And you know, was just looking at apps on my phone, listening to audio books, watching YouTube videos. There was just a lot of noise and I just felt that the Holy Spirit moved my heart to say, Like, hey, you’re gonna need to give that up if you wanna be able to listen to me and hear my voice and write these prayer books.

So I just felt very strongly about that. And I started in November of 2024. And on my phone I took pretty much everything. Social off, YouTube. Instagram, I took Zillow off. That was one that I used a lot and there were some that I left on my phone, but I put on the second page. 

So when you look at my phone right now, I kept the clock, the weather, my calendar. Google Maps, the remote control start one of our cars. You can start them with your phone, which is, we only really use it in the winter when it’s snowing. Rosary app that I really love. And then at the bottom I had the phone, the calculator, the camera and text messaging. 

So there were only 10 apps on. When I looked at my phone, and then if I swiped, then there were some folders with some things that I wanted to keep, but that weren’t really a problem for me. For example, when I travel, and I don’t travel a lot, but when I do, I usually get an Uber to get from the airport to wherever I’m staying. 

So I have a folder called Travel In, there’s some apps in there. But those were not the ones that I was looking at on a daily basis. So there are some more apps in my phone, but I really don’t look at them very much. 

So I go through this process of taking everything off my phone, and I just make this agreement with myself that I am not going to touch my phone a lot and I am going to quiet the amount of noise and inputs that are coming into my ears and into my eyes.

And I obviously had kind of a professional reason for doing this, I really wanted to connect more with the Lord. But the more that I did it, and the more that I got my brain space back, the more I just felt so deeply, oh, all of us need to do this. Like, it’s not a choice anymore. I’m gonna say it very, very strongly, like your brain is being totally ruined by your phone and it’s not okay.

It’s just not okay. And we have got to stand up and just say, I’m today years old and I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not gonna let my children watch me live like this anymore. And it is not necessary. 

So to just create kind of a cultural analogy, I want you to remember that everyone used to smoke. Okay. I don’t know when cigarettes came onto the scene. But certainly they were popular. Like I picture, you know, the guys in Mad Men in the fifties like smoking and looking super cool and the women are smoking and all drinking martinis and things like that. 

So certainly by the fifties it was really prevalent and it was so prevalent that even in the seventies and the eighties, there were just ashtrays everywhere, right? Ashtrays everywhere. You could smoke on an airplane, you could smoke in a restaurant. Everyone was smoking.

And even if you weren’t smoking, you were sitting next to 10 people who were smoking. And so you were secondhand smoking. And culturally it was so embedded into what was cool and what we were all doing.

And then there’s this delay that happens, right? There’s quite a bit of a delay. Before we’re like, whoa, wait a minute. I think people are dying from cancer from this. horrible, painful, early deaths and. They knew that and then they had to shift the cultural opinion about cigarettes. Because here’s the thing about cigarettes is they are amazing, right?

They give you nicotine, which gives you energy and they calm you down, which is amazing. Like people don’t think about it like that with cigarettes. But if you think about it right now, like imagine you have a fake cigarette and we’re like smoking it in, and then we’re blowing it out. 

That breathing will calm your body down and you don’t need a cigarette to do it. You can just, like breathe in and breathe out really deeply and it will calm you down. And so the cigarettes were giving people energy. Calming them down. 

And then also people lose weight when you smoke. By the way, a lot of people lose weight because you have a cigarette and it kind of satisfies your anxiousness and your desire for overeating, and then you don’t eat until you’re thinner. Okay? All around. I just want you like, it’s been a while and you don’t think cigarettes are cool. 

So it’s crazy to just stretch your brain though. I want you to think that this thing, that everyone was doing made you thinner and calmer. Happier and give you more energy. Like of course everyone was smoking, but then they realized this is making you sick, and they had to, then they started those public campaigns where they explained with billboards and commercials.

You probably remember them like, Hey. You’re gonna get cancer, this is really bad for you. And they started talking about it in schools, and I remember the ads, you know, with the people that then had to like talk through their neck, like a hole in their neck. And then those people kept smoking through the hole in their neck and it was so disturbing and it was so gross that it really seared into our minds.

