How to spend 1,000 hours away from your phone
How your phone blocks you from “wanting what you want,” how Hannah spent 1,000 hours away from her phone in 1 year, and how to exchange “why me?” with “who for? when experiencing trials.
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[0:00:05] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians? Those of us who aren't pastors, or religious professionals, but who work as speech writers, diesel mechanics, and loan officers. That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to my friend, Hannah Brencher. She's a TED speaker and Christian author whose work I've loved for years, and wrote about in my first book, Called to Create.
Hannah and I recently sat down to discuss why your phone blocks you from wanting what you want at work and at home. We talked about how Hannah spent a thousand hours away from her phone in just one year. We also talked about how we can exchange this "why me” attitude towards suffering to a “who for” mentality that enters into the pain of others. Please enjoy this episode with my friend, Hannah Brencher.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:04] JR: How in the world have I not had Hannah Brencher on the podcast yet? Hannah Brencher, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:11] HB: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I've been waiting for this conversation. It’s going to be so fun.
[0:01:15] JR: Let's go. I wrote about you in my first book Called to Create, shortly after you started leaving random love letters all around Manhattan. For our listeners who don't know that story, what the heck was this all about?
[0:01:29] HB: Yeah. Well, also I get emails all the time from people that come across my name in your book.
[0:01:33] JR: Really? I love it. That's amazing.
[0:01:36] HB: Yeah. It's a crazy story, but when I graduated from college, I moved to New York City, which was always my big dream. At the time, I was not a Christian at all. I had grown up knowing about it, but was really trying to figure out where I was in the world and what my place was in the world. I always thought like, you know what? I think God is real, but I also don't know if God has given me a purpose. I really need to believe that I'm meant for something more than this. When I got to New York City, I very quickly started dealing with depression. But at the time, 10 years ago, we were not talking about depression.
As a way of coping, I started writing letters, similar to letters that my mom had written me all throughout childhood. I wrote them to people I would see on the subways, or in cafes, and I would then leave the letters behind for somebody else to find. It was like, I was living in my own romcom, but without the romance part. It just was like, cathartic.
[0:02:36] JR: This is bringing to mind creepy Taylor Swift lyrics. I look through people's windows. It's that vibe. It's that vibe. I like it. I respect it.
[0:02:46] HB: Me years ago, I romanticized everything in life. I naturally romanticized depression. I was like, I'm just a lonely girl, leaving love letters around the city that I dreamed of moving to. Had no idea.
[0:02:58] JR: Such a tortured artist. Yeah.
[0:03:00] HB: Such a tortured artist. Who let me out of the house? I don't know. What was crazy was that I ended up blogging about it. I had a blog at the time. I said like, I'm writing these letters. If you need a letter for whatever reason, I'll write to you, thinking I'm going to write to my mom and two other people. That post ended up going viral. I spent the next year of my life writing over 400 letters to strangers all over the world before starting the organization I ran today, which is The World Needs More Love Letters.
Yeah, it was in that that I really felt I actually met God for the first time and felt it was Him drawing back the curtain, being like, “You want to have a purpose?” And like, “I need you to see that you are not the only lonely one here. My children are lonely. They are disconnected. They need encouragement. That is what I have wired you to do.”
[0:03:59] JR: My pastor said something a few weeks ago that has really stuck with me. He's preaching on 2nd Corinthians, and to make the point that when we encounter suffering, we encounter depression, anxiety, whatever it is, our natural inclination is to ask why me? When instead, we should be asking who for, right? Based on this pain I'm feeling, who in the world is feeling that similar pain that I could serve? It sounds like, that's what you were doing with these love letters, right?
[0:04:31] HB: Absolutely. I didn't know it at the time. But when I look back now, I'm like, oh, my gosh, there was such a ripple effect from just that small gesture. I think that that was the biggest takeaway for me is at the time, I was working at the United Nations, every day in these meetings about these huge global issues, climate change, girls' education, the hunger crisis. I thought in my mind, in order to do something that matters, it has to be big on this level. Here I am over here writing and mailing letters. I remember everybody kept bringing it up. Everybody wanted to talk more about the love letters. I was over here not even seeing the significance of it. I was like, “I'm just writing notes. I'm just doing something my mom has done for me, my whole entire life. I don't think it really matters that much.” Now, we have a global movement of thousands and thousands of people all over the world, because of this one love letter.
[0:05:30] JR: I love it. It's such a beautiful parable of how God can use the seemingly insignificant, to do the massively significant, because what's significant about the insignificant is that it's attached to the kingdom of God, right? If you are not following Jesus, your work is small, insignificant, in vain. If it is for Christ and for his glory, for his kingdom, he can magnify that to great effect.
All right, so bring us up to speed. Give us the two-minute version of the story from those initial love letters in New York to the work you're doing now 10 years later. You have this organization, The World Needs More Love Letters. Tell us about that.
