How to Develop a Healthy Relationship with Your Phone

Hey Friend!

Do you have a healthy relationship with your phone? I have had my ups and downs but now I am finally on the up side of things. I want to share how I have developed a healthy relationship with my phone, and how you can have one too. It all starts with having concrete phone boundaries. 

Yes, most of us are completely obsessed with our phones. It’s the culture we live in. I’m utterly exhausted from it. I go deep into sharing my story about my relationship with my phone in an interview with Emily McDermott. We talk about how we can take those baby steps toward reducing our dependency on our phones, and how to create realistic phone boundaries. The reality is, I run my business from my phone. I don’t know how to get anywhere in my own city without my phone. Phones can definitely be used for good, but there is a gray line that we have to be aware of. Continue reading as I go deep into the conversation with Emily about how to develop a healthy relationship with your phone. 

Overwhelmed Mom Surrenders to God

Emily: I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about a season, maybe it was yesterday, maybe it was years ago, when you felt like an overwhelmed mom. Were you overwhelmed by routines or how you were spending your time? What was the catalyst that sparked you to change and waive that flag of surrender?  What did you do to make those changes? 

Stef: There are little peaks of overwhelm. This is normal and it’s OK. Sometimes we get into seasons of overwhelm where it is debilitating. I label these as discernment alarms, because I believe that we are being shaken by the Holy Spirit. Faith is a big part of my life. If I’m idolizing something and I’m constantly chasing something, then something isn’t right. I believe that it’s the Holy Spirit alarming me that I need to make some changes. Start to shift your perspective when you notice you are in this season of overwhelm. Look deeper and ask yourself, what fundamentally needs to shift and change.

She Started to See God Work in Her Life

Stef: An example of this from my life is back in 2017 when I went through a huge business failure. My identity was completely rocked. I didn’t know who I was without success and all the fancy titles. I was 60 pounds overweight after just having two kids. With my addictive personality, I was eating my feelings, drinking alcohol, and finding some way to self-medicate. At this time in my life, I was raising a newborn and had a 2 1/2 year-old. I was overweight and dealing with an alcohol addiction, but at the same time, I was trying to find myself. This is when I decided to surrender to God asking Him to help me.

I started to see God work in my life. He helped me with my health, I was making better choices. I continued to invite Him in, but I still believed I needed to use social media to build my business. Honestly, I was on my phone for 5 to 6 hours a day working on social media, working hard to grow my online business. I’m not proud of that. If we all looked at our phone time, it’s probably something we wouldn’t be proud of.

For me, Instagram was this addictive vice that I had validated in my mind. I told myself that I needed to grow my brand, and show up consistently, since I just launched my podcast. Plus on top of that, I was doing Facebook Lives and a lot of coaching. And when it came to my kids, I felt that pull to document and share everything that was going on in their lives. My heart behind it was pure, but I did want to become successful again.  

Spending More Time Praying To God

I ended up doing all of these things while praying along the way. It was as if I was letting God half in, and at the same time, thinking to myself “Don’t tell me what to do”. The feeling of overwhelm was constant, and the pull toward wanting to be a good mom was always in the back of my mind. There were a lot of times when I ignored my kids, had my face in my phone, finished up whatever I was doing on social and had to tell my kids to wait. But, then I decided to surrender. I found myself praying more to God asking Him to help me make this easier, because it’s too hard right now. I asked the Lord to open my eyes. Then, God spoke to me and He told me to lay it all down and fast.

She Removed the Apps From Her Phone and Reduced Her Overwhelm Down to 5%

At this point, I had 1-2 people on my team, my new podcast, plus I was putting in 6 hours a day on my phone. But, I decided to turn it off and get off social. I removed the apps from my phone. The interesting thing is that I started to reach for my phone when I didn’t need to. Even though the apps were gone, I constantly found myself reaching for the phone, opening it up, and searching for the apps to click. It was just like an addiction. 

One time I was sitting with my coffee watching this beautiful sunrise coming up. While reading my Bible, I decided to reach for my phone to take a picture and post it on Instagram. But I didn’t even have Instagram on my phone. At that moment, this self-awareness hit me and I realized I don’t have to take pictures all the time anymore. Taking a break from Instagram for a month was my next step, and that’s when I felt like I could breathe deeper. I wanted to start doing other things that didn’t involve my phone, such as cooking more for my family.

I stopped constantly looking for my phone, but I still had to be careful not to go on other apps such as YouTube. The relationship with our phone is the problem, not the app, and we have to be careful not to get addicted to the phone itself. Advertisers are being paid to keep you addicted because of the revenue they make from the time we are on our devices.

