Stop Filling Every Quiet Moment with Scrolling

Where is your phone right now? Is it in your hand? In your pocket? At your side? Do you ever not know where your phone is? And when you don’t know, how do you react? Perhaps you’re like me: I used to keep my phone in my pocket, hand, or on a surface within reaching distance at all times, and the moment a notification dinged through, I took it out and dealt with it. On top of that, I regularly took my phone out to scroll social media.

What I didn’t realize is that this very habit was adding stress and overwhelm to my life. Part of my exhaustion was from constant noise and little down-time; I felt like I was always on and constantly had someone demanding my attention. At first, I blamed it on my three little children (who, admittedly, are quite needy being four and under), but what I didn’t realize was that I was filling any quiet moments I could have had with more noise from my phone. It took having an honest moment with myself to say I had put my phone and all the people on it before my kids—rather than being frustrated with my phone for distracting me from my family, I was frustrated with my family for taking up my screen time. 

What I’ve realized is that our brains actually require “dead” time in which they aren’t being forced to do anything at all. In Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone, she talks about the importance of giving our brains time to pause and rest rather than filling every empty moment with our phones. She writes about how our brains require down-time and perhaps even boredom to be productive.¹ She goes on to write in later chapters that “while boredom carries with it an element of feeling trapped, stillness offers an opportunity for peace …. Stillness also gives your mind the space it needs to be creative and come up with new ideas.”²

This isn’t a new concept—Jesus himself called people to quiet, solitary rest from their work. When Jesus’ disciples returned after being sent out to work and teach, he told them, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while” (Mark 6:31 ESV). Matthew Henry commented on this passage,

“The most active servants of Christ cannot be always upon the stretch of business, but have bodies that require some relaxation, some breathing-time; we shall not be able to serve God without ceasing, day and night, till we come to heaven, where they never rest from praising him, Rev 4:8. And the Lord is for the body, considers its frame, and not only allows it time for rest, but puts it in mind of resting …. He invites them not to some pleasant country-seat, where there were fine buildings and fine gardens, but into a desert place …. for quietness and rest.”³

Charles Spurgeon likewise recommended quietness for believers (especially those suffering under melancholy or an anxious spirit): “Beyond all medicine, stimulant, cordial, or lecturing, I commend quiet hours in calm retreats to God’s hardworking servants in order to help their spirits up to the mark. That blessed Spirit who led his servant Paul into Arabia, and Moses into the desert, is frequently pleased to bless retirement to the restoration of the believer’s joy and strength.”⁴

Taking time to not just rest, but also to be quiet and alone, is good for us. But many of us give up any opportunity for this kind of peace to our phones. We have well-worn paths of habit in our brains to reach for our phones and begin scrolling once we have a quiet and empty moment. But Catherine Price says we can (and should) push past these habits: “At first you’re likely to feel physically and emotionally twitchy, as if your brain is banging on a door that usually opens, and panicking when it realizes that it’s locked. But after a few minutes—or even seconds—your brain will tire itself out. It will stop pounding on the door and start noticing the room that it’s already in. And who knows? It might decide that it likes it there.”⁵

If we can push past these habits of reaching for our phones and filling every quiet moment, we may start to feel better and see good fruit produced. That cloud of writer’s block may lift, your struggle to memorize Bible passages may ease, your happiness and overall countenance may rise, and you may feel a little less frazzled.

By putting away our phones and not always having them within arm’s reach, we tell ourselves and the world that we are not omnipresent. I can’t always be there immediately for the friend who just texted me. I can’t always get to my phone before it stops ringing. I can’t always answer Instagram comments and messages within fifteen minutes—or even fifteen days! I am limited, and I can’t expect to be God for other people, nor should they expect it of me (not that anyone did; I had merely chalked that fear up all on my own). 

This action also declares that I am not omniscient. I don’t know everything. Everytime my son asks a question I’m unsure of or my own brain poses a question I don’t know the answer to, I can simply say, “I don’t know,” and leave it at that. I am a limited person with limited brain-space. I don’t need to fill every still moment with more articles, audiobooks, podcasts, or the like. It’s okay if I don’t absorb all the information those things could offer me. I can enjoy the quiet and accept my finiteness, enjoying the moment before me. “Best of any song is the bird song in the quiet,” Wendell Berry wrote, “but first you must have the quiet.”⁶

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1. Catherine Price, How to Break Up With Your Phone (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2018), 67–68.

2. Price, 130.

3. Matthew Henry and Gerald W. Peterman, Zondervan NIV Matthew Henry Commentary In One Volume, ed. Leslie F. Church, 2nd ed., of Premier Reference Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), 179.

4. Charles H. Spurgeon, “Bells for the Horses,” The Spurgeon Archive, March 8, 2018, https://archive.spurgeon.org/s_and_t/bells.php.

5. Price, 131.

6. Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems (1979–1997) (Berkeley, CA: Counter Point, 1998), 207.

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