[0:06:05] HB: One of the things that stuck out to me when I was writing that initial 400 letters is that I loved when somebody would reach out and they would request a letter on behalf of somebody else. That felt really significant and special to me. When I was in college, I would go on these retreats and again, I was not a Christian, and I was at a Catholic college, but I was like, give me all these retreats. Give me all these things. I want to know what's here. We would have this thing at the end of the retreats, where they have reached out to friends and family members and people to write us letters to gift to us at the end of the retreat.
I remember always thinking, this is so beautiful, but could we do this with strangers? Could we do this for somebody who has no idea that all of these people around the world are rallying for them? That's what we call a love letter bundle. If you go on to the website and get involved, it's absolutely free, we have people nominate friends, family members. We like to say, it's probably the stories that are not going to go viral tomorrow. Then we pick five or six of them that we put up online and you get a chance to hand-write a letter, mail it to a larger bundle of hundreds of letters showing up for somebody on a day when they're probably not expecting anybody to see them. It's pretty crazy and pretty cool. It has grown and evolved with me over time and in different seasons. It means something to me in different seasons.
[0:07:36] JR: Why do you think God delights in that work?
[0:07:38] HB: I really think the most powerful thing is our presence, in 2025, especially. It's like, there's nothing more present than sitting down and writing a letter to somebody that's uninterrupted. There's no robot on the other side of it. You have to use your handwriting, which a lot of people feel very vulnerable about. That to me is the definition of presence. That was the thing for me. It was like, I'll get these, I'll do interviews or magazine articles and they'll call me a stationary maven, or a stamp aficionado. I'm like, “I don't know a thing about stationery or stamps. I really don't.”
[0:08:12] JR: Could not care less about the paper.
[0:08:14] HB: Yeah. Could not care less about the – not that I don't care about the art form, but to me, it always symbolized something bigger. It symbolized presence. I was always hyper-aware in this tech world that we were becoming less and less present. Whenever, like, now, as I read the Bible, I am constantly seeing, oh, the biggest thing about God is his presence, is that he never leaves us, is that he's always with us. If we are made in the likeness and the image of God, then that must mean that our presence holds power as well.
Yet, I feel like, in our day and age, it is the one thing that is lacking from a lot of our relationships, from our friendships, from our relationships with our kids, it's like, people don't know how to be present anymore.
[0:08:58] JR: Yeah. Yeah, it's good. It's good. I was on a plane a couple of months ago. I was writing a bunch of handwritten letters, which for the record, I don't do a lot. I do it in batches, like twice a year, but –
[0:09:11] HB: It's not even that fun. I'm going to be honest. It's the worst.
[0:09:15] JR: It's the worst. It’s the worst. But that's what makes it special. My buddy who was sitting next to me, he's like, “Oh, man. Wow. You're really going after it with these letters.” I was thinking, I was like, you know what? It's a grand gesture, because –
[0:09:26] HB: It is a grand gesture.
[0:09:27] JR: — the people receiving these letters know how much I hate using these hands for anything other than typing, right? City hands right here. It's a great gesture to them. But I took the time. It wasn't ChatGPT generated. This is my hand on this paper writing this thing. It's my presence. It's the gift of my presence for this. However long it took me to write this note, I was thinking singularly about you. It's a good segue. I love the theme of presence throughout your career, from these love letters to this new book, which I've thoroughly enjoyed what I've read of The Unplugged Hours. All right. What is this thing? What is this book? How did it come about? If I could tack on a third question as any annoying podcast host will do to his guests, why is it particularly relevant to the Christian professionals listening to this episode?
[0:10:22] HB: Okay. I'm going to try to remember these three questions.
[0:10:24] JR: Great. You won't, so I'll remind you. Don't worry.
[0:10:27] HB: I think I'm starting to realize, we write books about the things we need to learn ourselves.
[0:10:33] JR: Yes. 100%.
[0:10:33] HB: I think God is maybe getting the memo to me of your lifelong gift, but also, the thing you have to work really hard at, is presence. I think our gifts can also be the things that we're not natural in, right? For me, this has been the thread of my career. It's like, that's the thing that roots it all together is presence and the power of our presence. I had been running more love letters, running my own business, being a girl boss, whatever you want to say, in a pandemic, then also being a mom, wearing all the hats. Truth be told, I was absolutely exhausted. But if you don't let people know that, and if you just look like you're doing well on the surface, no one asks questions. Or just like, “How do you do it?”
I remember coming across a scripture that I had read dozens of times, where Jesus says, “I came that you may have life and have it abundantly.” I literally wrote it in my journal. It wrote, “Is this the abundant life?” Is this the, like when you dig into the word, it's exceedingly more, above and beyond. I was looking around and saying like, my life is very good. It is. it didn't mean that my life was not abundant. But I wasn't looking at it through an abundance perspective. I was stressed and overwhelmed and exhausted and overstimulated.
When I looked at the root of it, what was not working over and over again, it was the phone, it was the connectivity, it was the inability to shut off and be where my feet are. It's funny because I meet a lot of people that struggle with presence for a number of reasons. The number one reason that I hear from people is I don't know how to be present, because I'm afraid if I get off my phone, I'm going to miss something and I can't miss something. That's what a lot of people say.