Well, I got off Instagram and everything in my business started to go up! My email list exploded. We went another six months as a company being off social, and that then turned into a year and a half. The percentage of time that I feel overwhelmed on a weekly basis is 5%. If you had asked me back when I was constantly addicted to my phone, I would’ve told you that I was overwhelmed 90% of the time. There is this huge flashing solution in front of all of our eyes but we’re so afraid to look at it. 

Your Phone is Designed to Keep You on the Screen Longer

Emily: There are socially acceptable ways to escape and unacceptable ways. Drinking a glass of wine and going on your phone scrolling social is completely socially acceptable. In fact, our phones are designed to keep us on the screen longer. We get this fear of missing out if we are not on social, and that’s on the personal level as well as the business level. But oftentimes we miss out on being in the moment because we are capturing something in a picture or video in hopes of sharing it.

You have helped me get off social and it completely transformed my relationship with my phone, specifically with Instagram. I thought as a business owner that I needed to grow my following and be on there all the time. When you think back to all the time we spend on our phones on social media, it’s amazing to think about how addictive and stimulating these apps are. If we’re already overwhelmed, we tend to think that our phone is going to help us calm down, but it’s actually stimulating us more.

We often use our phones to unwind after a difficult day with our kids and the chaos of motherhood, but that’s wrong. We need to have better awareness and pay attention to those discernment alarms telling us to lay our phones down. For those moms who resonate with that, and feel they have an unhealthy relationship with their phone, could you provide some warning signs or list things that you think she should look out for to help her better understand?

Ask Yourself Three Questions When Determining Your Relationship with Your Phone

Stef: This is going to look different for each of you. For me, it began with asking myself these questions: 

• Who is the person that I want to be?

• What kind of mom do I want to be? 

• What kind of wife do I want to be?

• What kind of home do I want to pour into?

I started to ask these deeper questions about who I wanted to become and who God had created me to be. I discovered that I wasn’t her. My children weren’t listening well. When my children would speak to me, I was looking at my phone. I often had the desire to reach for my phone when I was with my kids or my husband and I wasn’t showing up. I definitely wasn’t showing up in my marriage with everything that I could be. My relationships with my friends weren’t strong.

And through all that, I always found time to post on social consistently, instead of making time to call my friends or go out to coffee with them. That’s when I started to realize this wasn’t working and I started to inventory my life. I asked myself “What is the culprit to me not being the woman that God created me to be?” The one consistent answer was my phone. 

Inventory Your Life

Do a two-day inventory asking yourself “Who do I want to be and how do I want to live my life?” After that two-day inventory, you will become extremely aware of your relationship with your phone. Focus on your interactions with people around you and pay attention to how you treat them. Are you treating them the way Jesus would treat them? Jesus would be listening, looking into their eyes, serving them, and connecting deeply with them. Jesus would not be wondering if someone texted him. 

I have trained myself to overcome my addiction to my phone. Pay attention to the warning signs such as getting fidgety without your phone. Are you searching for the dopamine hit? It’s just like any other addiction. Are you panicking looking around for the phone? When you open your phone do you click the same 3 things over and over. Your body is craving a dopamine hit. These are warning signs that something needs to change.

How Your Children View Your Relationship With Your Phone

Emily: That’s interesting. I wear leggings a lot, and my leggings have pockets on the side for our phones. I often find myself tapping it, almost like a pack of cigarettes in the back of my pants. And then we are constantly asking ourselves “Where’s my phone?” The other thing you mentioned was the importance of showing up as the mom that you want to be. Sometimes I think of things from the perspective of my funeral and what people might say about me there. I sometimes wonder what my children are going to say. If I were to pass unexpectedly, I don’t want them to say something at my funeral like “Oh, I remember mom always used to say those three little words ‘Just a minute’.”

We so often as moms say to our kids, “Just a minute,” as we finish up a text or check social to see how many plays our reel got on Instagram. Before I found you, Stef, I was always checking my reels, but now I know in the long run, none of that matters, and it definitely doesn’t matter to God.

Stop the Bad Behavior Now and Set Phone Boundaries

Stef: You know what that says to them, our children, our spouse, our family, and our friends? It says “You are less important than this device.” Another thing I asked myself was “What adult life do I want my kids to lead?” They’re going to learn by sight, not by sound. They watch us, learn from us, and they internalize. I do not want to be the reason that my children are staring at a screen 24-7 when they are married and have children. I don’t want them to model my bad behavior, so I need to stop the behavior now. Granted, technology is a part of our lives, but we must make changes and set boundaries.

Emily: Your feeling of overwhelm, stress levels, and your overall health, were probably impacted by the phone. What were some of the benefits you found in your ability to be present — not only with friends and family, but specifically as a mom with kids? It’s hard when your kids keep calling “Mama, Mama” or “Mom, can you watch me do this thing with legos” and we’re over here wondering if anyone texted or did anyone write. How has that shifted for you?

