The App Annie mobile report Jan 2022 gives us a glimpse of the cell phone scene today. Across the top 10 markets looked at in the study, the average time spent in apps was 4 hours, 48 minutes in 2021, an increase of 30% from 2019.
Users in Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea surpassed five hours per day. Of that time, seven out of every 10 minutes was spent on social, photo and video apps, like WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook and Netflix with TikTok most used.
It’s now common knowledge that many apps are designed to create app addiction in the users in order to encourage you to use these apps as often as possible.
This is greatly affecting Christians as well, who are spending hours and hours on their cell phone, and less time in prayer and Bible study, the key essentials to maintaining a relationship with our Father in heaven. We suffer from cell phone addiction too.
I was at a Christian conference involving leaders and members. The conference put a weekly program up of activities and put an hour before breakfast to pray and meditate on the Bible every day. I was in a dormitory of 40-50 believers, some leaders, and I woke up to do my prayer time before breakfast. But I noticed that almost no-one awoke early to pray (only for breakfast) and of those that did wake up earlier, all of them grabbed their cell phones first, not to read the Bible, but to check WhatsApp, and social media websites like Facebook. Cell phone addiction.
So how can we regain control of our lives? Jesus says that we can’t be slaves of two masters (Mt 6:24)
1.Fast your cell phone for periods
As is true of any addiction, to regain control over our devices and apps, we need to fast them for periods, e.g. a weekend, a week. This will help break ce phone addiction and restore our control over our lives.
2.Leave the morning for other activities
Make a commitment to not use your cell phone or check it (unless you have something urgent and important) until after lunch. Instead get up early to spend time with the Lord and then begin your working day.
3.Remove addictive apps from your phone
Delete apps that are causing addictive behaviour. My friend deleted her Facebook site because she was checking it constantly.
4.Do something more interesting and productive
The reason why many of us keep checking our cell phones is because when we are bored, the easiest way to kill boredom is to go to an app on our phone, even when it really isn’t necessary most of the time.
So instead make a list of better ways to use your time, like pursue a hobby or write a book or start a personal project or help someone in need.
Check out The Christian Bucket List: 50 things to do before heaven
5.Put a limit on how long you use
Limit your daily time on your cell phone. For example two hours or one hour per day. There are apps now that monitor how long you use certain apps to enable us to put limits on our usage.
So let’s make a New Year commitment to make more space for the glory of God and break our cell phone addictions which hinder us.