For me, maybe it's the tortured artist in me, I struggled to be present, because the moment that I was present in a moment and loved a moment, I would be hit with all of these thoughts of like, “And this will end, and this doesn't last.” That felt very hard for me to grapple with. You just go into the grocery store having a sweet moment with your daughter and when you're present in it, you're like, “This ends and you die.”
[0:12:51] JR: Sorry, we're going to come back to the book a sec. Have you read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman?
[0:12:54] HB: I love it. I love it. I love it.
[0:12:57] JR: I love hate it. We'll give him four stars here on the Mere Christians Podcast. There's some things I take issue, but mostly love it.
[0:13:01] HB: I give you five, Oliver.
[0:13:03] JR: Five, five. Oliver wrote about me in the New York Times positively. Oliver, I take that back. Five stars, five stars. I think he nails this. I think he nails this because he talks about how like, all right, we all know it's a problem to be distracted at work, distracted at home and we could put all these filters in place, put all these rules in place, but at the end of the day, you're still distracted by this overwhelming sense of finitude. I'm going to die. That's why we can't be bored.
It's Aaron Sorkin's writing A Few Good Men. We can't handle the truth. If we sat and we're bored with the truth of our finitude, we can't handle it, unless, unless we have Christ and hope in the resurrection, right? That's the bridge that it was a little too far for Oliver to go to. I'm like, oh, my gosh, but the cross is the answer to all this. It sounds like, that's what you were feeling. You can't be present in these glorious moments, because you know at some point, it's all going away.
[0:14:01] HB: Yes. I still, I have the hope of Christ, but it doesn't – as a filler, it still makes me really sad.
[0:14:08] JR: 100%.
[0:14:08] HB: When I look at my parents and be like, “I don't know how many years I have left with you.” I'll look at my daughter and be like, “You don't fit in these shoes anymore.” Whoever else is just going to jump on social media and move on with their day. I'm over here weeping, having an existential crisis.
[0:14:22] JR: That's proper.
[0:14:23] HB: Yeah. Proper. Exactly.
[0:14:24] JR: We should lament over death. Death is the enemy, right? Okay. All right. Sorry, I took us down a rabbit trail. You identify the phone as the source. What did you do?
[0:14:32] HB: Yeah. As a source. I remember it so clearly. It was my birthday. I was sitting in a quiet time. I treat my birthday as a second new year. Like, what can we revamp over the next 365 days? I heard so clearly and so audibly in my spirit, “Turn off your phone.” I knew in that moment, that was not like, turn off your phone once. It was like, “This is what we're going to do this whole year. It seems small. It seems trivial, but you are physically turning that phone off.” Jordan, you are a fellow discipline junkie. You can't manage what you don't measure.
Immediately, I went and I made a tracker for myself. I said, “What does it look for me to learn to strike a balance with my tech this year?” Because I'm still on social media. It's how I do my career. I actually do like it. Can I strike a balance? Because all the books that I had read on tech were very much all or nothing. It was digital minimalism, or it's not a problem, or just let your whole life get sucked away. I was like, there has to be a middle ground. Maybe there isn't, but I'm willing to try to figure it out.
I created a 1,000-hour tracker and then hour by hour, I just started getting present with my life. Again, it's the one love letter. It's the one hour. It's the small thing on repeat that I can sit here today and be like, by far the most powerful discipline that I have ever cultivated in my faith, in my life, in my career. The discipline of unplugging has done so much for me, because I think it's clearing out the noise and getting back to the voice of God that I'm actually supposed to be following on a daily basis.
[0:16:19] JR: It's good. It's good. Those are strong words. I'm not surprised to hear that. I would credit this as one of the top habits of my entire life. All right, so you said a 1,000 hours with my phone off, or unplugged. We'll define unplugged here in a second. For a year, in a year, right? That was the deadline. How quickly did you hit the goal?
[0:16:38] HB: I went right up to it.
[0:16:41] JR: Right up to the finish line.
[0:16:43] HB: Right up to the finish line, literally back in the same place that I was a year before, I knew I was going to hit it. Yeah. I think at the beginning was that initial momentum and then anybody that follows a long-term goal, something more than 90 days, the momentum wears off. There were some months where I was like, “I really got to ramp it up if I want to hit this goal.” It's interesting because I'm very much a research-based person. I am like, let's, oh, that habit, that routine, that work, that didn't work. I really felt the spirit of God being like, “We're not doing that this year. That's not what you're doing. You're not even doing this in the hopes that you could write a book. That's not what we're doing. You just need to learn to be present in daily life and just know that that moment is enough, even if you don't navel-gaze it. Even if you don't write a piece of writing.” To me, I'm like, that's the highest currency that we can write about.
[0:17:35] JR: Yeah, for sure. For sure.
[0:17:37] HB: It's like, that wasn't what that year was about. That year was about my soul.
[0:17:40] JR: Yeah. It's good. Quickly define for us what you mean by unplugged. Do you mean your phone was on airplane mode for a thousand hours?