Hey. Don’t smoke cigarettes. And it is so seared into your mind that there’s pretty much nothing I could do to get you to smoke cigarettes. Right? Like if you came to my house and I said, here’s some magic cigarettes and I got them from Paris and each cigarette was $500 and I wanna give you one. Like, do you wanna smoke this cigarette with me?

You just would say no. You would just say no. You’d be like, no, I’m not a smoker. I don’t do that. Your brain has wired so deeply the damage of it, and maybe you’ve never smoked cigarettes before, so you don’t know how incredible they are and how they make you feel.

But there were lots of people who knew how incredible they were and how incredible they made them feel, but then had to change their behavior because they saw, oh, this is really damaging. It’s really hurting people’s health. 

And it wasn’t just like you died a little bit sooner, like you died a lot sooner and a really gruesome, painful death. And the reason I’m rubbing your face in this cigarette thing is because I just think the phones are the same way and we just haven’t caught up yet.

I think the phones are so damaging to our brains and our ability to think and solve problems and connect with people and have healthy relationships. But it feels amazing and it gives us dopamine. And so we’re just getting this bump all the time and everyone’s doing it, that we’re just all collectively saying it’s okay. And I’m here to say it’s not okay. It is just not okay. 

And so I’m just gonna like, lead the front of the mom saying, I know you’re lonely. I know you’re isolated. I know you’re bored. I know your brain feels like mush and we’ve got to just find another way. To solve those problems than these phones that are in our pockets.

So I remember the time, that I was an adult. I was an adult for a few years when I had a phone. I remember it was a green Nokia slide up phone. It was so cool. I love that thing, but it wasn’t a big part of my life. Like it wasn’t by my bed. I didn’t check it first thing in the morning. It wasn’t like that when we first got phones.

There was nothing else to check, right? There certainly wasn’t any social media or you know, even the news or anything on the phone. It was just text messaging and because text messaging wasn’t that prevalent yet, you didn’t feel the need to like, look at your phone all the time.

I do remember playing the stupid worm game on my phone, like sitting in bed and like the inch worm thing would like, move around, and I remember wasting some time doing that, but that kind of felt like a game, like in the way that we waste time playing games. Every culture does that. 

I remember playing solitaire by myself in my room, you know? So that didn’t feel like it was really intrusive in my life, but I’m old enough to remember those years where it just, I wasn’t a slave to my phone. And then the phone just kept getting better and better and more and more interesting and more and more fun.

And all of a sudden, you know, most of us, our phone will tell us that we are on the phone for six to eight hours a day. And we see those reports. It’s like you use your phone for five hours and you know, 43 minutes. This, you know, on average per day, which just seems like a staggering amount of time. 

But it’s easy to do. It’s easy to open those apps and to check things and to linger on the apps. And then for me, the biggest time sink was audio books, because it counts that, like as if you’re looking at your phone and you’re not really looking at your phone when you’re listening to audio books, but that time is still kind of ticking.

And I remember I used to explain that one away to myself, like, oh, but reading is good. But I will tell you, since I. Have really cleaned up the amount of information that’s going into my ears and into my eyeballs. I realize that even that was not great. It was too much.

And so I really wanna encourage you. To have a come to Jesus moment about, probably your phone. I mean, some of you it might be an iPad or a laptop. For me, it was really always my phone. I didn’t struggle as much with those other things, devices, but maybe for some of you it’s different devices.

And just to see how really, really messed up it is the way that we use them. Like just right now, when you think about a mom waking up and lighting a cigarette next to her bed. And smoking a cigarette with her coffee and smoking a cigarette while breastfeeding her baby and smoking a cigarette while walking in the grocery store.

Like I want you to, in your brain, it is so clearly toxic and wrong, and I want us to begin to think about the phones like that, where like, you reach for it and then you’re like, Ooh, gross. No, I don’t do that. I don’t want my kids to see that. 

And you’re just gonna have to go first because culturally it’s everywhere. Everyone’s doing it. And it’s just like, it’s like, you know that there were hippie crunchy moms in the eighties who were like telling their kids, smoking is bad and you shouldn’t be smoking.

