I gave up tech for Lent. Here’s how it helped my mental health

If you have ever struggled with your mental health, you may have mixed feelings about the oft-quoted verses from Philippians 4:6-7: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Maybe you’re raising your hands in praise at the citing of your anchor verse. Maybe you’re rolling your eyes, knowing the pain of an out-of-context truth. Perhaps you’re somewhere in between. I know I am.

On one hand, it is scripture - and therefore, in the words of theologian Greg Thompson, it is absolutely true and given because he loves us. I believe that. But on the other, in my totally honest experience, it doesn’t always seem to work.

God is looking for us to turn away, at least in part, from the lifestyle that is causing this epidemic of mental health injuries

I’ve struggled with anxiety for the last two years, seven months and eight days. In September 2022 I was having a stressful time at work; the community my wife and I were pastoring lost its venue with one week’s notice, and our two young children were seemingly always ill. That Sunday, I was leading church and had what I now know was a panic attack. I had to ask our assistant pastors to finish the service without a sermon while I drove home, spiralling into catastrophic certainty that I was never going to be able to lead again, would lose my job and, with it, all ability to provide for my family.

Having had these irrational fears laid to rest by my wife and our senior pastor, I decided to take a break from leading from the front. I needed some time away from what had become a highly stressful environment. Unfortunately, if you have experience with anxiety - which I didn’t back then - you’ll know this was the worst possible move. If a panic attack is the seedling of anxiety, then escape and avoidance are the fertile soil in which it grows. By the time I discovered this, however, it was too late. I was stuck with a mental health injury that I’ve been trying to recover from ever since.

Your mind matters

Against this backdrop, I was recently speaking to a friend when he mentioned he was preaching on the call to young people be a non-anxious presence in a thoroughly anxious world.

The aforementioned verse from Philippians came up, and I challenged it. That’s all very well, I said, but it doesn’t work - perhaps not my most faith-filled moment. He gently pushed back and suggested that perhaps it just hadn’t worked yet. It’s a formula, he said, not a timeline.

We were coming to the end of our conversation when he mentioned another verse he was planning to reference. Isaiah 26:3 says: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” It hit me like it was the cornerstone of his whole message. Having wrestled with anxiety for the last few years, how had I never come across this passage? What challenged me - and gave my heart hope - was the wonderful phrase: “whose mind is stayed on you”.

For the next few days, I kept considering what it might mean to have your mind stayed on God. I began to realise that not only was my mind not stayed on God, I don’t think I could really say it was stayed on anything. It bounced relentlessly - from work to kids to my marriage to myself to friendships to the news; back to work again, then onto the house and the mess and the kids - and on and on and on.

In this exhausting, endless sprint, any rest time I had was filled with YouTube, games or social media. If I was waiting 38 seconds for the microwave to finish, my phone would come out, and I realised this was making my stress levels, and therefore my anxiety, increasingly worse.

So, as Lent approached, I felt God calling me to lay this distraction down, to let my mind be stayed on him. I gave up all forms of electronic entertainment. I could use my phone for work and messaging friends, but nothing else.

And it has proved to be, albeit subtly, life changing.

The price of peace

Initially, I couldn’t believe how easy - and beneficial - it was. I wasn’t really missing anything, and in that first week, I think it kept me sane. Alongside normal work and parenting, we had an offer accepted on a house, I ran a seminar, and we did two back-to-back trips with our youth group. Stress and anxiety would normally have been through the roof, but I managed to keep it in check. I wouldn’t say I had my mind stayed on God, but it was certainly starting to settle on a few good things, rather than endless empty ones.

Over the next couple of weeks, I started waking up just before my alarm, feeling more refreshed than I had in months. This meant I found it easier to spend time with God before the kids woke up, which was something I’d really been missing. At one point, I asked my wife if she’d noticed any changes in me. Very kindly, with no hints of accusation, she said: “You’re more present as a husband and father.” I felt calmer, happier to be interrupted by the kids, more open and fun.

Not only was my mind not stayed on God, I don’t think I could really say it was stayed on anything

But it wasn’t all easy. One evening, after a particularly hard day, I didn’t want to read, paint or play cards. I just wanted to watch something on a screen, veg out for a few hours before bed. “This is why TV was invented, because life is so boring without it!” I exclaimed. It wasn’t my best moment, but it was how I felt at the time.

I also found a few loopholes over the next few weeks. Looking at houses we were thinking of buying didn’t count as entertainment, surely? Watching DIY videos on Youtube was educational, as was learning a language on Duolingo. But I knew it wasn’t about manipulating the rules; it was about the posture of my heart. Was I looking for more time with God? Was I trying to stay my mind on him? To be calmer, kinder, steadier. To be more mentally healthy.

Deep roots

I reached Easter Sunday feeling closer to God than I had done in years. I had rediscovered him in reading, prayer time and daily conversation. I still struggle with anxiety. Dropping tech hasn’t healed me. I’m not totally better, but I’m getting better, and staying my mind on God has helped with this no end.

I believe that God wants to set us free from anxiety. And there is freedom to be had. But, for the most part, it isn’t going to come from a momentary insta-fix. God is looking for us to turn away, at least in part, from the lifestyle that is causing this epidemic of mental health injuries. We are running too fast, and our soul needs to breathe and rest in order to heal sometimes. When we leave too few gaps in our time to do this, we can feel the burn.

Our current lifestyle can be shallow. We need deep roots that can reach down into God, so that we may be “like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit (Jeremiah 17:7-8).