84 | What Happens When You Declutter Your Phone and How It Changes Your Focus, Your Peace, and How Present You Are with Others

I think we can agree that so often your phone sets the tone for your whole day before you've done a single thing.

Your lock screen, your home screen, your notification, all of it hits you the second you look down.

A messy screen makes your brain work harder just to find what it came for.

A calm screen does the opposite.

You look, you find it, you're done.

There is nothing better than less visual noise, less app clutter and notifications to distract you, especially when there is nothing making you feel behind before your day has even begun.

Multiply that by every time you pick up your phone dozens of times a day and it adds up.

So that's the tone that your phone sets in the first few seconds, but the effects go a lot deeper than your screen.

So let's start talking about focus.

I used to think that I had a hard time focusing.

Turns out my phone had a lot to do with it.

Here's what happens.

You're praying, you're reading, you're deep in a conversation, or maybe you're in a meeting and your phone pings or it vibrates.

It might even be somewhere across the room and you don't even pick it up, but your brain jumps there anyways.

And you start thinking, well, who was that? Was it important? And the reality is it takes a minute to come all the way back to what you were doing before the distraction.

You do that several times a day, and it's no wonder you can't focus for very long.

There's research behind this too.

A study that was published in the Journal of Applied Sciences tracked how notifications actually hit people over several days, and it found that notifications interrupt you, they annoy you, they stress you out, especially when they land at the wrong moment.

Every ping is asking something of your attention, whether you answer it or not.

So decluttering the pings and dings isn't just tidying up.

It's giving your brain permission to stay put, to finish a thought, to pray one whole prayer instead of three interrupted ones.

If focus has felt hard for you to hold on to, if prayer maybe feels scattered, if conversations keep losing you halfway through, you know, your phone might be a bigger reason than you realize.

But here's some good news for you.