Earlier this week, Ivan Mesa and I did a radio interview about Scrolling Ourselves to Death. The host took live-on-air questions from listeners at the end, and a woman called in. She described a wakeup call in her life when she realized her phone was dangerously ubiquitous. Scrolling was the first thing she did in the morning and the last thing she did before bed. On at least one occasion, she fell asleep with her phone in hand—waking up to find it resting on her body.

This woman has since changed her habits, instituting digital fasts and new restrictions on personal devices. We all should. If we find that scrolling dictates the rhythms of our lives and the preoccupations of our minds, from waking up to falling asleep, we need not shrug in passive resignation. We ought to take steps to resist. Maybe start with one of these habit tweaks:

• Move your phone out of your room at night. Buy an old-school alarm clock if need be.
• Use apps like Freedom to put boundaries on phone or internet use to protect periods of unmediated time in your life.
• Consider guarding the first or last 30 minutes of each day as phone-free time. Yes, this is hard at first! But you’ll soon cherish the joy of beginning and/or ending your day without the distractions of your phone.

In a new TGC article, Stephanie Juliot offers other practical tips for how we might monitor our media habits to protect our spiritual health. We need frequent reminders, encouragement, and ideas like this. As the radio listener woman realized, we don’t have to live this way. Let’s resolve to alter course before it’s too late.