We make most of our own household cleaners and personal care products out of simple ingredients, like baking soda and vinegar. Biking is our main form of transit. And we try to be intentional about the things we buy. For other families, urban homesteading includes keeping bees, raising rabbits, making clothes, or preserving food.

More than anything, urban homesteading is a mindset. It turns us from consumers who are disconnected from where our food and belongings come from into producers who use our hands to make some of what we need to live. Most of us have little desire to be as self-sufficient as the original homesteaders had to be and the back-to-the-landers strived to be. In my family’s case, we’re thrilled to take advantage of all of the wonderful elements of urban life, including farmer’s markets and grocery stores as well as chocolate, coffee, and cultural events.

In some areas, urban homesteading has become mainstream. Where I live in Eugene, Oregon, nearly everyone I know has a vegetable garden and a flock of backyard hens. It’s no wonder the movement is picking up steam. There are many excellent reasons to celebrate the revolution.

1. Homegrown food is safer, more nutritious, and tastes better.

When the latest salmonella or e-coli outbreak dominates the headlines, it’s comforting to know exactly where your food comes from and how it’s raised. And because vitamin content is depleted by light, temperature, and time, freshly picked produce grown near your house is more nutritious than conventional produce, which is transported an average of 1,494 miles before it reaches the grocery store.

An even more delicious reason to celebrate homegrown food is the flavor. Gourmet chefs use the freshest ingredients they can find for a reason. The first time I cooked one of the eggs laid by our hens, I couldn’t believe how large and yellow the yolk was or how delectable it tasted. And it’s easy to appreciate novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s zeal for sun-ripened garden tomatoes. “The first tomato brings me to my knees,” she writes. “Its vital stats are recorded in my journal with the care of a birth announcement.”

2. Urban homesteading encourages healthy movement.

When I started gardening and making more things around the house and yard, I noticed a side effect: I felt better. It’s not surprising. Digging the dandelions out of a raised bed, brewing an India Pale Ale, and peeling potatoes fall in line with the sort of daily activities most important for maintaining a healthy body weight, according to research conducted by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic. In Levine’s study, people were fed an extra thousand calories a day. Those who did the most daily non-exercise activity (as opposed to deliberate exercise for fitness) gained the least weight.

Non-Exercise Activity Helps Maintain a Healthy Body

And in a nine-country European breast cancer study, of all the activities and recreational exercise women partook in, household activity—including housework, home repair, gardening, and stair climbing—was the only activity to significantly reduce breast cancer risk.

We hear a lot about the dangers of sitting, and most of us have to sit for some part of the day. But increasing our movement in our daily lives can make a huge difference for our health and the way we feel.

3. Urban homesteading helps families connect with nature and the seasons.

Growing up in Colorado, I was fortunate to spend a lot of time hiking and camping. Gardening has given me an even more intimate connection with the natural world, since now I must work with it as a co-creator. And it has given my two young sons a wonderful relationship with plants and seasonal rhythms. They love the garden and beg to help plant seeds, pull weeds, and harvest. Every time one of them asks me if it’s pea or fig season yet, or recognizes an edible plant in someone’s yard, I smile. Those may seem like simple things, but for me as a kid, produce was something that was shipped across the country and delivered to a refrigerated section of the grocery store.

4. Urban homesteading is thrifty. 

It’s no coincidence the urban homesteading boom coincided with a worldwide economic recession. If you build your soil, save seeds, and tend your garden well, you can save hundreds of dollars on organic produce each season by growing your own. Keeping chickens can also save you money. We estimate that our eggs cost $3.35 a dozen (in organic chicken feed) at the most, compared to $5 to $7 for similar eggs at the health food store. However, we were lucky to inherit our chicken coop, so others may have to include that expense as well.

Cooking from scratch saves us the most money. It’s not just that making stock, microbrews, and bread products from bulk ingredients is cheaper than buying them. As we’ve become better chefs, we’re also not as apt to go to restaurants, which used to be a huge drain on our finances.

Save Money in the Garden: 5 Tips for Thrifty Growing

5. Turning a lawn into a homestead makes productive use of land and supports healthier ecosystems.

In the memoir Paradise Lot, Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates recount how they transformed their backyard—one-tenth of an acre of compacted soil in Holyoke, Massachusetts—into a permaculture oasis where they grow about 160 edible perennials. What was once a barren lot is now habitat for fish, snails, frogs, salamanders, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, bugs, and worms. “Imagine what would happen,” Toensmeier writes, “if we as a species paid similar attention to all the degraded and abandoned lands of the world.”

Most of us don’t have the skills or desire to garden on the scale that Toensmeier and Bates do. But by planting a few vegetables, herbs, or fruit trees, we create habitats for birds, butterflies, and pollinators. And by composting kitchen waste, chicken manure, and fallen leaves, we improve the ecosystem that supports all life.

