Home Pastors Articles for Pastors 6 Wrong Reasons to Check Your Phone in the Morning

6 Wrong Reasons to Check Your Phone in the Morning

Our phones now go wherever we go—which is everywhere. And that means most of us sleep with our phones. In the bedroom, our phone wakes us up, tracks our sleep patterns and makes us available in the event of an emergency.

All these benefits are wonderful. The problem comes when our phone is within arm’s reach and we grab it out of habit to check email and social media in our half-conscious state of sleep inertia—before our groggy eyes can even fully open.

In our survey of 8,000 readers of DesiringGod.org, over half of you (54 percent) admit to checking your smartphone within minutes of waking up on a typical morning.

Then we asked whether you are more likely to check email and social media before or after your spiritual disciplines on a typical morning: 73 percent of you said before. Here’s the breakdown by age and gender.

We don’t need charts to know we are quick to Facebook and slow to God, and this impulse is a problem if John Piper is right when he says, “I feel like I have to get saved every morning. I wake up and the devil is sitting on my face.”

That’s a startling way to talk about the daily challenge of the Christian life.

Put another way, whatever we focus our hearts on first in the morning will shape our entire day.