5 Ways our Digital Tech Habits Kill our Prayer Lives

I wake up in the morning and reach my hand into the unknown outside the covers. Fingers fumbling on my nightstand, I knock over my eyeglasses, random book and empty cup until I find my phone. Bringing it close to my face, I activate it. With bright blue light piercing the veil of darkness and stirring my retinas, I scroll.

Unread messages. Facebook notifications. Instagram hashtags. Top news headlines—now that I see the latest breaking news, I must return to Facebook to see how the people are responding. I heart the comments I like, get angry at the ones I don’t and contemplate my own feelings on the matter. After minutes on end of scrolling and checking until my heart is somewhat though not completely content, I rise (because I can’t justify laying any longer) to handle my deeds for the day.

Sound familiar?

Maybe this is not an everyday occurrence for you, but if we are honest, I think some of us engage in this waking ritual more times than we care to admit. But this is normal, right? At least it’s our society’s new normal?

Over the last forty years, the use, update, and integration of increasing amounts of digital tech (desktops, laptops, smart phones, smart watches, streaming TV services, etc.) into every area of our lives has skyrocketed at a dizzying pace. Just think about it: we fiddle with our phones during work, church, active conversations with spouses, sitting in class—this technology has literally invaded all of our spaces and the pace is only increasing. While speed and change can be good, I am concerned that our society has and is changing so fast with these technologies that are so young, that we have scarcely scratched the surface on all the ramifications these resources have on lives and our spirituality. More specifically, how has it affected our prayer lives?

Before we discuss the effect it has on our prayer, we first need to discuss a preliminary question: is prayer still relevant in a modern society? Or is it, like a home rotary phone, an old relic of a distant past—cool when someone actually has one, but largely impractical? More importantly, does God even hear our prayers? If He does, does He care enough that our prayers even make a difference?

One of the greatest evidences I see in Scripture for the need and utility of prayer occurs in Matthew 26:36-46. In this passage, Jesus is about to endure the most difficult trial in His earthly life—torture and execution for the sins of the world. As this climatic sequence approaches, Jesus not only retreats to prayer, but asks His followers to join Him in it. In this example, we see three things about prayer: 1.) prayer functions to connect us with God in a deep, spiritual, and even psychological ways, 2.) we sometimes need others to pray for us/us to pray for others, and 3.) prayer didn’t change Jesus’ predicament (this time), but it seemed to empower Him to endure it.

In this same way, we too need to connect to God in deep and meaningful ways. We too need to pray for others and need others to pray for us (I seriously doubt Jesus would have asked it of His disciples if it “didn’t work”). We too, need the power to endure life’s hardballs while remaining spiritually intact. Perhaps this is why other passages command us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17 [ESV]) and affirm repeatedly that “the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective (James 5:16 [NIV]). Prayer is the lifeblood of the Christian. To the extent that we do not have active prayer lives will be the extent that we find ourselves distant from God, inattentive/ineffective in tending to the spiritual needs of others and finding ourselves unable to endure the hardships of life. Prayer is not a distant relic of a forgotten past. In a society where more people can do more harm to more persons in more ways than ever before, we cannot afford to forsake effective prayer.

Back to tech. I’m not against it. I love and use my own smart devices. All I’m saying is that we need to look at our habits of use with a critical eye. While being able to instantly access social media and email can be helpful in small doses, surely our unregulated use is not good. It is on this hook that I hang my premise: our heavy and unregulated use of our digital tech is killing our prayer lives in five ways.

#1: We have become too busy to pray

I was once taught the old mantra that your day should be divided into three sections: eight hours for work, eight hours for family/home life, and eight hours for sleep. While this sounds ideal, our society makes that clean cut balance virtually impossible. For many of us, the workday never ends. We stay late at work to cover projects or we get home and compulsively check our emails so that we can finish up that “one last thing real quick”. This bleeds over into our family/home life and causes us to constantly push back doing the things that we promised we were going to do around the house. The free time we do have, we end up spending in a mindless social media scroll, vainly attempting to get a mental break. Fifteen minutes pass. Then thirty. Now we are at an hour and a half of time that we didn’t have in the first place, being sucked away into the void. The deception here is that we don’t really have the time for prayer. Is this the case? Or is the time that we do have simply whisked away from us before we have a chance to intentionally direct it?

#2: We are distracted when we pray.

Some of the research into our tech habits shows us that heavy media use and task switching (i.e. consistently switching between windows, apps, hyperlinks, etc.) may be linked to a decreased ability to concentrate and ignore distractions.[1] An interesting aspect of the study showed that doing an activity like online shopping for just 15 minutes shows a decreased ability to focus in the short term. Remember our scenario from the beginning? If we move from a bout of initial scrolling to focus on prayer, is it a wonder why we find ourselves distracted? Unable to spend even three minutes in sustained prayer before our attention wanders off? It is as if these habits are wiring and rewiring our brains for distraction.