[0:17:50] HB: Combination, okay, because a lot of people don't want to want to turn off their phone, and I get that. There's a lot of people that also are not in a position where they can turn off their phone. What I did was if my whole entire family was with me, it was the end of the day, or it was me and Novi and we were at the house and my husband was at work, those would be times when I would turn off the phone. I wouldn't turn it off, or ghost for days or anything, just turn it off for an hour, turn it off for two hours.
There's some freedom and release from just being able to say, “I can turn this thing off and that was enough.” But when my daughter was at preschool and I needed to get work done and I needed to have my phone available, I got a small tin box for my Kia and I would just put my phone into the box and then I would take it out when I needed to take it out. Whether it's turning the phone off, it's getting a box. I saw a great video weeks ago about somebody who builds a tiny little phone booth in their office and then they started keeping the phone there, like a landline. You know what it means to be off your phone and undistracted. And so don’t let the “But I can't turn off my phone,” be the thing that keeps you from grappling with presence.
[0:19:10] JR: It's good. It's good. I like it. All right, so I know our listeners are excited to hear how you did this. We'll talk about that in a minute. Before we do, I want to spend a few minutes about why our addiction to our phones is so problematic. Thanks to the work of Cal Newport, John Haidt. I think most people understand by now that our phones are making us more anxious, right? Duh, we get it. Beyond creating anxiety, Hannah, how is our addiction to our phones keeping us from doing our most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others? What's the connection there?
[0:19:44] HB: I'll probably get emotional talking about this. I always do. This is one of the things where it's like, when I started unplugging, I thought, “I'm going to be a more productive person. I'm going to get more done because I'll be undistracted. I'm going to be a more present mom.” Those were my surface-level things. Then it's funny because I hit the thousand hours and then continued to cultivate the discipline. I feel like, the thousand hours was the foundation for what I was going to learn beyond the thousand hours. For me, one of the things that started coming off in layers that I realized was driven by the phone, was that so long as I'd had a smartphone, I'd had access to social media. I grew up in an age where you share everything on social media, good, bad, ugly, all of that. I learned to reign it in eventually.
What I didn't realize was that when you get so wired to share, there's no way that the perceptions and the things that you think about your work, your life, your kids, your relationship, are not affected by the opinions of other people. 8. I've grown. I've changed. I've developed. I've grown up. But that girl, that girl was a visionary. She was a dreamer. She was a creative. She wanted to write novels. She didn't care what people told her was like, “Oh, that work, you should go and do that thing.”
What I realized is that I just started moving with whatever somebody told me was good. It got me to destinations that have been beautiful and where God has covered me. It's almost like God has been pulling me back to who were you before the noise got in? That's who you're wired to be. That's who I made you to be. I feel more creative in my daily life that I felt in a decade.
That's just the side thing. What I realized was that I had a friend who struggled with opioid addiction for many years. In sharing his sobriety with me and telling you the story, he said something that was so profound that I've never forgotten, where he said, “It was one thing to stop using the drugs. It took me years to undo the behaviors that I had learned, because of the drugs.” I think that's what's happening with our phones. I think it's a very real addiction. It's a socially acceptable one, but we have built behaviors, because of our phones. We don't even realize that those behaviors are problematic, whether that is the lack of boundaries, the people pleasing, the doing things out in the open in public, even though the Bible is telling us, go and cultivate the secret place.
Layer by layer, I started to realize these are all behaviors that I've cultivated because of a mindset that I always have to be on it. Always have to be producing. This is what makes me valuable and worthwhile. I'm valuable and worthwhile because I'm a child of God. If I don't see that and believe that in my work, in my life, in my motherhood, then that's a problem that I need to pay attention to.
[0:23:02] JR: Yeah. As you know, I wrote a whole chapter in redeeming your time called Dissent from the Kingdom of the Noise.
[0:23:06] HB: Such a good book. I just reread it a few months ago.
[0:23:09] JR: Yeah, you told me. Yeah. By the way, man, that's one of the greatest compliments you can receive as an author is when another author you respect write you a long email, lik you did to me about a book. That’s it. That's it.
[0:23:23] HB: I was like, man, I revisited a bunch. I pull it off the shelf all the time.
[0:23:28] JR: In this chapter, by the way, I only had you on here to say that. Thank you. We can end the episode now. Thank you for boosting my ego. I've been feeling really bad about myself.
[0:23:36] HB: I only emailed you that, so that you would get me on the podcast.
[0:23:41] JR: I share this chapter a bunch of reasons, why our addiction to noise generally and phones and social media specifically block us from doing our best work for God's glory and the good of others. One, it obviously distracts us from doing deep work, right? Just the notifications. Two, it blocks our ability to be creative, because boredom is a prerequisite for creativity. It's what you were just saying. Three, most importantly, it blocks our ability to listen to the voice of God. There's been two more reasons why I think this is so dangerous that I've been pondering since I wrote the book. I just want to pile on for a minute and get your take on this.