6. Gardening and creating things boosts the spirits.

Author Matthew Crawford traded his job at a Washington think tank for a career fixing motorcycles because working with his hands made him feel more alive. “Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day,” Crawford writes.

We’ve all experienced the thrill that comes from making or fixing something. In her book Lifting Depression, neuroscientist Dr. Kelly Lambert explains that association. “When we knit a sweater, prepare a meal, or simply repair a lamp, we’re actually bathing our brain in ‘feel-good’ chemicals,” she explains. Lambert contends that in our drive to do less physical work to acquire what we want and need, we may have lost something vital to our mental well-being—an innate resistance to depression.

I can attest to what Lambert says. Almost nothing is as satisfying as appraising a finished scarf or jar of sauerkraut, or cutting the first slice off a loaf of homemade bread. I have no doubt that creating something with my hands every day—even a meal—is imperative for my mental health.

7. Urban homesteading encourages families to live, work, and buy more intentionally.

These days, before we buy something impulsively, my husband and I are more likely to ask ourselves some simple questions. Can we make, fix, or do this ourselves, and is it worth the time and energy? Sometimes the answer is no. For me, canning and making clothing are not worth the effort. But just asking these questions makes our family more intentional about how we live and work, and what we buy.

As a society, we’re often encouraged to make decisions based on two variables: time and labor. When it comes to household tasks, it’s usually seen as preferable to save both time and labor. While making a stew will take longer and require more physical work than buying a can, the process is enjoyable and good for the body. In addition, the homemade variety is healthier, tastes better, and brings greater satisfaction. Equations look different when you add in all of the variables.

I hardly think of my family as urban homesteaders anymore, because the parts of the lifestyle that once seemed foreign and daunting, such as gardening, composting, and cooking from scratch, are now routine. They help us stay connected and make our lives feel richer. It’s powerful to produce some of what we need to survive, especially food.

Growing Cycle

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The Cost of Things

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Caped Avengers 009

The past two weekends, my neighbors held a yard sale. Apparently my boys could smell commerce happening nearby, because within moments of awakening, they were at the window. “The neighbor has a tent on his lawn,” Ezra announced. Both boys spent most of the weekends outside asking questions and fondling nicknacks or glued to the window watching people come and go.

“We need a canoe.” “Ball next door!” “Mom, can we go look at the games again?” “My boat.” They managed to tote home a number of odd things from the free box, including a stained white plastic ball that looks like it came from the antenna of a Jeep, a telephone that would have been state-of-the-art when I was Ezra’s age, and a wide-brimmed hat that fits no one in the house.

These finds joined other relics that Ezra’s lugged home over the years, including a couple of other land-line telephones, a broken audio cassette recorder, and a microphone. Apparently our compulsion to collect stuff starts at a young age, and it only seems to escalate from there. On our recent camping trip, I was amazed by all the things people bring to “get away from it all” – super-sized motorhomes, patio furniture, dog beds and crates and yards. Of course, we toted our share of stuff back and forth from our car, although fortunately we were severely constricted by its compact size.

It’s not that I don’t love stuff. Every time I turn on my washing machine, drop into my bed at the end of the day, or turn on my computer, I am thankful for the material things that make our lives better. My goal is not necessarily to have less. I’m not on a mission to pare my belongings to 100 things as many bloggers have amazingly done. I just want to be intentional about what I bring into my life. I want to spend my money, time, and attention on things that bring me happiness and satisfaction. And I want to try to keep in mind a purchase’s entire life cycle: where did it come from and where will it end up?

In this issue of YES! Magazine (all about the “Human Cost of Stuff”) Annie Leonard says it well: “I’m neither for nor against stuff. I like stuff it’s well-made, honestly marketed, used for a long time, and at the end of its life recycled in a way that doesn’t trash the planet, poison people, or exploit workers. Our stuff should not be artifacts of indulgence and disposability, like toys that are forgotten 15 minutes after the wrapping comes off, but things that are both practical and meaningful.” (My review of Judy Wicks’ Good Morning, Beautiful Business is also in this issue. Check it out if you see a copy!)

Visiting second-hand stores helps me be more intentional about new purchases. All those cluttered shelves of hardly used, outdated appliances helps take the sheen off the marketing and shiny newness in box and department stores. Recently Ezra and I wandered through several used stores together. He’s been wanting a Leap Pad learning system, because he loves playing with his friend’s, and I heard used stores tend to have vast quantities of them. When the first three stores didn’t have one, Ezra was desperate to bring home something – anything. He insisted he would be happy with a pair of butterfly wings, a toy cash register, or a toy laptop instead of a Leap Pad. I convinced him to wait until we checked out the last store.

They had exactly what Ezra wanted, and it was just $5. “I’m so glad we waited,” Ezra beamed as he hugged his new Leap Pad. I’m hoping he learned something about being intentional about purchases. And for now, fortunately, the yard sales are over; please don’t let any of our neighbors open an ice cream cart.

