The moment you try to give something up, it’s like all your senses go on high alert. You try to fast during Lent and suddenly you have an overwhelming craving for a cheeseburger with bacon and caramelized onions. Sound familiar? No wonder it’s so hard to stick to a “screen fast.” We’re so attached to our phones, those little screens that entertain and constrain us, shine like the sun, relieve our boredom, and dry out our eyes. Why it is so hard to put it down?

St. Paul was sincere about his own inner battle: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Romans 7:15). Can you relate? It’s kind of a relief to read someone of St. Paul’s spiritual stature going through the same thing we do. For all of us, the phone is a near-constant invitation to waste time. We know it, and yet we keep scrolling anyway. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way: at some point we have to shake off the inertia and wake up. Why not now? All of know that it would be good for us to put our phone away while studying, working, or resting, to try to talk to God and be there for the people around us.

All sacrifices are hard, like skipping meat on Good Friday, so why does putting your phone away during a family dinner feel even harder?

I was talking about this with a friend, a young university professor, and he told me, “It’s all about FOMO.”

It was the first time I’d heard of it. “Foam... What?”

“Fear of missing out. It’s hard to disconnect because you’re afraid of being left behind. If you post something on Instagram, you immediately start burning with anxiety to see how it’s doing. If you haven't posted anything, you’re still itching to check what your friends are up to. The upside is that you’re online and in the loop. The downside is that you’re always restless, like a caged lion.”

In other words, through your phone you can tune in to everywhere you’re not, but the price is checking out of the one place you actually are. Out of fear of missing what’s happening in other cities, we fray our nerves. During the day, we steal attention from the people right in front of us, and at night we sleep like dolphins... with one eye open, just in case.

Reclaiming silence

We were not made to live on high alert. That’s useful for emergencies and exceptional situations, but our normal state is be giving full attention to the people eating dinner with us, spending a good hour savoring what we’re studying, praying daily, sleeping deeply. Otherwise — to use another image — it’s like you keep opening the fridge door every five minutes, and the yogurt goes bad.

According to Dr. Kevin Majeres, anxiety is the number one problem facing young people today. That tracks. When I talk to high school students, they often tell me that they’re half afraid to go home after school because they’re probably going to waste all the free time before dinner to their phone. Because of that fear, many prefer to stay in after-school activities and delay going home as long as possible.

Sometimes I think we live like magpies, pecking at moments with fleeting emotions. Enough! It's time to step off the conveyor belt heading toward burnout and find the slower, but far more colorful, path of inner silence.

And really, what did we expect? Social media was specifically designed to have an irresistible pull on whoever holds it. It attracts with a force comparable to the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings (have you read Tolkien?). So if we’re serious about disconnecting in order to reconnect, we need to put some thought into removing the temptation.

Making the most of Lent

“What if you just deleted social media?” I asked a 17-year-old once.

He looked at me like I was an alien, like I had absolutely no idea what his world was like.

“Father,” he said, very seriously, “we have two lives. Our real life, the everyday one of going to school, and a virtual life, the one we live on social media. And how can I put this? My Instagram life is my main life. Do you understand? How could you possibly suggest I delete my main life?”

We looked at each other. I didn’t need to say anything. He’d heard his own words, and he already sensed that his situation was, to say the least, a bit strange.

Another teenager, 15 years old, went to a party. He danced with a girl for a while and then they stepped outside to talk. The topic was screen time... but they made it a competition.

“This week,” she said, pulling out her phone, “I’ve spent 4 hours on Instagram.”

“Only 4?”

At that point the student telling me the story interrupted himself: “Finally, I thought, I’d someone different, free. Four hours in a week is nothing. I was excited. But then she remembered...”

“Wait, I haven’t checked TikTok yet... Yep! 20 hours on TikTok.” 20 hours!!

“In less than a way,” the student concluded, "my friend had spent an entire day on social media. That can’t be right. It was pretty disappointing.”

A nightingale needs to breathe before it can singing. We’re the same. We need to cultivate an interior life where ideas, reflections, and memories of the people we love can take root, because that’s where our words, dreams, and plans come from. Without interior life, a person ends up with nothing real to say.

That’s what Lent is about: breathing so we can sing again, compressing the spring so you can jump further, lifting your head to see the world in full color. In short: taming FOMO to gain interior freedom. As Pope Leo XIV says: “Lent is the time when the Church, with motherly care, invites us to place the mystery of God back at the center of our lives, so that our faith may regain its energy and our hearts not be scattered among the worries and distractions of daily life.”

Getting concrete

Making a vague resolution like, “I’m going to find time for silence,” is easy. Keeping it is the hard part. If you genuinely want to grow and build an interior life, you want to have the self-mastery to connect and disconnect when appropriate. But the problem, as St. Paul puts it, is that I do not do what I want.

The solution looks different for everyone. I know an 18-year-old who swapped his smartphone for an old-school brick phone. With the time he used to spend on social media, he learned to play guitar in six months.

“Do you miss Instagram?” I asked him.

“A little,” he admitted, “but I’d choose guitar a thousand times over. Next year, when I start university, I want to audition for a band.”

There are other approaches too. Another student told me: “I use my phone like a landline. I don’t carry it in my pocket. I only use it in set places, at set times.”

There are many ways to have a healthy relationship with your phone. What matters is spending time thinking about it and committing to making the effort. Let me finish with a question, if you don’t mind me asking: how many hours of screen time are you willing to give up for love of God?