One, the times when I am on my device most, I find that it limits my vision for what God can do through my work because the things I see on my phone are so overwhelmingly negative that it inevitably leads to this pessimistic view about the world and what I can accomplish in it. The other one, speaking of Oliver Burkeman, came straight from him in Four Thousand Weeks, I think our phones in general, and social media specifically block us from wanting what we want, right? He said, “It's not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It's that they change how we're defining important matters in the first place. They sabotage our capacity to want what we want to want.”
Hannah, have you found that to be true? Did you find that in these thousand hours away, you are more free to get clear on your desires, because a bunch of other people weren't telling you what to desire?
[0:25:18] HB: Oh, 1,000%. 1,000%. There's a story that I write about in the book. My mom is the most amazing human in the world. She is. What I want is to be more like her. I will never forget, I was visiting her with my daughter for her birthday and it was her birthday, and literally, every couple minutes, it felt like, somebody was showing up at the door with a gift, or flowers, or somebody brought a cake, somebody went to Whole Foods, got a bunch of goodies for her. I'm over here being like, this is the wildest thing I've ever seen.
I'm like, “Mom, all these people are coming to the door for you.” She's like, “Yeah, that's what we do.” I'm like, “No, no, no. That's not what we do. Maybe you, but me, we Venmo, we DoorDash.” Post-pandemic, we're not going to the door.
[0:26:15] JR: That's right. That's right.
[0:26:16] HB: I mean, I remember, and it was because I was paying attention, I wasn't distracted, this thing inside of me that was like, this is the most important thing that we're going to do this year. We're going to go home and we are going to make a plan for how to go to the door for our friends. I carved out a tradition that on Thursdays, me and my daughter, we would go to Target. We would go to a store. We'd go wherever. We'd grab something, make a care package for somebody that we loved, and then we would go to the door. It became the most life-giving routine in my whole life. That was one of those things where it's like, if I'm not paying attention, I don't even know that I want that.
It's funny because this is actually happening right now in my business, because we're doing a lot of like, okay, let's clean up this system, let's tweak this over here, this and that. Naturally, I get ahead of myself. I'm like, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, and I have to step back and be like, no, I need to go and sit in the presence of God, and he's going to tell me the next step. Literally, last week, he was like, “I want you to send more flowers this year than you have ever sent through your business.” Flowers, that's how you know it's from God, right?
[0:27:36] JR: Yeah. Right.
[0:27:37] HB: I told my assistant, I said, sign up for every flower email that you can. Make a flower folder. We are sending people flowers this year. I don't know why, but I want to be obedient.
[0:27:48] JR: All the flowers.
[0:27:49] HB: All the flowers. I started going through the calendar, marking dates of significance to people I work with, people in my life, people, when they lost a baby, when they had that anniversary. When my friend told me, this is what she loved about her mother at Christmas time, and she's not with her anymore. I was like, this is the most important thing that we will do is we will recognize and we will remember in our business this year. And again, when you start listening, and this is how you know it's the presence of God, it's not efficient. It's not really the thing that's – every once in a while, he'll give me an efficient system, but he cares about the way in which we love each other and the way in which we are kingdom-minded in the businesses that we're building.
All that to say, I feel really fulfilled in the business that I'm building right now, because it's not all about growing, and it's not all about finances. It's actually about giving and generosity. That was the thing that really switched for me in The Unplugged Hours was like, I'm not here online to build a business so that people can give me something. I want to give them everything that I have and believe that God is carrying me and covering me and providing for me. That was huge for me, because I grew up with a scarcity mindset. If you were to ask me what I thought about God growing up, I lived with the fear that there was never going to be enough for me, that I wouldn't belong at the table, that I would always get the crumbs. The fact that I'm changing that about my mindset and my business is huge. That probably didn't answer the question. I don't even know what the question was.
[0:29:26] JR: I think it does. I mean, my question was, have you found that the unplugged hours are allowing you to get clear on desires? I think what you're saying is yes, and not only that, but God has used the time away from your device to make your desires more aligned with him, rather than Mark Zuckerberg's, right?
[0:29:48] HB: That goes back to what you were saying about when you step onto social media, you are stepping into a landscape where they know you. They know you better than you think they even know you. Read The Power of Habit and the ways in which we have become the products for companies. I think what's important to note is that the second you step into these landscapes, everybody's coming at you with what you need to do better. Here's how you need to lose weight. Here's how you need to make $100,000. Here's this. Here's that. When we are overloaded with that much information, it actually leads us to a place where we do nothing at all.
I think that that's the most important thing about scaling back, doesn't mean that the experts aren't great, but so take something, run with it. When you've implemented it, come back for something else, because the amount of the information that's out there, I think is making us people that just we lurk and we spectate it and we confuse it with actual action.
[0:30:52] JR: It's good. It's really good. All right, let's get practical. Cause a lot of people are listening like, “Hannah, I would love to spend a thousand hours away from my phone. I know it's going to make me more productive at work. I know it's going to make me a more loving person. How did you do it?” And take as much time as you want to unpack this. I want this to be as practical as possible for our listeners.
