Latest / Style Edit: Fashion, beauty & personal style / Why I Swapped My Phone for a Newspaper (And What It Taught Me About Slowing Down) | Style Edit
Transcript
- I held the paper in my hands this morning, and for the first time in years, my thumb didn’t twitch to scroll. The ink was still wet on my fingers, and the world felt suddenly, beautifully heavy. Let’s be real for a second. We all know that feeling when you wake up and your hand immediately goes to the nightstand. You grab the phone before you’ve even opened your eyes. You’re scrolling through headlines that haven’t happened yet, reading comments from strangers who are angry about things you don’t fully understand, and letting the noise of the internet bleed into your coffee routine. It’s a reflex. A muscle memory. But last Tuesday, I decided to break the cycle. Not because I’m some digital detox guru living off-grid in the woods, but because I was exhausted. Not physically tired, but mentally cluttered. So, I did something that felt almost rebellious. I walked to the corner bodega, bought a physical newspaper, and sat on my fire escape to read it. Just me, the paper, and the Brooklyn skyline. The weight of it in my hands was grounding. There was no blue light. No notifications buzzing against my palm. No algorithm deciding what made me anxious next. Just words, arranged in columns, waiting for me to choose where to look. There is a tactile joy to reading print that screens just cannot replicate. When you turn a page, there’s a sound. A crisp rustle. It engages a different part of your brain. Studies actually suggest that comprehension improves when we read on paper because our spatial memory helps us map out the information. You remember where a story was located on the page. Was it top left? Bottom right? That physical context creates a mental anchor. On a screen, everything is fluid. It’s all one endless stream. You can swipe away a difficult article as easily as you swipe away a distraction. But with a newspaper, you commit. You sit with it. You might smell the ink, which sounds strange until you’ve actually smelled it—it’s earthy, industrial, comforting. It smells like history. It smells like something made by human hands, not generated by code. For someone like me, who spends half her life curating vintage fabrics and worrying about the texture of silk versus cotton, this sensory experience matters. Style isn’t just about how clothes feel on your body; it’s about how experiences feel in your mind. And this? This felt expensive. Not in price, but in presence. Here is the gentle challenge I want to offer you today. When you scroll news, you are being fed. An algorithm looks at your past behavior, your biases, your fears, and it serves you exactly what it thinks will keep you engaged. Usually, that means outrage or fear. It’s a feedback loop designed to keep your eyes glued to the glass. But a newspaper? A newspaper is curated by humans. Editors make choices about what matters. They decide what gets front-page space based on significance, not just click-through rates. Yes, they have biases too—we always do—but it’s a different kind of bias. It’s editorial judgment. It’s slower. When you read a physical paper, you are encountering a wider variety of topics than you might seek out online. You stumble upon an arts review you didn’t know you cared about. You see a local community event notice. You read a long-form essay that doesn’t fit into a tweet-sized snippet. It forces you to engage with complexity rather than consumption. It reminds you that the world is big and messy and nuanced, not just a series of hot takes. Does it feel like you? Or does it feel like you’re letting the feed drive? One of the most surprising benefits of putting down the phone was the boredom. I mean that literally. There were moments while I was folding the paper after reading, sitting on those cold metal steps, where I had nothing to do. No podcast to fill the silence. No Instagram reels to distract me. And in that silence, my mind started to wander. I thought about the dress I was planning to style for a client later that day. I thought about the letter I needed to write to my grandmother. I thought about how much I missed the rain. When we constantly fill every quiet moment with digital input, we lose the ability to think deeply. We lose the capacity for daydreaming. That ‘boredom’ is actually creative incubation. It’s where ideas come from. As a former magazine editor, I can tell you that the best stories didn’t come from frantic Googling. They came from sitting with a question until it revealed its shape. Reading the paper gave me that space. It allowed me to process the news without reacting to it instantly. I could read a complex political piece, close the paper, take a deep breath, and then decide if I even wanted to talk about it. Or maybe I wouldn’t talk about it at all. And that choice? That agency? It’s priceless. I mentioned earlier that I was mentally cluttered. If you’ve been listening for a while, you might remember the episode about wearing grief when your soul feels heavy. I think a lot of that heaviness comes from the sheer volume of input we carry around in our pockets. We are absorbing the pain of the world twenty-four hours a day. It’s relentless. By switching to a physical newspaper, I wasn’t ignoring the world. I was engaging with it on my terms. I was setting boundaries. There’s a profound act of self-care in limiting your exposure to the global panic room that is social media. It’s okay to step back. It’s okay to say, ‘I will hear the news at eight o’clock, and then I will close the tab.’ Or better yet, ‘I will read the paper, and then I will go make tea.’ It’s about reclaiming your attention span. Your attention is your most valuable currency. Don’t spend it all on ads. Spend it on things that have texture. Spend it on stories that unfold slowly. Spend it on your own thoughts. When you hold that paper, you are holding a moment in time. It’s static. It’s finished. It’s done. Unlike the feed, which is always becoming, always changing, always demanding more of you. This is a moment you can finish. You can fold it up. You can put it aside. And you can return to your life, lighter than you were ten minutes ago. I want to tie this back to style, because that’s what we do here. Style is just confidence wearing clothes, right? But confidence also wears mindset. When you feel scattered, your posture slumps. When you feel overwhelmed, your face tightens. You radiate stress. But when you take ten minutes to sit with a physical newspaper, to breathe, to read slowly, you ground yourself. You arrive in your body. You look more present. You listen better. That presence changes how people perceive you, and more importantly, how you perceive yourself. You walk into a room knowing you took care of your mind first. You’re not checking your phone under the table during lunch. You’re not distracted by a notification while your friend is telling you about their day. You are there. Fully there. That is the ultimate chic. Not the designer bag, not the perfect hair, but the ability to be completely present in your own life. It’s a rare skill in our hyper-connected age. It’s a luxury. And it’s available to anyone willing to trade the scroll for the page. So, try it. Buy a paper. Sit somewhere nice. Read the headlines. Let the ink stain your fingers. Feel the weight of the world, but hold it gently. You’ve got this. I hope you find a quiet moment today, however small. Maybe it’s a book, maybe it’s a cup of tea, maybe it’s just five minutes of doing absolutely nothing. I’m Eva Perry, and I’ll see you in the next edit. Take care of yourself.