Feeling out of control? No time to think nowadays? Fed up with people you don’t know asking to be your friends? Try these five simple steps.

1. Switch your mobile – or computer – off after 6.30pm or 7.30pm each night. It’s interesting to me that we try to set boundaries around screen use for our kids, yet we do not restrict our own usage.

2. Have two phones rather than one. Keep one for business calls and use the other for family and friends. At weekends – or when you go on holiday – switch the work phone off or leave it in a drawer at home.

3. Once you have done 1 or 2, go to places where calmness and serenity can find you. In my experience scale seems to be important. You need to feel physically small to relax or reflect. Perhaps this is why so many people like empty beaches, mountains and cathedrals. In such situations our minds seem to expand to fill the available space. Seeing a distant horizon also appears to help in that our thinking is projected forward.

4. Create the time and space to think. When, for instance, was the last time that you told someone in the office that you were going off “to do a bit of thinking.”

5. If all else fails visit the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a website that enters all your online accounts and deletes all of your data. Privacy restored.