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1,000 Phone-Free Hours: Lessons From a Yearlong Experiment
When author Hannah Brencher began stepping away from her phone, she found contentment and freedom. In this interview, she shares how we can do the same.
Her latest book, “The Unplugged Hours: Cultivating a Life of Presence in a Digitally Connected World,” shares with readers what she learned from that challenge.
In speaking with The Epoch Times, Brencher reflected on that year and offered tips to help others start enjoying their own phone-free hours.
The Epoch Times: In “Unplugged,” you describe beginning this odyssey on your 33rd birthday when you received “a nudge” about getting off the phone. What did you mean by “nudge”?
Hannah Brencher: I call it a nudge, because for different people in different walks of life, it means different things, but I think a lot of us have experienced that. For me personally, a lot of my nudges have come since becoming a person of faith, but I’m careful to test these things. The one that happened on that day felt so deep in my spirit that I felt it was really important to listen and follow the nudge to see where it would lead me.
The Epoch Times: A little bit later in the book, you bring up a friend in publishing who asked what you wanted people to say about you over the next 15 years. Can you explain what you meant when you said, “More than anything, I want to be the real deal”?
Ms. Brencher: That’s my goal and my hope, the highest compliment, especially in the social media age where it’s really easy to curate and project an image. What’s always most important to me is that I walk my talk, just because I think a lot of us have felt let down by people we thought were one way, and then they turned out to be completely different. You find out that some people are living secret lives or aren’t really living lives that honor God in the way we thought. For me, it’s always important to be honest and transparent about where I’ve stumbled, where I’ve had to start over, or where I’m finding challenges. What you see is what you get with me.
The Epoch Times: You write about a spirit of enoughness. That could mean different things for everybody. What for you is a spirit of enoughness?
Ms. Brencher: Too much use of the phone can rob us of the feeling of being enough or having enough. There’s always something more that we could purchase or do or click or accomplish, and it keeps you running in this rat race of feeling like you have to do more to be worth more.
One of the first things that happened when I started unplugging and turning off my phone is that I would feel what I call the spirit of enoughness, where there would be this moment to look around and just breathe and realize, “It’s all right here.” Once the noise went away, I was able to settle into that feeling of enoughness, of feeling this is enough for me. I don’t need more.
The Epoch Times: I really like your idea of unplugging for just a few hours every day, instead of withdrawing from everything. Can you give us three specific tips about what people can do to start?
Ms. Brencher: First and most importantly is to start small. If an hour is too much for you, then scale it back. There’s no shame in that. We’re living in a reality in which a lot of people are never separated from their phones. I talk in the book about there’s actually a phobia, nomophobia, the fear of being without one’s phone. It sounds wild for the generation growing up, but they’ve never had a time without a device in those formative years. So if an hour feels too long, start with 30 minutes. Start with 15 minutes.
The next tip is having a way to track what you’re doing. There are apps that you can use. There’s irony in that, I suppose. You can use a journal or a planner, or the paper trackers on my site. When we don’t track or collect our evidence, we can fool ourselves into staying in that day-one mentality, always being at the starting line, when in actuality we may have accumulated hours of time unplugging. That’s a strong reason for collecting that evidence and being able to look back over the progress you’ve made.
Another tip would be to figure out what you want to do with that time before you turn off your phone. A lot of people turn off the phone, and then immediately, it’s like, “I’m bored, I don’t know what to do,” and they turn their phone right back on. So make a list of things you want to get done, whatever those things are, so that when you turn off the phone, you can go and do them and then come back to the phone.
So that’s three tips, but I think one of the things most important about unplugging is figuring out the why behind it. Is it because you want to be a more present parent? Do you want to be more focused in your craft? Do you want to be a more present spouse? When you stay in touch with that, it’s easier to remind yourself in those hard moments when you don’t feel like unplugging why you’re doing this: “This is the person I’m becoming.”
Unplugging means setting aside phones and technology for more intentional practices. Anastasiia Krivenok/Getty Images
The Epoch Times: Several times in “Unplugged,” you bring up your life in school or college. Do you have any advice you'd give to young people today?
Ms. Brencher: I would tell that younger version of myself not to wait or hold back because you’re afraid of what people are going to think of you or how they might criticize you. I was in middle school, and I vividly remember going to a newspaper meeting because I wanted to write for the paper. But I didn’t join because it was considered weird and uncool to be on the newspaper staff.
Now here I am, a full-blown writer. This is my career, and a part of me thinks, man, I could have started developing my craft even earlier if I wasn’t so afraid of what other people would think of me.
The Epoch Times: You end “Unplugged” with the chapter “Take Your Time.” Any thoughts there on slowing down in general?
Ms. Brencher: You know, slowing is actually considered a spiritual discipline, because we are so ramped up and so fast-paced. A lot of that is not only our phones and our devices, but the expedited culture we live in. You can tie a lot of that back to the Industrial Revolution, and ever since, we’ve only been getting faster, but I don’t feel like much of a human life is designed for efficiency and speed. A lot of the things that we want deep in our hearts—relationships and faith and love and health—are slow moving. They evolve day after day with commitment and with discipline.
And so I think the first thing that we have to do is get to a breaking point where we want that slowness. For me, it was years where I found my life in the hustle and the movement and the go, go, go. And then a lot of us reach a place of burnout, saying, “I’m moving so fast, but it’s not bringing me joy, and I feel tired, and I can’t keep up.” It’s the awareness to say, “I want a different pace.”
And so, honestly, the biggest thing is you’re telling yourself a new truth. I'll wake up in the morning, and I will feel like, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much to do, and I don’t have enough time.” But if I look at the evidence, I have the entire day, and if it doesn’t happen today, it could happen tomorrow. So it’s retraining and rewiring your brain with a better truth of time.
The more I’ve practiced that, the more I’ve realized that this false sense of urgency came from me, from years of telling myself that everything was urgent. The more you tell yourself that new truth, the rhythms of the day slowly start to align with that truth.
Jeff Minick has four children and a passel of grandkids. He has written two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” as well as “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” You’ll find more of his writing at JeffMinick.substack.com.
