I picked up my phone to check the weather the other day, and twenty minutes later I was still standing in my kitchen, having bounced from app to app through a chain of perfectly legitimate tasks that I never actually chose to do in that moment. I wasn't scrolling mindlessly. I was checking my steps, signing up for a yoga class, responding to my husband's text, following up on a bank alert. And I still lost the thread of my own day.

That's what makes our relationship with phones so hard to examine. It's not all mindless scrolling. Our phones are genuinely useful tools, and that's exactly why we never put them down.

We've adapted so completely to being constantly tethered to our devices that we've forgotten what it feels like to have a mind that isn't always being filled with input. We reach for our phones in every spare moment, not because we need to, but because we have two minutes to kill and our brains have been trained to say "phone" before we've made a conscious decision.

Something interesting has shifted in recent years, too. A lot of us have pulled back from posting on social media, but we haven't pulled back from our phones. We've just become passive consumers instead of active participants, and the tethering hasn't loosened at all. I've explored this on my YouTube channel, So What Are We Doing Here, in two video essays I'll link in the show notes.

In this episode, I walk through three simple habits that have helped me reclaim my time and attention, habits I still have to practice every day. I'll share the most recent data on phone usage from the 2026 Reviews.org report, explain how our apps are engineered to keep us engaged through intermittent rewards, personalization, and instant gratification, and talk about why mindfulness, which just means paying attention to how you feel, is the foundation for lasting change.

I also share why I believe doing this work alongside our students is far more powerful than just enforcing phone policies at them. When students see that their teacher is honest about struggling with the same thing they do, it stops being about compliance and becomes about awareness and choice. I reference high school teacher Ashly Hilst's approach from Episode 306, where her message "Phones don't make good moments, people do" stuck with students in a way that traditional policies never had.

Whether you want to start with your own habits or bring this conversation into your classroom, this episode will give you a framework for helping yourself and your students take back control of how you spend your time and attention.

If you want to put these three habits into practice for yourself, I have a free 21-day Intentional Connectivity Challenge. It's one email per week for three weeks, each one focused on building one of these habits, with a follow-up check-in to help you stay on track.

If you want something more personalized, Motivation Lab is my coaching app that helps you understand how your brain works and build strategies that fit your natural tendencies. There's a module called Take Control of Your Phone Habits that walks you through exactly what I'm describing here, and it also covers motivation, focus, and procrastination, because our phone habits are tangled up with all of those things.

And if you want to bring this work into your classroom, my Finding Flow Solutions curriculum has a full unit on healthy phone habits with student journals, slideshows, and discussion activities that are no-prep for you. There are versions for elementary, middle, and high school.

We've been taught to think of the brain as the control center, the part of us that really matters for learning. But the body isn't just along for the ride, carrying our brains from place to place.

Caroline Williams, science journalist and three-time author (including of the book Inner Sense) has spent years digging into the research on how our brains and bodies actually work together. Turns out they're in constant conversation, sending signals back and forth in ways that shape how we think, feel, learn, and remember.

And that means the brain isn't calling all the shots from up there in your head: your body has a lot more to say than we've been giving it credit for.

Caroline and I talk about why we've been trained to override our body's signals, what happens when kids learn to tune in instead of push through, and how this changes what it means to teach the whole child.

This conversation might shift how you see everything from behavior issues to why certain kids struggle to focus. You'll learn:

• Why emotions don't actually start in your brain
• How body awareness connects to emotional intelligence and self-regulation
• What's really happening when we say "trust your gut"
• Why teaching kids to tune into their bodies might be one of the most important things we can do
• How understanding this changes the way we think about learning

If our bodies are constantly feeding information to our brains, then a lot of what we do in classrooms starts to make less sense...and there are easy, small shifts that can help.

Article/Transcript for this episode: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/the-brain-isnt-separate-from-the-body-heres-what-that-means-for-learning/

After 20+ years of creating exclusively for educators, I'm expanding into some new creative spaces.

In this podcast episode, I share the "why" behind my new YouTube channel ("So What Are We Doing Here?"), my Substack publication, my free guided meditations on Insight Timer, and some other fun new places to find me.

I also talk about how my own work has shifted more toward adults, and why so much of what I've always talked about on this podcast (productivity, mindset, burnout, boundaries) goes way beyond the classroom.

Then I get into something I've been wanting to demystify for a while: the restorative practices that are at the heart of my retreats. I break down what forest bathing, sound baths, and restorative yoga actually are, what the research says about why they work, and what it felt like to lead these sessions at my Books in the Wild retreat last month.

I also make a case for planning your year around restorative practices instead of around work, and using the concept of "due season" to build intentional periods of rest into your calendar before the busyness fills it up.

Truth for Teachers isn't going anywhere. But you're not JUST a teacher, and I want to create for ALL of you, not just the part of you standing in front of a classroom.

Article/Transcript for this epsiode: https://truthforteachers.com/truth-for-teachers-podcast/so-what-are-we-doing-here-expanding-into-retreats-video-essays-mindfulness-and-more/

Retreats: https://dueseasonpress.com/
Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/AngelaWatson
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sowhatarewedoinghere
Substack: https://angelaswatson.substack.com/
Motivation Lab: https://studio.com/apps/angela/motivationlab