#3: Prayer has become under-stimulating.

Compared to our other highly stimulating habits, prayer can’t compare. Once again, research shows us how “notifications” (red icons, dings, ticker bars, lights, colors, etc.) may actually drive us into an endless loop of compulsive phone checking behavior.[2] Human beings are hard-wired to search and find. The neurological reward when we “find” drives us to do the hard work of searching again. This works well to sustain our efforts in hunting elk—and once we found such sustenance, we can enjoy the reward. But what happens when searching and finding become instant and artificial, such as the search/find/reward cycle our brain goes through when we scroll? And what happens, because of our unlimited access, when we hit that reward center again and again and again as we scroll endlessly?

Our brains were not designed to experience the constant stimulation from that comes searching through endless notifications and screens that have no bottom. We are launched into a vicious cycle of checking our phones for “the next thing”. The problem is that the next thing is illusory—there is always more to see. Our phones literally hold the capacity to hold us captive forever in this loop of “never enough” and “always more”. Therefore, large quantities of time can go by before we even realize it, or why we can be so conditioned to checking that we feel vibrations that are not even real. Faced with all this mental stimulation without break, is it a wonder why it becomes difficult to sit in a quiet room and pray without being bored or drifting to sleep?

#4: We come to prayer primed with the agendas of others

Let’s keep the example of waking up in the morning and checking our phones. If you’re like me, within the first five minutes, you’ve filled your eyeballs with all the latest headlines. During this time, we’ve explored various articles and have grown increasingly frustrated at the comments section or at the fact that other people will believe a contrary viewpoint. If our time is spent emotionally oscillating between each scandalous news event, other people with other agendas are now setting the tone for our thought life (and even the things we bring to prayer). I’m not suggesting we bury our heads in the sand and ignore the latest and greatest, (Jesus and the other writers of the New Testament often spoke to the political/social conversation of the day) all I am saying, is that we don’t allow other people to get the final word on how we will view an event. This will cause us to pray prayers that are narrow in scope and focus more on what “we” want done with little consideration of what “He” may want done. We absolutely need to identify “what does God want done in the world”. Not “what does my team, church, or political party want done”.

#5: We have lost the ability to discern God’s voice

I’m reminded of the scene in Exodus 3 where Moses is tending the flock in the wilderness. While shepherding, he saw the strange sight of a bush that was on fire but not burning up. Curious, he approached and then God spoke to him. Notice in the scene that Moses didn’t hear God speak to him until he paid attention to the divine occurrence amid the mundane. I find the same to be true of us. Think of the last time you stood in line anywhere. If you’re like me, that time was spent scrolling, email checking, or sending messages. In short, I was not very attentive to those around me—I was consumed with the things I had to do once I left the store. Being attentive to my phone or to my to-do list is fine, but what would happen if I did that every time? When our default response during boredom is to rapidly unlock, check and lock our phones, how will we ever be in the space of mind to discern when God wants to do something extraordinary amid the ordinary? How will we be open to hearing God nudge us to pray for the lady at the register or pick up the bill for the guy in the line behind us at Starbucks? We miss God’s extraordinary attempts to speak to us and to nudge us into action because we have closed our ears to hearing Him. The bush burns right in front of us daily, but we miss it because our eyes are looking down.

Our use of smart tech isn’t going way—nor should it. In the same way that society around us has learned to navigate it, we too need to learn to navigate it if we are to have meaningful prayer lives. Here are some tips that may help:

·         Choose a specific time and place: when trying to hop back onto the prayer horse, don’t get too crazy. Just pick a time and place this week that can be dedicated for that reason. Repetition and consistency will work to condition your mind for prayer in the same way that eating dinner at six every evening conditions your body to expect it.

·         Have an attentive posture: while there are no biblical commands that mandate certain body positions for prayer, we’d be naïve to ignore the mind/body connection. This is why you may not have experienced much success when you’ve prayed while laying on your side. Try sitting up in a comfortable place so your body can tell your mind to pay attention.

·         Pray with the entire body: Whether we are praying out loud or praying over someone by visually looking at their picture. There is significant benefit in utilizing all of our God-given faculties in prayer to keep us engaged.

·         Set tech limits: This is going to be one of the biggest challenges, for it requires us to push back against an entire culture, but if you find yourself prone to any of the five problems listed above, this is a necessary step. This doesn’t mean complete elimination but could be something as simple as creating specific window in which you will not engage unmitigated with your devices (ex: not checking social media before noon, or not checking phone notifications after 8pm, etc.).

I will now return to my refrain in the beginning: I’m not against smart technologies—but it must be balanced. As a Christian, we have the freedom to use this resource as we please. As Christians who want to grow in holiness, missional living, and conformity towards Christ, however, we must ensure that we use this resource responsibly.

[1] Firth, Joseph et al. “The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition.” World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) vol. 18,2 (2019): 119-129. doi:10.1002/wps.20617

[2] Firth, The Online Brain.