75 | Why Spiritual Rest Feels So Hard When Your Phone Is Always Within Reach and 3 Practical Shifts to Help You Rest Well This Summer

When you experience a moment of stillness, do you reach for your phone? If you do, what happens is you're teaching your brain that stillness is something to escape rather than something to experience.

And in our fast-paced digital world, many of us, if we were to be honest, might agree that over time, we have developed an intolerance to boredom.

But I think for many of us, it runs really deeper than boredom.

I think it's an intolerance to the quiet.

an intolerance to being alone with our own thoughts for more than about 90 seconds.

And I think vacation makes this particularly tricky because we bring all of our regular digital habits with us on vacation, right? It's the same apps, the same notifications, the same habitual reflexes that we've built up over months and years.

So we might change our location, but often we don't change our patterns.

So we end up sitting somewhere so beautiful, but we're looking at the same screen that we look at every other day of the year.

So why do we do that? Well, I actually think it's a good question to ask ourselves.

And I think one primary answer could be that a lot of us carry a low-grade anxiety about being unavailable, right? What if someone needs me? What if I miss something? What if something happens and I didn't see it? So instead of actually resting, we kind of half rest.

We got one eye on the phone, one hand near the phone, and really one part of our brain quietly monitoring the phone.

And that is not rest.

That is just distraction with a nicer view.

I think real deep rest requires something from us.

It requires permission.

And a lot of us have never actually given ourselves the permission to rest.

We think rest is what happens when everything else is handled.

But everything is never really fully handled.

I am literally stepping into a vacation this week.

And just yesterday was my last day of work.

I closed the tabs on my computer.

I set up everything that I could do with my co-workers to leverage teamwork.

But there are still things outstanding in my job for when I return.

There will always be one more thing, which means if you are waiting for the coast to become completely clear before you actually rest, you are going to be waiting a long time.