[0:31:12] HB: I say, the first and most important thing for unplugging is you need to have a way to measure it. Like we said, it's worth repeating, you can't manage what you don't measure. For some people, that might be screen time. I've only ever felt shame with screen time and I am not allowing shame to get into this story, because yeah. For me, that's a paper tracker. There are free trackers online on my website. There's a hundred-hour tracker. If you don't want to do the thousand hours. Yeah. The hundred hours can be about a month, but I also say to people too, it's not about when you finish. It's that you finish. That is big.
That's something that pre-unplugged Hannah did not know. She thought, “You will be worthwhile if you hit this goal.” Then when I hit hour 800 something, I was like, okay, we didn't finish this challenge, would you be proud? Would you feel this was enough? I had to reckon with that part of me that was like, I'm only wired to feel proud if I hit the goal. All that to say, I say, download a tracker, make yourself a tracker, whatever you want to do, but start with a quantity, whether that's one hour, whether it's 15 minutes, if you feel an hour is too much, then start with 15 minutes. 15 minutes can be really powerful. The other thing that I will say is that I don't necessarily recommend going into unplugging, not knowing what you're going to do with that time at first.
[0:32:36] JR: Yes, this is good. This is good.
[0:32:38] HB: You can get to a place where you are so okay with being present that you float from task to task. But at the beginning, I needed to know what I was doing. I've seen this happen with a lot of people. Like, my husband who started tracking his unplugged hours, he was like, “I didn't know what to do. So, I just turn my phone back on.” It's realizing that these phones have hardwired us to believe that we have to be doing something at all times. I would say, think about something that you've wanted to do for so long. You've talked about doing it. Whether it was making banana bread, whether it was reading one of the 5,000 books that you have, that are sitting on your shelf, that you keep buying the books, but you're not reading them.
[0:33:23] JR: Which by the way, thanks for buying, but we really would love for you to read books.
[0:33:25] HB: Yeah, read it.
[0:33:26] JR: That's why we wrote them.
[0:33:27] HB: Redeem your time.
[0:33:28] JR: Come on.
[0:33:29] HB: I would say, pick the thing, turn off the phone, or put the phone away, go and do that thing, and then come back. It's all going to be there. You will have missed nothing, but you will have gained something. I saw this happen with a friend of mine and she told me. She was like, “I keep telling myself I'm waiting until the new year to turn off my phone, but I need to start now. I need to start with honesty that keep the phone in my hand at all times to convince myself I'm not deeply lonely.” I was like, “Ooh, okay. Thanks for your honesty. What do you want to do with your first unplugged hour?” She like, “I want to declutter my closet. I wanted to do it forever.” That's what she did. She turned off the phone. She went. She decluttered the closet. She came back and she was like, “That was amazing.”
Pick the thing you want to do. If you don't know the thing you want to do, then I would say, and this is tough, because it's like, turn off your phone, no. But spend some time thinking about it. If you literally don't know the person that you are actively trying to become, I would say, that's the thing you need to start journaling about. It’s like, who does God want you to be? What kind of habits and rhythms and routines does that person cultivate? Then, start to do those things. Because it's like, the more you do those things, the more you are becoming that person.
Another tip that I would say is get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, because once the honeymoon period wears off, you are going to start to understand why you have covered up your life with so much noise. You are going to realize that it is very uncomfortable to sit with your feelings. Me 10 years ago, I don't think I thought that I could be undistracted, because I was literally scared to be in my own mind. If somebody with depression and anxiety, I'm like, I need to be doing something, because I don't want to think.
Now, I'm over here and I still deal with depression, but I like being in my mind. I can sit for long periods of time in stillness, but it starts with those small increments and realizing that just because it's uncomfortable, just because it comes with resistance, doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. That's probably actually a sign that you should do it more. You should pay attention. I'm trying to think of more practical things, but it really just starts with who is the person you want to be? Is the phone keeping you from being that person? Then also this, this is important, I think for parents, because I think that we think when we want to be present with our kids, that means we need to get down on the ground and play with them for four hours, and that will be present.
What I've learned is that it's not that my daughter wants four hours of my time. A lot of times, she just wants me down on her level for a few minutes, for 15 minutes of building a puzzle where I'm right here and I'm undistracted. That can fill her for hours. I'd rather do the 15-minute puzzle, where she has my full attention than to go about my day being with her, but not really with her. The other thing that I would say is whether it's on your tracker or in a notebook that you've bought, get curious about all of this because you are going to learn so much about yourself, it's going to be some mind-blowing things that are going to happen, and it's exciting and it's beautiful and it's not that you're taking the phone away, because you're bad, or because the phone is bad. It's like, you're deciding to say, “You know what? No, I want to be in my life. I want to cultivate presence as hard as it is. I want to have something to show for myself. When I get to the end of my life, I don't want to show a social media grid. I want recipes. I want baby books. I want photographs. I want letters. I want proof that I was here and that I showed up and I went bankrupt for what God had for me.”
[0:37:40] JR: It's really good.