And their kids were like, what are you talking about mom? Everyone does it. What’s wrong with you? And she just knew. She was like, no, don’t do it. And they had a smoke free home and she was brave enough when her friends came over to say, you can’t smoke in my house. I want us to be like the revolutionary moms who say, we are not gonna do this phone thing anymore.

And listen, I loved my phone, I loved all the things. I love information, but it’s just, I’m telling you, it’s so damaging and it is keeping you from living the life that you want. And we’re gonna find out in 20 years how bad it was, and then our kids will. Be better about it and then their kids are gonna be even better about it, and we just have to stand up and say, no, we’re not allowing this to happen.

So I’ve created a new program called Screenless with St. Augustine. I’m just having such a love affair with him right now. He’s so wonderful. And I just love him so much because he was so naughty and he was just like, can I just be naughty for a little bit longer though? Please. Like, it’s so yummy. Please, I’m not ready. Like I’m not ready to be priest. 

And I just really appreciate how human he was and what a great thinker he was. You know, he ended up giving us some of the most beautiful writings that we have, but he just, like, went kicking and screaming, right? Like I just picture the Lord dragging him through the streets, like not physically, but really, he was just like dragged him through his twenties.

Like, come on, let it go. Augustine just like let it go. And so he, to me, is just like the perfect saint to hold our hearts and to hold our hands while we give up the screens. So I’ve made this program, we’re gonna do it in the Catholic mom com community, so I want you to come join us for that. We start the last week of April, and you can either choose to go cold Turkey.

Or you can choose to wind down gently for six weeks. To me, that really is just a personality preference. Okay. I am cold Turkey girl. I always have been, I’ve done that with like food or anything. I’m just kind of an all or nothing. I really, it’s just way better for me to just like not have access to things.

So I for sure went cold Turkey, but I think it’s just a perfectly fine strategy to wind down gently for six weeks. And if you don’t choose to come join us, just just Google something or AI it and come up with your own rules. I just made up rules for how we were gonna give up these screens and we’re gonna do it.

So I have a 40 day fast, which is the cold Turkey one, and then a six week wind down, which is almost the same amount of time, but just like you’re basically just giving up a couple things every week and kind of weaning yourself off of it. And then we’re leaning on prayer and we are really charging up in our brains how very damaging it is.

You’ve gotta create a very, very painful story, and you’ve done that with cigarettes, which is why nobody can get you to do cigarettes, and I want you to do that with your phone. And then we wanna really charge up. The rewards of doing this, of living your life, of connecting with the people around you, of just appreciating the beauty of what’s around you.

I see so many more things now, which is not surprising, but it’s more delightful than I thought it was going to be, to just like live my life in the world and not be looking at my phone. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t leverage technology. I still have a job and I still work, and I still sit at my computer and I research things.

So I’m not using screens at all, but it’s just that mindless touching of the phone all the time, 50 times a day. That is what I wanna clean up. So that when you’re using technology, it’s really, really intentional and you sit down and you are looking up something and it’s a time constrained activity and, and you’re using it. I love technology. But you’re not a slave to it. 

So we’re gonna do it all together as a community, and then I’ll do coaching calls to support you. And the coaching calls are really gonna involve just your unique challenges of why you think you need your phone. Your brain’s gonna kick and scream and be like, no, but you really need it. You need to check it more than other people, or whatever the reasons are. 

Or I think a lot of us, what’s gonna come up for us is how lonely we are and how isolated we are and how bored we are. And the phone was really scratching that itch. And, without the phone, our brains are gonna go, well now what do we do? And we’ve gotta answer that. 

And that’s why I wanted to do it. Together. This is probably the only time we’re gonna do it live together in the community. It’ll just be an evergreen course that people can take any time. But I wanted to do it live so that we could do that coaching together and I could help hold people’s hearts through the process.

And I have a really good handle on it. Now. I’ve been doing this, you know, for months, let’s see, November, December, January, February, March. Yeah. So I’m coming up on five full months of having taken all these things off my phone, and I slipped a few times. I don’t even know that that’s the way that I wanna say it.

