How to Love Living with Your Phone (in 3 Easy Steps)

If you wanted to, you could find a thousand articles about cell phones, modern life, attention, and distraction. You know the stuff- our hours on our phones, what it’s doing to our brains, the rise of screen addiction.

My guess is, you don’t want to. 

And why would you?

You already know you use your phone more than you’d like to. You already know the steady pull to check it constantly, already feel the guilt. But you also need your phone all day long for all manner of things, and getting dragged through negativity and scolding helps nothing.

So good news for you: I’m not here for data, guilt, or finger-wagging. I’m here with a different message… because there’s another way. And you don’t have to ditch your phone to get back presence and freedom.

Fact is, smartphones are both the most helpful, fun tools humanity has ever had and also a huge drain on presence and contentment. It’s both-and. The only way forward is to recognize these two truths, hold them simultaneously, and chart a course from there.

Here’s why this is worthwhile: living well with our phones is a big part of living well in the modern world… and you care about this. You care about being present, having good relationships, using time instead of wasting it. You’d prefer to be a content person over a jealous or depressed person.  

You live a better life when you’re using your phone well. And that’s what we’re here for.

So, onto the three steps (which are certainly doable, if not strictly “easy”… and every bit worthwhile). 

FIRST: acknowledge the level of power your phone can have over your soul.

We start by being real. If you’re like most Americans you spend between three and five hours daily on your phone, and you touch it 1,000 times a day. From a utilitarian point of view, your phone is the most important thing in your life (because what else do you check every five minutes, on average, or touch 1000 times a day?)

This isn’t about your phone’s effect on your brain or attention but rather your soul. Using our phone as much as we do impacts our souls wildly. I’ll give you three quick examples:

·    We become fragile. We over-depend on our phone because it’s a crutch (e.g., GPS, relieving social awkwardness, boredom), and it makes us lose self-reliance and resilience. Feeling tethered to our phones makes us feel un-free… and for our soul to be healthy, it needs to be robust and unencumbered.

·   We look to others for validation. Often using our phone, especially social media, conditions us to getting approval from others. We feed on “micro-bursts of validation” (-Tony Reinke) throughout the day and come to need these.  We start checking our phone frequently because, as one student told researcher Sherry Turkle, “I need to see who wants me” (or likes me).  But for our soul to be healthy, it needs to be OK simply with God, and without constant buttressing from other people.

·   We become overwhelmed. We have a human-sized soul, not designed to carry the burdens of the world – either our small world of contacts or the large “out there” world. We tend to think virtue is being connected, available, and engaged – all the time, for all the needs. This is wrong and crushing. Right detachment looks like Jesus’ freedom of heart, letting Him lead us “into a way of loving where we’re genuinely comfortable turning things over to Him” (John Eldredge. His term is ‘benevolent detachment.’)

Those are three biggies for your soul. Of course your soul will encounter other traps and pitfalls – mental absence, laziness, envy, superficiality, impatience – but I promised to go easy on negativity. The point is to see the truth, admit there’s a big, powerful intersection between our cell phones and our souls… and acknowledge how much it matters.

SECOND: embrace the need to be in charge of your phone.

The unhampered road of cell phone life leads to a place we won’t like, in terms of our souls. Our phone is smart and determined, and it’s been designed to be extremely appealing. It’s good at its job! Its goal is to get you to spend as much time on it (or on a particular app) as possible. As John Mark Comer says, “Your phone doesn't actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You are not the customer; you are the product. It's your attention that's for sale.” 

There’s even a term for this: attention harvesting. I find the term creepy and zombie-movie-esque, but today’s it just marketing jargon. So let’s be real that there’s a battle between our own best interests and those of the phone’s creators. They’re necessarily at odds.

So step two is to make a commitment: you must be the boss of your phone, not the other way around. You choose to be in charge and promise yourself that you and your soul will get more out of your phone than it gets out of you.

THIRD: set limits so you can enjoy life with your phone – healthy soul, no guilt.

Limits are what bring us fulfillment and, paradoxically, greater freedom. When we set and stick to healthy limits, in any area of our lives, we can grow and flourish in that area. This is true of modern phone use. Our commitment from step 2 only works if we walk it out through these limits in step 3.

Here are some straightforward ways to start using limits in your phone life:

·   Commit to certain times when you won’t use your phone at all. Doable ones to start with are for the first and last 15 minutes of the day and during meals.

·   Identify your biggest problem spots and make a plan. My biggest problem spots (and many people’s) are social media apps. Others struggle most with news, games, or Netflix. Identify yours. Then decide what amount and times you’ll give to them.

·   Get accountability to enact your plan, ideally a combo of technology and human forms. Use apps like Freedom, iPhone’s own “screen time,” or habit… and also tell someone your goals (and ask them to bug you about them.) For more, follow plans like this one or mine, join a challenge, or get a screen coach.

·   Build in periodic long breaks. I’m a big fan of unplugging on Sunday (non-legalistically: I leave my phone in my bedroom for the day and use it only briefly from there.) Andy Crouch and J. M. Comer both give excellent guidance on Sunday tech Sabbaths, worth reviewing.

There are few things are refreshing as going phone-free for a day – once you get over the initial withdrawal and anxiety.

So what do you say?

If we value our soul (and we must, especially if we are followers of Jesus), we can live in a way that helps it flourish. We can take the bull by the horns, harness discipline, and become proactive. We can commit to handling this wonder-full piece of technology in the best possible way. It will be less easy but infinitely more worthwhile than mindlessness… and in the end, we can love living with our phones.

We were made for presence, virtue, and freedom.

Let’s be sure we don’t give those away.

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