How Rest and your Phone Can Be Enemies (and 3 Ways to Fix It)

A participant in one of my phone challenges said this to me, and maybe you can relate:

“Having my phone near me sets me to ‘on.’  It helps if I turn the screen facing down (despite it being on silent etc) and even better if it’s out of sight. The other issue is messaging; I always feel obliged to respond to people.”

She was identifying two key things here:

First, having our phones nearby subconsciously puts us into work mode. They put us in a state of readiness, efficiency, vigilance. What’s coming in now, what do we need to attend to?  As the phone challenge participant said, we’re like a motor with the switched flipped to on.

Second, our phones make us feel that we need to be responsive, ever-available. We associate reachability and quick response times with the virtues of diligence and reliability, so not replying promptly feels bad and produces guilt.

Both of these issues are related, at bottom, to r e s t.

We are not machines, but our cell phones put us into the machine zone. We live with the low-grade stress that comes with a workplace mindset, the opposite of rest. We lose the pockets of opportunity we’re meant to have for respite, and in that process we lose a little bit of our humanity.

Truth is, we were made for rest. We humans need it and are profoundly blessed by it, in ways we don’t even fully understand. God designed rest on purpose as a necessary and beautiful balance to work. It’s why he gave us the boundary of daytime (light to work) and nighttime (dark to rest and sleep). It’s why he gave us the Sabbath, and modeled it for us by his own observation.

Our phones will interfere with rest at every level if we let them.  We’ve seen how they elevate the roles of efficiency, reachability, and response time to unreasonable and unsustainable levels, preventing rest and creating exhaustion. They suck us into the “zoned out” space of screen viewing, a form of recreation that rarely refreshes. They steal minutes (or hours) from the rest of evening relaxation (say reading) and of course sleep.

But good news! It doesn’t have to be this way.

We can reclaim real rest. How?

First, we can embrace the fact that virtue is found in loving well, maintaining good boundaries, and prizing rest. Reachability and quick response time factor into the picture in a much smaller way that our phone would have us believe.

Second, we can put limits on our phone like the family cell phone drawer, app limits, and “putting your phone to bed” in another room an hour before you go to bed yourself.

Third, we can use our Sabbath as a phone break. I do this routinely and non-legalistically, and it’s been a life-giving practice for me.

The gift of rest is tied to freedom. We can rest because we aren’t enslaved to our work… or to anything else. Including our phone. Let’s embrace real rest as the gift it is to bring the refreshment and the re-visioning for our lives that God intends.

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