Do you try to be intentional about your purchases? Do you have any tips to share? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Striking a Balance With Technology

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When my sister spent a year studying abroad in Iceland in 1993, we had little contact with her. We spent a lot of money to call each other occasionally on a land line that hummed and cracked, and we wrote letters, which took weeks to make it from the Colorado mountains to her new home on the Arctic Circle.

That experience would be radically different today. We could email, text, or Facebook each other. My sister could blog. We could video chat with her.

That’s an astonishing transition when you think about it.

The technological progress we’ve seen in the last two decades – the Internet, digital cameras, mobile phones, streamed videos – is dizzying. I’m in unabashed love with so much of it. Even amidst the marketing and spam, some days Twitter feels like a giant free-form university with intelligent people from all sectors of life zipping information back and forth and bantering about ideas. I get giddy when I discover an interesting academic, thinker, or activist and find dozens of their interviews and lectures online. And the revolution that e-readers and tablets are bringing to publishing and academia is exhilarating.

This is an exciting time to be alive.

And yet, the amount of time we (and our children) spend interfacing with gadgets and screens makes me uneasy, and I know many people share my angst. Recently a blogger lamented that she’s contemplating ditching her iPhone, because it’s eating too much of her time, and dozens of her readers divulged that they’re feeling the same way.  The same week a Lifehacker post and a Harvard Business Review article warned that our smart phones might be dumbing us down. Then a large study came out, finding that one in three people feel envious, lonely, frustrated or angry when visiting Facebook.

Despite its connecting powers, our technology often seems to disconnect us. It can encourage us to ignore our family and friends to engage with a group of folks we hardly know. And it can swindle hours that we may have once spent in nature, or moving, reading, writing, or making art.

I imagine most people, like me, are constantly trying to find a balance with family, work, creativity, and the distracting allure of our gadgets and screens.

I try to ask myself questions from time to time. How much and what types of technology help me be present with my friends and family? Stay intellectually stimulated? Focus on the things that matter? Conversely, which activities and gadgets make me feel distracted and unhappy, steal my focus with my kids and my work, and distract me from the creative projects that make me feel more alive.

I’ve yet to find a perfect balance. But I’ve come up with a handful of ways to be more intentional about the way I spend my time, and that’s helped me  make peace with my angst about technology.  Here are a few of the tricks I’m using right now to try to let in the gifts of the information age, while keeping out the less than happy side effects that so often sneak in with them.

  • A digital sunset and a weekly digital sabbatical

We usually turn the computers and gadgets off around six, so we can eat together and wind down for bed. And we devote Sunday to family day. It’s usually a lazy day, with leisurely hikes, library trips, afternoon naps – and no computers. In other words, it’s everyone’s favorite day of the week, and it’s incredibly restorative.

  • Not-so-smart phones

The truth is, I don’t really need Google on the go, because most of the time I’m home near my trusty desktop. (Yes, desktop. It’s like those archaic days of the early 2000s around here.) So far, I’ve survived without apps and GPS. And while we’re out and about, I’m able to focus on these quickly disappearing days when my kids are little and say and do curious and hilarious things. I have a feeling I will have to renegotiate this one in the future, but for now my not-so-smart phone offers more than enough distraction.

  • A television-lite life

We have an old-fashioned TV that we hardly turn on, except for mid-afternoon episodes of Dora and Diego for four-year-old Ezra, who is a huge fan. (We’ve found a trick to allowing  a little bit of TV and avoiding the cajoling, begging, and tantrums that can come with it: we allow a certain amount at a certain time of the day, and we stick with PBS shows on DVD or Roku to skip advertisements.) As for the adults in the house, we enjoy a few shows, but we have little time to actually watch them in this season of our lives.

  • Pen and paper

This groundbreaking technology allows you to write or jot down notes, without allowing you to click over and watch cute kitten videos on Youtube. One trick I’ve learned: when you get the urge to Google something or message or email someone, write it down. During a designated computer time, scan your list and decide what you really need to attend to. This  practice can improve your focus and be a huge boon to your productivity.

  • Quiet

As my kids get older, I’ve found that background noise – radio, podcasts, or music – makes it difficult for me to be an engaged parent. I listen to a podcast for an hour a day, and we sometimes listen to music in the afternoons. Other than that, I shut off all the background noise when I’m at home with the kids, and I’m astounded by how much happier and focused that makes all of us.

  • Slow blogging and a social networking diet

Like its cousin Facebook, this blog can devour hours of my already spare work time. That’s why I’ve transitioned to a less frequent posting schedule (generally once  a week on Mondays). And although I read and reflect on and appreciate every single comment you leave in this space, I don’t always have the time to respond to each of them. Likewise, I only go on Facebook for a few minutes a few times a week. And I tweet four days a week for a half hour or less. I’m mostly okay with less blogging and social networking, because it means I get to spend more time in the here and now. And that feels like a good balance right now.

I’m curious, how do you feel about technology? Have you devised ways to be intentional with it? Have you found a good balance? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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