Creating a Phone Work Block Improves Your Relationship with Your Phone

Stef: I think this is an evolution. This has been a six-year journey to getting off social media apps completely.

• I first started by deleting the social media apps off my phone on weekends for three years. I wasn’t fully ready to completely break it. 

• Second: Fasting from social media apps

• Third: Instagram was completely off my phone

• Fourth: No notifications on my phone at all

What ended up happening in my brain was a sense of free space. There was nothing to check. I didn’t have any notifications. I did, however, have emergency people come through with notifications if they needed me. The reason I did that was to retrain my brain. I’m only going to deal with the phone when I am in a phone block. During my phone work block, I will check for messages, check Voxer to see if my team needs me, see if I have missed calls, and then put my phone away. 

These practices have helped me to be more present. When my phone is out of sight and removed from my space, it’s easier to let go of that addiction. I also let those people who were most important to me know that I was trying to detox from my phone and I was only going to check my phone every hour. 

Finding a Place For Your Phone to Live Is Crucial For a Healthy Relationship with Your Phone

It was important to me to find a place for my phone to “live” in my house, away from me, so I wasn’t constantly checking it. Placing it in a phone box was extremely helpful. Once it was in the box, I felt free. If my phone was in my pocket or my purse or somewhere within reach, I was more likely to touch it.  Remember, this took 6 years to break the addiction to my phone and build stronger phone boundaries. If you are feeling convicted right now, just start with simple phone boundaries and set a timer for an hour or so.

How did it shift my presence? Well, can you relate to this? Ever have a moment when your kids or your husband are talking to you, asking you something, and you are not fully present? There are moments when I’m thinking about the addiction, whether that’s the actual phone or the clicks, and I get so embarrassed because I have to ask them to repeat what they were saying because I wasn’t present or paying attention to what they were asking. I try to be extremely mindful of what they are saying to me. 

You can only do one thing at a time, and do it well. Now that my phone is not connected to me, I’m more present and I’m able to look at my family and actively listen to them and answer them with intention. The thing I don’t want my kids to say to me at my funeral is “I never felt like my mom really saw me. I never felt like she really listened.” I refuse for that to be my story, and I refuse for that to be their story about me.

Breaking The Phone Addiction

Now that I have broken the phone addiction, and I have a better relationship with my phone, I now feel like I can listen better. Plus, I feel like I can remember more. My memory is so much sharper. This is definitely a cultural shift — having shorter attention spans and the increased need for a dopamine hit from our phones and social apps. It’s making it harder to remember things when we are glued to our phones. But, now that I am off my phone, I have noticed my memory has gotten a lot better. My conversations with my loved ones and my friends have gotten deeper, and I am much more aware, too. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Practical Solutions to Creating Healthy Phone Boundaries

Emily: This has been so impactful in my life too. I am kind of on my own journey as well. There’s the intention behind it, recognizing how you want to show up but also acknowledging the importance of putting the blinders on or setting boundaries. Taking the apps off your phone and only going on Facebook on your laptop and not your phone can help. Ask yourself “What can make an unhealthy habit more difficult to do?” This will help you create stronger boundaries. These are practical solutions.

Stef: There are more levels to this if you want to set boundaries with your phone. On YouTube, I was watching this one minimalist who talked about these new minimalist phones. The phone is bare bones and has nothing fun on it. A very old-school style of phone, but it definitely can help break the addiction. I’m not quite ready for that, but there is so much more growth in this area for me.

Another boundary you may want to create is not allowing phones out when your family is home. Your kids are getting home from school, your husband is home from work, and that is a time to put the phone away in the box. That is a practice that I have been working on. And once the kids are in bed, I grant myself some time on my phone to scroll if I want to, which ends up mostly being Pinterest. The boundary work is what’s most important and what’s feeling aligned in your heart. So a good question to ask is “Lord, what should this look like for me?” I like to ask if I’m glorifying God in this. If I’m using my phone 24-7, then I’m definitely not glorifying God in this but idolizing my phone.

Become More Aligned with God

If I show up every hour to check in on my team on Voxer, I definitely am glorifying God. It’s a good way to put our moral filter on our choices and helps us to be more aligned with God when it comes to what we do with our phones. This is hard work and you’re going to go against the grain. This is not what the world says to do. Just know that there is always an answer when God is with us. There is a solution for everything and God has the answer for you. 

Emily: My phrase for 2023 was “lay it down” and I’m probably just going to keep it for 2024 because I feel there’s always the constant surrender, the constant laying it down, and the constant realization that we need to stop idolizing. I’m going to try to do a little bit better every day. Thank you for your encouragement, Stef, and I appreciate your time. 

I pray this blesses you!

Xo,

Stef

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