The fork pauses halfway to my mouth, suspended in the 45-watt glow of the dining room light, because the screen of my phone just flickered. It wasn’t even a notification. It was a phantom reflection from a passing car, a stray beam of light hitting the glass at a 15-degree angle. Yet, my heart rate has already climbed by 25 beats per minute. My breathing has shallowed, shifting from the deep, belly-centered rhythm of a man enjoying a Saturday night pasta to the clipped, thoracic gasps of a soldier in a trench. I am not at work. I am technically ‘off.’ But the phone is face up on the table, a black mirror reflecting my own tense expression back at me, and in this moment, I am more tethered to my professional obligations than if I were sitting at my desk.
The Asterisk on Leisure
Being on call is often marketed as a compromise-a way to reclaim your time while remaining ‘available.’ We tell ourselves we are resting, just with a small asterisk attached to our leisure. But the nervous system does not understand asterisks. It does not recognize the nuance of ‘available but not working.’ To the amygdala, being on call is a 55-hour marathon of high-alert scanning. You are a radar dish looking for a specific frequency of disaster. This is not a state of rest punctuated by work; it is a state of work punctuated by agonizing moments of non-work that you cannot fully inhabit because the ‘all clear’ signal has never been given.
Max J. and the Silence
I think about Max J. quite often when I feel this weight. Max is a historic building mason, a man who has spent 35 years coaxing life back into crumbling limestone and 19th-century brickwork. He is 65 now, with hands that look like they’ve been carved from the very substrate he repairs. Max once told me about a job he took on a 125-year-old cathedral… He told me that the hardest part wasn’t the 45-pound bags of lime mortar he had to haul; it was the fact that he couldn’t listen to music. He had to keep his ears tuned to the ‘groan’ of the building. If he listened to a podcast or a symphony, he might miss the 5-second window where a crack began to migrate.
The Cognitive Tax
That is the essence of the on-call limbo. You are forbidden from the luxury of total immersion. You cannot lose yourself in a book, a movie, or a conversation because a portion of your cognitive processing power-perhaps 25 to 35 percent-is permanently partitioned off, running a background process that monitors for a specific ringtone or a Slack notification.
[The brain is a house where every door is unlocked, and you are the only one home.]
The Grey Zone: The Third State
This partitioned brain is what leads to the ‘third state.’ We are familiar with the first state: active, engaged labor. We are familiar with the second: deep, restorative rest. The third state is the grey zone. It is the Sunday afternoon where you sit on the couch but don’t actually watch the game. It is the dinner where you hear your spouse’s voice but don’t actually process the words because you are subconsciously calculating the 15-minute response time required if the server goes down. We are physically present, but our souls are leaning toward the exit, keys in hand.
Building Forts of Control
Confession: Organizing Urgency
I have a confession to make, and it feels like a betrayal of my own desire for peace: I find myself obsessively organizing. Just this morning, I spent 45 minutes organizing my digital files by color. I made the urgent tasks a searing shade of crimson and the long-term goals a cool, 235-valued hex code of forest green. I do this because when the phone is on the table, I feel a total loss of agency. Organizing the files is a desperate attempt to exert control over a world that might interrupt me at any second. I criticize the digital tether constantly, yet I find myself checking the battery percentage every 15 minutes, ensuring I have enough charge to be reachable. It’s a circular madness.
The Erosion of Resilience
We must acknowledge the biological cost of this simmer. The human body is designed to spike in response to a threat and then return to a baseline of safety. When you are on call, that baseline is never reached. You are stuck in a ‘low-grade’ fight-or-flight response. Cortisol levels remain elevated, not enough to cause a breakdown today, but enough to erode your resilience over 365 days of ‘just being available.’ It is a slow leak in the tires of your psyche.
Psychic Resilience
65% Remaining
Eroded by constant low-grade stress.
You try to tell yourself it’s fine. ‘I’m just sitting here,’ you say. ‘I’m getting paid to watch Netflix.’ Yes, and you are also paying for that Netflix with the currency of your nervous system’s peace. The trade-off is often invisible until you realize you haven’t had a deep, un-interrupted thought in 45 days. You become reactive. Your temper shortens by 15 percent. Your ability to dream about the future is replaced by the immediate need to survive the next 55 minutes without a crisis.
Demanding the Counter-Weight
Finding the Real Cold
Max J. eventually finished that cathedral job. He told me the first thing he did wasn’t sleep. He went to a creek about 25 miles outside of town, took off his boots, and stood in the freezing water for 15 minutes. He needed a sensation that was louder than the silence he had been monitoring. He needed a physical reality so demanding that his brain had no choice but to shut down the ‘monitoring’ partition. He had to replace the phantom groans of the stone with the very real bite of the ice-melt.
Cognitive Drain
Total Focus
The Foundation of Stillness
I find myself looking for my own version of that creek. Sometimes it is the act of cooking a meal that requires 45 minutes of constant stirring-something where I cannot hold the phone. Sometimes it is a 15-minute sequence of breathwork that forces the diaphragm to move against the grip of my ribs. These are not ‘hobbies.’ They are maintenance. They are the 5-minute repairs on the 105-year-old masonry of our minds.
“We are told that being reachable is a sign of importance, but we aren’t told that being reachable at all times makes us unreachable to ourselves. The weight of the phone in my pocket feels like 15 pounds sometimes. It is a lead weight that pulls on the fabric of my jeans and the fabric of my focus.
“
I look at my color-coded files and
delete the red category.
It was an illusion anyway. The only true urgency is the 15 seconds it takes to realize you are finally, truly, off the clock.
We need to find the courage to turn the phone face down, or better yet, to leave it in the other room for 35 minutes while we remember what it feels like to have a body that isn’t a waiting room. The buildings Max J. works on stay standing because of the mortar, yes, but also because they have a foundation that doesn’t move. If the foundation is always shifting, always vibrating in anticipation of the next storm, the whole structure eventually turns to dust. We are no different. We require the stillness of the stone if we want to survive the 75-year lifespan we are hopefully allotted.
Is the call coming? Maybe. But for the next 15 minutes, the only thing that is allowed to be ‘on’ is the sound of the wind or the taste of the cold water. We have to learn how to give ourselves the ‘all clear’ when no one else will. It is the only way to stop being a ghost in our own lives, haunting the hallways of a ‘maybe’ that drains our very real ‘now.’