I don’t think our phones steal our time. I think they steal our stamina.

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I kept trying to figure out why I’m so tired. Not sleepy, just… depleted. And I couldn’t explain it because like, things are fine. I’m not going through anything. I’m not overworked or anything. I have weekends. I have evenings. I technically have time.

But I don’t have the thing that makes time useful. Whatever that thing is. Energy. Bandwidth. The cognitive break that lets you actually do something with an empty hour.

I can still do the big visible stuff. I show up to work. I make the meetings. I do the calls. I reply to enough texts. I hit deadlines. I function. From the outside, I’m fine.

But the small quiet things have slowly disappeared and I didn’t even notice when it happened.

Reading. Not skimming articles, actually reading. A whole book. Without checking my phone every six pages. I used to be someone who read. Now I buy books and they sit on my nightstand.

Thinking. Following a thought somewhere. Letting it develop. Instead of having half a thought and then getting distracted and then having another half thought and then checking something and then forgetting what I was even thinking about.

Writing something that isn’t a deliverable. Calling a friend and actually being present on the call instead of half-listening while doing something else because. Going for a walk without airpods. Sitting. Just sitting somewhere without needing a podcast or a show or something running in the background to buffer my own thoughts.

I don’t think it’s a discipline problem. I think something is actually being taken from me, slowly, in increments so small I didn’t notice until I was already empty.

That’s the thing about phones, about the internet, about this whole ecosystem we’re living inside now. It doesn’t ask for much. It asks for a little. A glance. A check. A scroll. A quick reply. Tiny things. Nothing that feels like anything in the moment.

But it asks constantly. It asks all day. And every ask is an interruption. And every interruption is a tiny transferring of resources. These transfers accumulate.

The day ends and I’m exhausted but I can’t point to what I actually did. I’m not tired from effort. I’m not tired from work. I’m tired from noise. From being “on” in ten tiny ways. From context-switching a hundred times. From a brain that’s been pinged and pulled and interrupted so many times that it’s forgotten how to go deep. Forgotten how to stay with something.

It’s like…you know how they say the thing about boiling a frog slowly? It’s that. I didn’t notice my attention span shrinking. I didn’t notice my tolerance for boredom disappearing. I didn’t notice that I’d stopped being able to think in long uninterrupted stretches. It just happened, gradually, while I was busy checking things.

So I’m trying something. Trying to treat attention like money. Budget it. Protect it. Actually notice where it’s going instead of letting it leak out everywhere. Get stingy about it. Stop handing it out to things that take and take and give absolutely nothing back.

I don’t know if it’ll work. I don’t know if the damage is reversible or if this is just who I am now. But I’m trying.

Anyway. If you’ve been feeling weirdly drained lately and you can’t figure out why, if you have time but no energy, if you’re resting but not recovering, if you feel tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix, you might not be lazy. You might not be depressed. You might not be broken.

You might just be overstimulated. Your brain might just be full. And once you know that, you can try make it less full.