Review: Reclaim Your Mind by Jay Vidyarthi

Reclaim Your Mind: Seven Strategies to Enjoy Tech Mindfully
by Jay Vidyarthi

My Rating: 4 stars
Genre: Nonfiction Self Help

Blurb:
In our ever-connected world, inner peace isn’t about rejecting technology—it’s about having a better relationship with it. You need boundaries, but that doesn’t mean you should feel guilty every time you pull out your phone. Reclaim Your Mind offers a middle way: a balanced, mindful approach to everyday tech.

With relatable anecdotes and short, easy-to-follow exercises in every chapter, Reclaim Your Mind provides seven key strategies to help you use technology wisely. You’ll learn to develop awareness of your tech use, design your digital and physical environments to focus your attention, reject false urgency, and opt in to better tech that fosters authenticity and fun. Backed by scientific research and the author’s own experiences as a lifelong meditator and an influential designer of technologies for well-being, Reclaim Your Mind helps you rekindle a positive relationship with TV, social media, games, news, email, and even AI. With Jay Vidyarthi’s tools and insights, you’ll learn to stand up for your freedom of attention and relish the convenience, connection, and—yes—joy that technology can offer without getting stuck on apps designed to exploit you. You’ll improve your relationship with technology and ultimately, with yourself.

My Review

I received a free copy through Netgalley and voluntarily reviewed it.

Reclaim Your Mind caught my eye on Netgalley and I was excited to read this one. I am glad I did as I really liked this book. The focus of this book is on how to enjoy tech mindfully. I really liked the encouraging tone of this book and the focus on what you can do to improve your relationship with tech. I also appreciated he seemed to genuinely like tech and didn’t advocate for stepping away of it altogether, but instead setting boundaries and interacting with it in a way that works for you.

I love what tech has brought to my life even though I also struggle with parts of it and I thought this book captured those two sides well. I also liked how simple and applicable a lot of the advice was. It also was fun to see some of the strategies I used myself in the book, like making it harder access to apps/ sites that kept capturing my attention.

This book had a lot of good ideas and tips. It also gave me more understanding and language for why I struggle with some things like certain games or social media and also ideas for how to handle things better. And I felt this understanding was very valuable. It isn’t a very long read and I liked how it’s split up in sections making it easy to pick up and read a bit.

A few things I want to mention is that the focus is mostly on phones and apps. Probably because of how phones are one of the easiest ways to grab your attention no matter were you are. There isn’t as much about computer or laptops, although a lot of advice is easily transferable to those. I also felt the author seemed to value voice or video connecting over text. While for me personally text is such an important medium in which I communicate with people online through direct messages, comments, emails and blogging. Then again I am neurodivergent which does change things, which he does mention, although he doesn’t go into detail about that.

To summarize: This was a great book focused on enjoying tech mindfully. I liked the positive encouraging tone and the focus on what you can do to improve your relationship with tech. I also appreciated how the author clearly loved tech and didn’t advocate for reducing or stopping your use altogether. I liked the variety of strategies and tips the book had and how it gave me additional insight and language for my struggles with tech as well as what I like about it. The focus of this book is on phones and apps, but a lot of the strategies can be easily adapted for other medium. I also thought his opinion of text seemed a bit low compared to other modes of communication and as a neurodivergent person one of the things I love about tech is how I can communicate using text. I can definitely recommend this book!

Links:
– Goodreads
– Bookbub
– Amazon
– B&N
– Kobo

You can also read my review on Goodreads and Bookbub.