[0:37:41] HB: I didn’t mean to be like, I'm going to be I'm going to look back on my ring and it's going to be like, you tracked the high-intensity interval training.
[0:37:47] JR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. I love that. It's super practical. I heard, number one, download a tracker, which by the way, your website's hannahbrenchercreative.com.
[0:37:57] HB: hannahbrenchercreative, or hannahbrencher.com.
[0:37:59] JR: Great. Okay. Download tracker. Two, know what you're going to do when you're unplugged, right? I hear people all the time like, “How do you make time to read?” I'm like, “I don't consume any social media.” You can read a lot of books, too. Number three, start doing those things. Number four, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, which I love. I would add a fifth, and this is really, this has been an essential habit for me when I want to be off my phone when I'm doing the work of discipling and just hanging out with my kids. I have to get the phone off of my person. It cannot be in my pocket. I'm an addict, so are you. If it's in my pocket, I will check it, because checking my phone and emails is frankly more fun than playing PJ Mask dress up all the time. Yeah.
[0:38:38] HB: When you delete, because here's the thing, when you go and you delete the social media to not get distracted, you will start checking other things. Suddenly, you'll be checking –
[0:38:47] JR: Oh, 100%.
[0:38:48] HB: Stock markets, bank accounts.
[0:38:50] JR: 100%.
[0:38:50] HB: Virtual houses that you've built. It's crazy, this addiction.
[0:38:56] JR: It's insane. I'll share one thing. I think I shared this – I don't think I've shared it on the podcast yet. I've shared it in one of my devotional emails, but one thing that's been particularly helpful to keep me off my phone during the workday and focused on this work, I believe God's call me to do at this laptop, is using a device called Brick to brick those most addicting websites and crack stats, whatever it is on my phone. Have you seen this device?
[0:39:23] HB: I've seen the device. Yeah.
[0:39:25] JR: I am obsessed with it. It's a magnet. It's a Bluetooth-enabled magnet that sits wherever you want. I've got mine in my refrigerator. I tap my phone to it and it blocks all the apps that I don't want to check. I have to physically go back to the Brick to tap my phone again if I want to unlock those apps and –
[0:39:44] HB: That's good. Yeah.
[0:39:45] JR: That's a pretty powerful incentive to not check it. All right, hey, you complete this challenge of a thousand hours, unplugged in a year, I'd love to know what habits have stuck. Within the last whatever timeframe you want, 24 hours, week, whatever, what have your daily, or weekly unplugged habits look like?
[0:40:04] HB: Yeah. I always tell people too, I'm like, I don't know. I have grown so much in this area, but I do feel like, if you open up the floodgates, it all comes back. It all comes back. It's like a discipline that constantly needs to be reined in in different seasons. The tracking has still been the most beneficial thing. It's like, the second that I finished the unplugged hours, I think I was like, okay, I'm good now to just track it in my mind. I realized, I'm a healthier person when I track the unplugged hours, not because I need all the data, though I love the data, but just because the active tracking helps me because the thing is I teach people discipline all day, every day. I'm so passionate about it, especially for women. But I'm an all-or-nothing person. I'm a creative. The moment I'm not tracking the water I need to be drinking, I am the most dehydrated soul you've ever met. That's just it.
The moment I'm not tracking my unplugged hours, I'm like, I could be on my phone watching TikTok, soldier homecoming videos for the rest of the evening. It's just a reality. Sorry. Tracking is a big one. I work by Pomodoro's. It's one of those things where it's like, if there are people, or clients that do need to get to me and they text me, or they email me and I have to keep checking in, I believe in the power of blocking off your time, whether that's 25 minutes, that's a 60-minute, that's a deep work session, those are the ways in which if I have to be on call, in a day that I'm doing more meetings, I can still be focused.
My biggest role is that I have a role of like, you create before you consume. I think that that's a big baseline of as somebody who shows up on social media and creates content, I got to the point where I just was resenting the platforms. I didn't even want to be on them anymore. Yet, I'm like, this is what I do feel God has called me to do. I do feel he's called me to be an encouragement in this space specifically. I have to figure this out. What I did that was surprising was that I reclaimed my writing practice and my writing discipline. I stopped going on social media, thinking that that was going to give me something to post. It never did. I started to reclaim my time for creative brainstorming, for writing on a notepad. I literally do all of my work on yellow notepads. I don't type a first draft. It's all written down here. That's something I started cultivating in the unplugged hours that has stayed with me since.
Then, I think the biggest thing for me, and it's more of a spirit thing, but I feel I'm at the place now where even if I am on my phone, I can hear the spirit whispering. It's always these three words, enough is enough. Enough is enough. That's my call and my reminder to say, “You know what? That's what this phone is taking from me. This belief that what I have in front of me is enough.” I'm always going to think as long as I am letting this thing rule me that there's another thing to buy, there's another thing to email, there's another task to be done. I listened throughout my day to that voice that says, enough is enough. Sometimes it happens at 2 p.m. Sometimes it happens at 4 p.m. Sometimes I'm surprised that I'm like, I have more I want to get done, but I've heard enough is enough.
