How to Stop Phone Distractions as a Christian Mom (Reclaim Your Time, Focus & Peace)

Do you ever feel like you’re constantly available, but you’re never actually present with the people around you? Are you getting to the end of your day, and you realize that you spent more time scrolling, watching other people live their lives instead of living your own? If that’s you, you’re not alone.

Our phones are the most powerful tools that we own, but it’s also the most powerful thief of our time. So today, we’re going to talk about why our phones are not just some innocent distraction. They are reshaping our brains, our relationships, and our ability to steward what God has given us.

Hey friend, welcome to Time Management for Christian Moms, where we practice purposeful work, intentional rest, and focused living. If you’re tired of feeling busy, and you’re unsure of whether you’re focused on what actually matters, you’re in the right place. Hi, I’m Kirsten, a former tech program manager turned stay-at-home mom, and I help Christian moms bring clarity and structure to their days through simple systems, biblical productivity, and calm discipline.

If your coffee is cold and your to-do list is long, let’s dive in and focus on what matters most. If you feel like you’ve been trapped by your phone, I just want you to know that you aren’t alone. There was a moment last summer, before I even started this podcast, where I thought I’d start an Instagram account to compliment my blog.

You know, it just quote unquote made sense. I thought I could fit it in the margins really easily, but I was convicted very quickly. And I didn’t know why, but I just felt this discernment to not only get off Instagram for my blog account that I literally just started three weeks prior.

Maybe, maybe even less. But to even get off of my personal account as well and just take a break. So I took a break over the summer from the middle of June until towards the end of August.

And honestly, it was the calmest I had felt in a while. But even if we take a break, our phones, they still pull at us, even if we’re off social media. You know, you might have this pressure to look something up really quick just because you can, or to quickly check your email, or to check the weather, and then all of a sudden you’re online shopping.

Like, our phones are bigger than just the social media pool. So I just want to say, if you are feeling guilty about your phone usage, you’re not alone. I mean, they’re literally making products to help people overcome this addiction, because that’s what it is.

And this addiction doesn’t care if you’re young or old. I think a lot of people think that it’s just the young people that struggle with this, but this is not just a problem with our youth. It is a problem with our society as a whole.

So today, I don’t want to just talk about the effects that our phones have on our lives today. I want to cover some practical solutions for managing our usage, so we can focus on what matters most in this season as young moms. You know, we are to be a loving wife, a nurturing mama, a woman devoted to God, living out his calling on our lives.

And so we can’t do that if our nose is buried in our phones. So I just want to remind you, though, that your phone is designed to hijack your attention. It’s not you.

Social media is literally engineered to keep you scrolling. Every notification gives you this dopamine hit. You are not just distracted.

Your brain is being trained. We are being conformed to the world. Data has shown that the average person checks their phone every 12 minutes.

And that doesn’t surprise me, to be honest. Social media apps, they are engineered to keep us scrolling through these endless feeds. It knows what we like, and so it shows us more of that.

“They are so smart, and people are reporting higher levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness with heavy social media use. But it’s supposed to be social, right? But it’s not.

It doesn’t allow us to be still. We’re always having to fill up the time. But in Psalm 46 10, God tells us, be still and know that I am God.

In stillness, it’s just not optional if we want to hear from Him. We have to be still, but we’re not being still right now. And it feels hard to create these moments of stillness because we’ve created these bad habits, but we can break those bad habits and create new ones that are good.

So a practical solution I have for you is you have to create some phone boundaries that are going to protect your brain and your day. So some people, they will put their phone in a drawer in the other room. Some people even have fancy phone boxes.

I think they log automatically or something. I guess it’s aesthetically pleasing. I don’t know, but that’s an option.

Just throwing it in a random dresser drawer. Basically, the out of sight, out of mind principle. Or some people, if you listen to my episode with Jamie from a few weeks ago, she mentioned how she does not have a smartphone as her regular phone.

She uses a flip phone. You could just toss your smartphone out the window and be done with it. I think some people are going to have a hard time going from something so drastic, but they are making new phones that are technically smartphones that have maps and a camera, but they don’t have the social media and the Internet on them.

