When Screen Time Becomes Sinful

We are pleased to share an excerpt from guest writer Teresa Mull’s book “Woke-Proof Your Life” by Sophia Institute Press.

Big Tech is a big problem. Physically, mentally, and spiritually, it is capable of ruin on all levels. If we let it. It is through Big Tech, after all, that so much woke influence is born, bred, disseminated, and festers.  

We must ask ourselves if we’re using our remarkable technology as a resource—discovering or communicating fruitful news and information, being fortified by a community, taking part in a health-giving routine, and so on—or if our devices are a recourse for filling time. 

We’ve all seen it and likely done it ourselves: we’re told to sit down and wait at a doctor’s office, at the airport, in line at the post office, and the first thing we do is pull out our phone. For what? It didn’t ring or buzz. We didn’t receive a message. We’re looking for a distraction, for momentary entertainment. The time we used to fill by striking up a pleasant conservation with our neighbor, saying a prayer, philosophizing internally, or musing on the way interior paint colors are developed is now filled with silent head noise, as we’re all absorbed in a virtual world that’s filling our time and keeping the brain just-amused-enough so that it doesn’t have to think for itself.  

St. Mother Teresa said, “We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. . . .We need silence to be able to touch souls.” 

Texts, emails, “news,” and entertainment are everywhere. Data reports vary on the amount of time the average American spends in front of a screen, but even the low-end estimates are appalling: in 2018, a New York Post story reported, “Americans spend nearly half of their waking hours (42 percent) looking at a screen.” Statista reported that in 2021, “adults in the U.S. spent an average of 485 minutes (eight hours and five minutes) with digital media each day.” For kids aged 11–18, the average time spent online using social media, gaming, shopping, video chatting, and texting is 10 hours and four minutes a day.  

Consider that too much screen time, in addition to being a waste of time, increases: inactivity, obesity, isolation, depression, anxiety, eye strain, poor posture, wrinkles, and sleep irregularities. Despite being a supposedly “social” platform that makes communication easier, social media makes us lonelier. It’s designed to suck us in and keep us checking up on other people, and research has found apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and the like to be more addictive than smoking and alcohol (and, as we’ll see later on, just as harmful). Much like its fellow vices, social media adheres to the law of diminishing returns: another study found that limiting social media usage to a maximum of 30 minutes a day significantly reduced users’ “anxiety and fear of missing out (FOMO).” 

Our phones are also making us dumber and less friendly. An eyewatering NBC News report in 2018 revealed our phones negatively affect our ability to remember basic information and to think “deeply, attentively and conceptually.” Even when we aren’t using them, one study reported that “the mere presence of a smartphone seemed to reduce the quality of conversations.”

An even more alarming study found that “mobile phone addiction during the COVID-19 quarantine period could, directly and indirectly, predict suicidality five months later when the pandemic was in remission.”

Technology is a wonderful blessing from God, but cell phones are designed to addict us and distract us from God and from the needs of our neighbors. Phones are also the way woke ideology is granted a platform and works its way into the collective psyche.  

Our human appetites are boundless, which is why God provided very clear-cut guardrails for how to moderate ourselves. Remember that we will be called upon to give account not just of every evil word, but of “every idle thought.” 

You’d think with all these modern-day conveniences and technologies making so much of our existence streamlined and automatic, we’d be less stressed out, not more so. It’s as if we’re trying to keep up with the fast-paced technology we invented for making our lives easier. Instead, our stress has amounted to an “unforced error” in tennis. We bring into our lives “unforced stress” by taking upon ourselves a second life of sorts (as if one isn’t stressful enough!)—one full of scorn, perversion, division, and despair that is never silent, but which can, thank God, be silenced.

If you’ve been out of cell phone range recently, on, say, a camping trip, you’ve likely felt a sense of relief that your absence from the fast-paced world of texts, emails, phone calls, pop-up ads, and the news cycle was “excused” by the circumstances of nature. Well, it turns out you can excuse yourself from the fast-paced world, too. Just blame it on nature. Human nature.

Ask yourself: is the purpose of your screen time a resource or a recourse? Is your social media usage bringing you closer to God by strengthening Christ-centered relationships, supplying you with a community of like-minded believers who inform, inspire, and invigorate your life? Or is it diverting you from the beauty of God’s creation, distracting your attention from His goodness and negatively manipulating your mood?

Remain attentive to these questions and use your devices as tools —and sparingly. Be selective in what your eyes and mind absorb. You wouldn’t open your mouth and let random strangers put any sort of unknown substance into your body, would you? Then why risk the same thing with your eyes, mind, and soul? You are what you eat. And watch, and hear, and read, and so forth. By consuming whatever Big Tech (including the mainstream media) throws at us, we’re essentially filling our minds with junk food, and it has the same negative effects on our souls as cheap, mass-produced, fake fast food has on our bodies.

Some ways to use screen time better:

Designate phoneless areas of your home and commit to phone-less activities: walking in nature, going to the gym (you’ll make more friends without your earbuds!), dinnertime, waiting in waiting-rooms, and so on. If your phone causes you to sin, cut it off: leave it at home, in your purse, whatever.

Consider significantly reducing your social media usage, or getting rid of social media all together.
Limit your consumption of news to an hour a day. Find one traditional-minded news program to watch, or one newspaper to read, or one podcast to listen to, and leave it at that.

Wear a watch. If you’re like me, you use your phone as a timepiece, but checking it can lead to reading emails and texts, and next thing you know…