It’s more that there were life circumstances where I had to put YouTube back on my phone. For some reason I was with the kids and, and we needed to look something up. And I was fine with that, and we did what we had to do, but then I left it on my phone and I remember looking at it for the few days after that.

And that’s when I was looking at YouTube shorts, which I had never looked at before. But man, it was so fast how much my brain wanted to go back to that short form content where you just swipe and swipe and swipe, and it’s so entertaining and it’s so interesting. And it’s like politics and puppy dogs and business, right? For me, that’s what I see.

And it’s so engaging and I caught myself and was like, whoa. I couldn’t believe how fast that happened. And I took it off my phone again, and then it happened again when I put Twitter on my phone. Actually, we decided to create a Twitter account for our business. And so I had to put it on my phone to like, authorize something or something. 

And I had never really looked at Twitter. That has not been my. You know, social media app du jour for me. And, but I was looking at it and it was so awesome. I was, it was so interesting and fun and I started scrolling on that pretty quickly and it was a couple days and then I was like, Ooh, gotta take that off. So I had to take that off again.

So it hasn’t been a total of straight lines for me, but. Oh man, I feel so free. I feel so good. I feel almost like, euphoric a little bit, and I just wanna like convert everyone. I’m just in this place where I’m like, I’m gonna sell everyone on not using their phone.

And not having to buy your bed. Waking up to an alarm clock, just, I’m really not needing to check your email. I have a whole class on email. Like you just don’t need to be checking your email as much as you are, I promise. 

And in this program I also have a bonus class on husbands and screens. Kids and screens, extended family, like those of you that have text messaging groups and you feel like everyone actually does expect you to respond quickly. We talk about that. We talk about news and not looking at the news anymore. I have a whole class on that. 

And then I talked to you about how your brain works and how habit loops are created, and then how the thoughts in your mind create the feelings in your body. Which is the model. So I’m gonna teach you about habit loops in the model, and those two things are how we’re actually going to create what we’re gonna be doing instead. ’cause you can’t just leave a void. 

So I’m just going to say it from the rooftops. You’ve gotta get off your phone. You have to do this for your children. You have to do this for your brain. You are gonna be held accountable to the Lord about how you spent your time. 

And I am just like, mortified by how I’ve spent my time on that phone for the last 10 years and I just will not live like that anymore and I’m just gonna take everybody who wants to go with me. And we’re just gonna get off our phones and we’re gonna live our real lives. We’re gonna use technology in pockets. I think it’s amazing and wonderful, and I’m loving ai. I am sure I’ll do a podcast about that. I’m not scared of that. 

But, ooh, that phone, get it outta your hand. Get it out of the hours and hours of touching it and, and being addicted to it. And let’s go back to, you know, early two thousand where we had, we had phones, but they just didn’t, we weren’t obsessed with them. 

So. Go to Catholicmomcalm.com/screenless. That’s what the program is called, screen Less. You’re gonna love the Augustine quotes. I thread them throughout the whole program. It’s so beautiful. He’s so great 

And I think he’s just the perfect saint to kind of like hold our hand through this process because he had to do it himself. He had to be in the world and do all the things, and then he just saw that even though everyone was, was doing it, whatever the doing it thing means that he was going to not participate.

And we need to do that. We need to opt out of this tech culture in the way that it’s making us slaves all throughout the day and making us zombies. We’re just not gonna live like that anymore. 

And I believe in you. I believe that you can do this. I believe that it’s worth it. And I believe that 20 years from now, you will think of it like smoking and you’ll be like, oh, I can’t believe we did that.

And of course I can believe how it happened. It’s the dopamine is so exciting and we’re all doing it, and it’s so fun. I totally get how we got there, but we’re just not gonna stay there. It’s unacceptable. 

So if you would like to come join me in Screenless, The link will be in the show notes for sure, but then also you can just go to catholicmomcalm.com/screenless. And if you’re listening to this outside of, you know, the end of April, 2025, that program is available still. 

It’s, I made it so that it would be a standalone program that anybody could go through at any time, but I wanna go through it live with you guys for six weeks, just because I think it’d be really fun and I wanna cheer you on and I believe in you. And I think this work is worth doing. 

All right, my friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.