Could you be addicted to your phone?

It sounds like a silly question, but chances are you and I are showing far more signs of phone addiction than we’d like to think.

In Psalm 90:12, Moses prayed: “So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.”  I’ve found that I’m not numbering my days, nor being wise, when I’m too focused on my phone, and not enough on my relationship with God and others He’s entrusted me with.

My recent article on Crosswalk.com lists 10 Signs of Phone Addiction. I wanted to give you, my readers, additional steps of how to live more fully present with God and others. So, here are the ABCs of how to love our phones less and people more.

• A  –  Admit your phone is taking more space and time in your life than it should. The first step to dealing with an addiction, a problem, or a needed change in behavior is to admit the situation needs altering. Denial never helped anyone. More of the same doesn’t mean change. So, admit some steps need to be made to lessen your phone’s priority in your life.
• B  –  Be aware of the frequency with which you pick up or look at your phone. Is it to check for a particular email you’ve been waiting for, to see if someone messaged you, to be at your boss’s beck and call? (If you’re not at work, that last one shouldn’t be an issue. And if you ARE at work, why are you looking at your phone?) I was once told an eating disorder is not evidenced by binge eating or refusing to eat, it’s evidenced by how often one thinks of food, their weight, or how their bodies look. That slammed me into perspective and made me think about how many times I was obsessing over issues like weight and calories. I wasn’t overweight, just overly consumed with the idea of being a certain weight. Do you see the correlation? You may not feel you need your phone, but how often do you think about it, touch it, reach for it to make sure it’s there, or scroll through it? Here’s a more telling question: How often do you turn it off?
• C – Carve out time to be phone free. Schedule times to be without your phone as a way of diminishing your dependence on it. Go for a walk with your spouse, child, or friend—without phones. Agree to leave phones in the car before walking into a restaurant to have dinner together. Make sure devices are nowhere near your dinner table at home. If there’s an emergency, people can do what they used to do before phones were portable…leave a voice message. Don’t have your voicemail set up? Set it up and encourage people to leave a voice message or text if they need something, but make no guarantees about when you’ll get back to them. Emergencies rarely happen during the 15-60 minute time slots that we choose to be away from our phones. Even if you get an emergency message or call, it’s likely you can’t do anything immediately anyway. Practice depending on God, His goodness, His timing, His protection, and give up your crutch during scheduled periods of time.
• D – Don’t take it out in the presence of others. If you grab your phone to see what time it is during your lunch appointment or coffee date, you’ll likely see that you missed a message or call, or you’ll see a notification and then you’ll check it out and feel the need to respond and –there it is! You just allowed your phone to become more important than the person in your presence. (I still wear a watch for that reason alone!) Even when it’s unintentional, that’s how we clearly tell someone else that whatever is on our phone or whomever interrupted our time together is more important than their time and presence.
• E – Erect boundaries around your schedule and communicate them clearly to others. Let others know when you will not be responding to calls or messages (before 8 am and after 5 pm–or  whenever  you and your family have decided to not be interrupted).  Clearly defined phone boundaries let the significant people in your life know they are more important than business, and it also lets them know you’re not a phone addict and you refuse to become one.

Which one of these ABCs do you most need to work on? Let me know in the comment section below.  Chances are they’re on my list too. 🙂

And check out chapter 7 (“The Loneliness of Screens”)  in my book, The New Loneliness. You may be surprised at some of the statistics on phone and social media use and become more aware of how time spent with your phone might be negatively impacting your relationships.