One of them is actually called WisePhone. I will put a link in the show notes to that for you if you want to check that out. There’s also a discount associated with that if that’s something that you’ve been thinking about and you didn’t even know it existed.

“But ultimately, you don’t need to be perfect when it comes to managing your time with your phone. You just have to be intentional and figure out what boundaries are going to work for you because for everyone it’s going to be different. I love how when I talked to Jamie, she was just like, I’m not even going to let it be an option.

And that was so powerful. I think for some of us in hindsight, we probably wish we wouldn’t have, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And I’m just so thankful that there’s solutions now where we can really think critically about how do I break free from this.

So, figure out how you can separate yourself from literal boundaries, not just these figurative ones that people talk about all the time, but an actual physical boundary that keeps you off of your phone. And honestly, our phones, they are the reason that we feel disconnected from our actual lives. Technically, we have more connections than ever.

But honestly, I think we have fewer meaningful relationships than people did of past generations. They’re just so superficial. We, I honestly don’t think we were meant to keep up with every single person we’ve ever met.

It’s so taxing to be friends on Facebook with every single co-worker or committee member that you’ve ever met in your life. And not that we don’t still love and appreciate and cheer on those people, but we can’t keep up with that many people. It’s a lot.

And funnily enough, I saw this trend recently on social media where they’re talking about how, you know, people say they don’t have a village anymore. But oftentimes people aren’t willing to be the village and to inconvenience themselves. And I think our phones are a part of that.

We are spending so much time thinking that this phone is checking the social like connection box and it’s not. We were called to live in community and not just observe it and to give a quick thumbs up or a quick heart on a post as a way to connect. That’s just, it’s very superficial.

It’s vanity metrics. It’s not real. But we need to be the kind of person who shows up.

And if you want support, you have to be the support. Another issue with our phones is they are killing our creativity because they are removing the margin. And I talked about this a minute ago.

But creative thinking needs space. And if we aren’t being still and leaving some margin to actually think for ourselves and letting scrolling fill every spare moment, we are just losing our creative juice. Without margin, our brains, they are not getting time to process or dream or innovate.

It’s just, it’s sad. We are not being the creators that God called us to be. We are to create.

We need to just be still. In Isaiah 30, 15, it says, in quietness and trust is your strength. We have to create these phone free blocks in our day for thinking, praying, planning.

So when we sit down to create, whether that’s through a ministry with our children, through a business, in our homes, you know, making a new recipe, whatever creation means for you, we need to make sure our phone is far away. We have to put that boundary in place. You can’t build a successful business or ministry or have this meaningful impact on the people around you if your brain is always busy.

Being distracted, honestly, most of the time, it’s not even, it’s not a productive busy. It’s just busy. It’s being distracted and keeping you from what God has really called you to do.

If you’re feeling trapped from your phone, I will share what I’ve been personally doing. I do have a brick phone lock. You may have seen it on social media, funny enough, but I’ve had it for the last few months and it has helped my life so much.

It’s really been a game changer. I set it on a schedule and it is bricked, which if you don’t know what it is, it’s basically literally a little square. I keep it on the backside of my fridge where it’s hard to get to, it’s magnetic, but you can set it on a schedule to lock you out of certain apps whichever ones you want at certain times.

I put mine on a schedule because I honestly do not have the discipline to lock myself out of my phone, screen limits did not work, deleting apps doesn’t work. None of that has worked for me. And I hope those things could work for you when you try them, but if they haven’t, this may be a great solution for you.

But I stay off of my social media apps, the most important parts of the day. So in the morning when I’m trying to connect with the kids and do school, I cannot get on social media. When I have my work block and I’m working on this podcast, I do not get on social media.

At night right before I go to bed, I cannot get on social media. It is bricked most of the day, and that has really changed my life. I rarely unbrick it, and in order to unbrick it, I have to go to the device, scan it, and I’m going to tell you one thing.

If I’m in bed already, I am not going to get up and walk all the way into the kitchen just to scan my phone, so I can get on Facebook. It’s really just this habit that I’ve had, and I don’t want it that bad, because I won’t get out of bed. So, but I do have a discount code for it, so if you want that, I will put it in the show notes for you.