That's me stepping away, because I think what you will realize when you start to unplug is that it's so much more than the phone. It's how we've wired ourselves to work and create and be in relationship with one another. That stuff is far more than just tracking an unplugged hour or two. It's learning to listen to the spirit of God within us that is leading us and guiding us and telling us like, “Hey, I know you want to do this work project right now, but what I really need you to do is go and make that friend a banana bread.” That's where I want to live. Do I always listen? No, I don't. I didn't make the banana bread that one time that I was supposed to listen. I learned my lesson, and now I listen for the banana bread.
[0:44:41] JR: You listen for banana bread. No, it's really good. I love that enough is enough mantra because that's – I think that is what keeps pulling us to these devices is it's not just the – it's this addiction to feeling needed. It's this addiction to feeling like we can do it all, that we are limitless, right? We have limits. God is the only one who is limitless and infinite, right? Stepping away from that phone is a good way of preaching that as a reminder to myself that if the things on my to-do list, or on his to-do list, I can leave them unfinished. He's going to complete them with or without me.
All right, Hannah, four questions we wrap up every episode with. Number one, Isaiah 65 says, that we will all long enjoy the work of our hands free from the curse of sin on the new earth. I want you to fast forward.
[0:45:30] HB: Okay. Go to the mirror.
[0:45:31] JR: Prices return. No big deal. The new Jerusalem is here.
[0:45:33] HB: My finitude is gone.
[0:45:34] JR: What's that?
[0:45:35] HB: My finitude is gone.
[0:45:36] JR: Exactly. Your finitude is gone. What do you want to be working on with Christ for a million years on the new earth? Have you ever been asked that question?
[0:45:45] HB: Should have sent that ahead of time. I think I want to be an interior designer. No, I’m kidding. I don't know.
[0:45:51] JR: You're probably going to be writing love letters.
[0:45:53] HB: No. No. I'm going to say, nothing handwritten. No, you know what I want to be? Okay, so this is really, we don't, okay. Yeah. I'm going to be the care package assembler. I'm going to be the welcome committee. The hospitality crew.
[0:46:08] JR: That's so good.
[0:46:09] HB: Nothing gives me more joy than knowing somebody is coming to stay in my guest room and I am going to Target, I'm getting all their snacks. I'm sending surveys. That's what I am.
[0:46:19] JR: That’s a gift.
[0:46:19] HB: The welcome committee.
[0:46:20] JR: Work that on the new – I can't imagine we don't have that on the earth. I like that.
[0:46:23] HB: Okay. Hospitality crew.
[0:46:25] JR: If we opened up your Amazon order history, other than your own books, which books would we see you buying over and over again to give to friends?
[0:46:32] HB: The Practice of the Presence of God, big one. Gosh, I'll give my friends anything Kate Bowler, anything Anne Lamott.
[0:46:41] JR: Yup. That tracks.
[0:46:44] HB: I'm trying to think. Okay, this is for the parents, because I've been giving this to a lot of new moms, Bringing Up Bebe, French parenting. I'm a big fan of French parenting.
[0:46:54] JR: Hot take. Hot take. Heard it here first, the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:46:57] HB: It's a great book. It’s a great book. Yeah.
[0:46:59] JR: I love it. All right, Hannah, what's one final thing you want to say, or reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?
[0:47:06] HB: Oh, we've had a good conversation. I think, I just want to reiterate, we've talked about it throughout the conversation, but I just want people to know and understand that it's often the small stuff. That's what life is, right? It ends up being bigger things, but I think that when it comes to anything, when it comes to your work, when it comes to your goals, when it comes to your family, it's small things that could very easily go by the wayside, or not happen at all. I think about, I'm very much a practical person, right? I'm like, “Oh, okay. If I want to practice this principle in the Bible, what does that look practically?”
November of this last year, we wanted to practice more gratitude. We got these little post-it notes. Then every day as a family, we just started writing one thing we were grateful for and sticking it on the wall. Such a small thing, but it became the thing that my daughter was like, “That's what I love. That's what I want to do. I want to sit at the table so we can practice our gratitude.” It's like, it’s so small things that ends up being what life is really, truly about. Don't neglect them and don't think. If today you listen to this episode and you turn off your phone for 10 minutes before you pick it back up again, count it, count the victory. The small stuff will stack up to the big stuff.
[0:48:40] JR: It's good. It's really good. Hannah, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you have done, are doing for the glory of God and the good of others, for reminding us that we can't do our most exceptional work if we are addicted to anything, especially our devices. Yeah, just thank you for giving us some practical ways to dissent from the kingdom of noise today. Guys, if you want more from hand on this topic, check out The Unplugged Hours wherever books are sold. Hannah, thanks for hanging out with me today.
[0:49:07] HB: Thank you for having me.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:49:09] JR: Hey, I'd love to hear who you want to hear on this podcast. Let me know at jordanraynor.com/contact. Thank you guys so much for listening. I'll see you next week.
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