Most of us admit to spending excessive time on our phones. Tony Reinke, in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, warns that this habit reflects what CS Lewis called the “Nothing” strategy in The Screwtape Letters—a life consumed by trivial distractions, leaving little room for what truly matters. This “hamster wheel” of nothingness can rob us of what will truly satisfy our souls.1 As Reinke notes, “the impulse to pull the lever of a random slot machine of viral content is the age-old tactic of Satan”.2
I am so convicted by this! Yet the battle against such a powerful, persuasive, persistent tool often seems insurmountable.
And that’s where another book came in so helpfully for me—though it was not written specifically for Christians, it’s been an invaluable tool in the spiritual fight for my attention.
The book, by journalist Catherine Price, is tellingly titled How to Break Up With Your Phone. In it, she presents a practical, hands-on 30-day plan for regaining control of phone habits.
The goal isn’t to get rid of your phone. Rather, it’s to create a long-term relationship that, in the words of the author, “feels good”.
The end goal of simply ‘feeling good’ might not sit well with us as Christians (because we want to satisfy more than our feelings) but the plan actually allows you to set your own goals of what you want to get out of your relationship with your phone.
The key starting question is: What do you want to pay attention to? Because, as Price says, we are what we pay attention to.3
There isn’t much substitute for getting a copy of the book and following the daily steps (or joining her newer Screen/Life Balance hub), but to give you a sense of what’s involved—and maybe just a few tricks to implement today—the first stage in the plan is to take stock of current phone habits (there are apps available to help you do this, e.g. ‘Moment: Cut Screen Time’), before starting to create what Price calls ‘speed bumps’.
These are “small obstacles that force us to slow down. By creating a pause between our impulses and our actions, speed bumps give us the chance to change course if we decide we want to take a different route.”4
For example, delete social media apps and instead access social media only via your phone’s web browser. The extra steps then needed to access it prompts us to ask ourselves if it’s really what we want to do in this moment.
Another suggestion is to sort apps and put them into folders, not just for the sake of being tidy but because it makes them less attention-grabbing. This creates another speed bump and promotes the helpful habit of launching apps by typing their names into the search bar rather than scrolling.
Something else that’s useful: get an alarm clock—because if you use your phone as an alarm clock, you’re guaranteeing your phone will be the first thing you check when you wake up.
The climax of the plan is a trial separation—to take a 24-hour period without any internet-enabled devices with screens. Price helps readers prepare for and then reflect on the experience.
When I tried it myself, I found I’d been cheating myself out of fully experiencing things by being constantly connected to my phone.
And in light of that, one of the most persuasive thoughts for me came in the epilogue:
“Like a former smoker who’s now repulsed by the idea of smoking, I associate spending time on my phone with feeling bad – which makes me want to spend as little time on it as possible”.5
Perhaps the book’s stated goal of ‘feeling good’ is a helpful one after all. We are creatures of habit and it’s hard to break bad ones, especially when there are thousands of engineers working to keep us glued to our screens. I am sure that being distracted by my phone has lost me countless opportunities to enjoy God more and show love to others. But perhaps, in this age, I also need to be convinced that it actually feels good not to be on my phone. And I am now far more conscious that being on my phone usually doesn’t make me feel good or productive.
That said, this has sadly sometimes led me to be unloving to others: when I have precious moments of downtime, often the last thing I now want to do is catch up on messages or phone calls and so I sometimes rudely leave people hanging. But when I consider the bigger battle for my attention, and the call to be present with my family in the here and now, I still feel like it’s ultimately a move in the right direction to want to be away from my phone, rather than attached to it.
I don’t write as someone who has overcome the battle. Price rightly warns that we need to constantly be on guard, especially once the plan is finished. She suggests creating a monthly reminder to check in with yourself and ask some reflection questions. I failed to do this, and I only recently realised how many bad habits had crept in during the time that had elapsed since my own 30-day plan ended.
My daughter is now more aware of my habits than ever—I don’t want her to have to compete with a device, and to see me with it always in my hand. So I went back to the book (which is what has prompted this article!) and reinstated some practices, but it is still a conscious battle each day.
How much must the devil delight in seeing God’s people distracted. In God’s kindness, one tool in our box to fight our distraction is How to Break Up With Your Phone.
A version of this article was first published by the ACR in 2021.
- Quoted in Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, Crossway, 2017, ebook version, conclusion. ↩︎
- Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, conclusion. ↩︎
- Catherine Price, How to Break Up With Your Phone, Trapeze, 2018, p 82. ↩︎
- Price, How to Break Up With Your Phone, p 92. ↩︎
- Price, How to Break Up With Your Phone, p 113. ↩︎