The link will be there. It really has been this simple, life-changing tool that has helped me create more margin in my brain, and it’s just kept me from being distracted when I know that I don’t really want to be. And speaking of social media, so social media honestly to me is like the modern-day Hollywood.

Like I don’t feel like people lift up actresses and actors like they used to when, you know, 20 years ago when I was a kid. But, you know, our feeds are basically just one big advertisement all the time. And these influencers, they’re basically like celebrities, and we are not supposed to compete with them, but yet we find ourselves doing that intentionally or not.

It gives us unrealistic expectations about what life is supposed to be like. We see them as normal people, but they’re living this lavish lifestyle in these really nice homes because they’ve made a living from social media. So they’ve given this facade of they are normal, and I’m not calling out all creators, just to be clear.

I’m just saying, many of them will put on this mask that makes you think that they have this just normal life and they’re just like you, but then you’re like, well, if they’re just like me, why do they have like an in-ground pool and their house is gigantic? What am I doing wrong? And I think sometimes we just forget that they are normal people like us, but they have an income that is not like the normal people.

And so we are thinking that something is more attainable than it really is. We start feeling bad about ourselves and that’s just not the goal. That’s not what God has called us to.

We shouldn’t be comparing ourselves. I would even argue that many of these businesses that you see online, they aren’t really businesses at all. They are basically these funnels that are selling you courses on how to sell courses.

It’s basically like the modern day MLM where it’s like, I’m going to have you buy this course that will teach you how to sell this course. Like, no. And I hate that this is happening because there are so many sweet women that are prioritizing their families and staying home and they want to raise them right, but they want to contribute financially for their families and they are suckered into this and it just makes my heart so sad because we are called to create.

And that might be a spicy take for some of you if you’ve ever, you know, sold a course to sell a course. I don’t want it to come off as insensitive. I think many people are well-meaning.

They just want to provide for their families, but I just have this heart for wanting to truly help other people. If I’m going to have some sort of business, it needs to truly pour into other people and bring value and honor the Lord. And I think just reselling something that already exists, it’s not really creating true value in his world.

And we are called in Romans 12,2, do not conform to the pattern of this world. And it’s so easy to do. We have to renew our minds so we are not conformed.

Ultimately, I want you to stop comparing your real life to these curated highlight reels. I want you to build your businesses, your homes, your ministries, based off of the real world, your real talents, the real people around you, not just some algorithm that’s feeding you whatever things it should feed you. I just want you to remember that your phone, it is not some innocent distraction.

It is creating this lifestyle that is rewiring your attention, it is stealing your margin, it is leaving us all lonely even though we are supposed to be connected. And if you are just craving peace and presence and true biblical productivity, you have to set boundaries. Not because your phone is evil, but because your life is too important to waste away in front of a screen.

We can’t live for the Lord if we are trapped and mindless in front of this screen that has us constantly pulled in. You can do this. You can break free of this.

There are so many practical solutions from throwing your phone in a drawer in the other room, totally getting rid of it and replacing it with a flip phone, the WisePhone, or even getting the brick. There are practical ways that you can break free of this. It will take time and practice, but you can renew your mind and get rid of this distraction that’s keeping you from God’s calling.

I will put the links to the WisePhone and the brick in the show notes if that’s something you’ve been looking for, and the drawer is just not working. I will put that there, but you can do this. We all struggle with it.

You are not alone. There is no reason to feel shame about this. We will get through this together and our families will be better for it.

“I know it will be for generations to come. Thanks so much for spending part of your day with me on Time Management for Christian Moms. If this episode helped you think more clearly about your time or priorities, make sure you’re following the show and leave a quick review.

It takes less than a minute, and it will help more moms discover Biblical Productivity. Productivity that’s rooted in peace, not hustle. I’m so glad you’re here and I’ll see you next week.”

From Time Management for Christian Moms | Overwhelm, Planning, Priorities & Biblical Productivity: Ep 19 | How to Stop Phone Distractions as a Christian Mom Entrepreneur (Reclaim Your Time & Focus), Mar 4, 2026
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