Setting down my phone as a spiritual practice

Happy 5785! Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year, started at sundown on October 2. Similar to the New Year's resolutions and intentions that many people set on January 1, Rosh Hashanah and the preceding month of Elul is a time of personal and spiritual reflection about the past and the year ahead.

In that spirit, I signed up for an Elul email series from Judaism Unbound that featured a weekly journal prompt to encourage introspection and intention-setting. When I sat down to write my first journal entry, I hit a wall—I wasn't really in a mental and emotional space to introspect or set spiritual intentions. And that wasn't a temporary thing: more often than not, my baseline state is feeling frazzled and overwhelmed, and I struggle to focus on any one thing for very long. Being asked to spiritually introspect felt like being asked to decorate a cake, but all I had was a half-baked pan of batter and some eggs and vanilla that should have been mixed in but I forgot to do that part.

I wasn't always like this. I used to be able to read a novel in an afternoon and write two blog posts a week. I could read in-depth essays without my attention drifting off after a few paragraphs. I'm sure some of this general feeling of overwhelm has to do with the fact that my life genuinely involves a lot of moving parts—two relationships, multiple freelance writing projects, a paralegal gig, a running routine, volunteer work, and so on. But I've come to suspect that there's another factor that negatively influences my ability to focus: my smartphone.

My current smartphone usage has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic. I need a high level of structure and routine in order to function, and thanks to government-mandated shutdowns that was suddenly upended. I lost all of my freelance journalism work overnight and became consumed with anxiety about the future. Every situation was supposed to be evaluated for its relative COVID risk, and that was more than my already maxed-out brain could handle. I had panic attacks in grocery stores, and I was sleeping about three to four hours per night. I started relying on various unhealthy coping behaviors, including spending an inordinate amount of time on my phone. I spent hours obsessively reading news websites and scrolling social media, which put me in a distraught, amped-up state. Then I would spend hours trying to unwind by playing Woodoku (it's kind of a Tetris/sudoku hybrid) and doing a paint-by-numbers app that involved repeatedly tapping my finger on the phone screen.

I felt guilty about how much time I was wasting, but I also felt completely incapable of doing anything that required sustained focus. The most impressive thing I accomplished during that period was coloring a 6-foot tall sloth poster while listening to the back catalog of the You're Wrong About podcast. Meanwhile, it seemed like everyone else was writing a book, launching a successful small business, baking sourdough, renovating their house, having a child, and/or adopting a dog. According to social media, anyway.

Things have dramatically improved since the height of the pandemic—I'm writing again, sleeping more, and generally high-functioning. However, my obsessive relationship with my phone has continued. It came into sharp focus at the beginning of last summer, when I decided to not use social media during Shabbat. It seemed like such a manageable thing, especially considering what a halachic (traditional scripture-based) observation of Shabbat looks like: no driving or riding in a vehicle, no using the telephone, no shopping, no turning on or off anything that uses electricity—you can't even tear off a piece of paper towel or carry your keys in your pocket outside your house. Not using Instagram and Facebook for 25 hours should have been simple, right? (Since Shabbat begins 18 minutes before sundown and ends when three small stars appear in the sky close together, it lasts about 25 hours at my latitude in Minnesota.)

But abstaining from social media was not simple. I found myself staring at my Shabbat Times app on Saturday nights, waiting for the the magical minute when I could log back on to Instagram. It didn't feel healthy, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense—I was scrolling through other people's lives instead of living my own.

Then I started to notice the other ways that my phone use impacted my life. I struggled to focus during the work day because I kept obsessive checking news headlines or scrolling Facebook. My self-image had become warped by the hours I'd spent comparing myself to carefully filtered Instagram selfies. Reading about atrocities around the world left me too distraught to sleep through the night.

Although I felt overwhelmed by work and personal responsibilities, I was somehow finding the time to spend an average of three hours and 45 minutes per day on my phone. My top hobby, by far, had become staring at my phone, and nearly every other aspect of my life was suffering because of it.

So that was the background for the intention that I eventually wrote in response to the Elul journal prompt about introspection and intention-setting: To be more mindful and thoughtful in the way I care for myself, so that I can feel less frazzled and more able to be present in spiritual experiences and my relationships.

Because I'm more of an action person than an ideas person, this intention was followed by a slew of concrete steps: "less morning screen time so I can start work at 8 am" and "not looking at my phone if I can't sleep at night." There were other things too, because it would be simplistic to blame my focus problem solely on my phone—I have a tendency to take on too much and then spiral into guilt when I don't accomplish it all, among other issues. But setting down my phone seemed like it would make dealing with other stuff more manageable and open up space for spirituality.

Elul has come and gone, and my phone usage is still a work in progress. My phone screen time has fallen to an average of 2 hours and 15 minutes per day, which has made a noticeable difference in how much time I have to work on my to-do list, as well as providing more time for actual non-phone hobbies. I'm writing more efficiently because I'm not constantly taking breaks to stare at my phone. I'm more present when I'm spending time with loved ones. When Rosh Hashanah rolled around, I had more mental bandwidth for reflection and religious practice.

In the midst of my reevaluation of my phone use, I took a three-week online course about Hasidism and Neo-Hasidism—it's been interesting to consider my struggles with technology through that lens. Today, we associate Hasidism with ultra-Orthodox observance and insular, Yiddish-speaking communities. However, when Hasidism was founded in the mid-1700s, it was primarily a populist, mystical movement that emphasized joyous religious practice and an intimate relationship with God, who is conceived of as being everywhere and in all things. Neo-Hasidism, generally speaking, seeks to reclaim those roots of Hasidic practice without joining a formal Hasidic community.

Our instructor acknowledged that there is a certain amount of irony in teaching a class about an experiential, mystical religious movement via Zoom—you can't practice Hasidism or Neo-Hasidism by staring at a screen. So the class also included some optional offline homework, like pausing throughout your day to look for God's presence in everything. One week, inspired by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's practice of hitbodedut, we were told to go out into nature and talk to God.

Rebbe Nachman is famous for encouraging people to regularly speak to God privately and spontaneously, in their native language, rather than relying on memorized Hebrew and Aramaic prayers recited in a group setting. According to Rebbe Nachman, if you don't know what to say, you talk to God about how you don't know what to say. It's kind of the prayer version of free writing: you just keep talking and talking and talking to God, ideally at night and out in nature.

Walking through the woods in the dark while talking to God was far from the most spiritual experience I've ever had. Since I watch a lot of horror movies, I had a nagging sense that I was about to be murdered by a knife-wielding serial killer, zombie, and/or demonic forces. I felt more like I was talking to myself than communing with the divine. I did not have any sort of mystical experience, possibly because I expressly asked God not to freak me out by doing anything miraculous like setting a bush on fire.

Although I'm glad I tried it, hitbodedut isn't a spiritual practice that particularly works for me—as a pantheist I believe in divinity that is interwoven into the world, and speaking to God puts an anthropomorphic spin on things in a way that simply doesn't resonate. But I do think that there is profound wisdom in a spirituality that is based on intense focus and spending time within nature.

If Rebbe Nachman was alive today, I think he'd be telling us to get off our phones and go touch grass.