Dopamine Detox

by Eddie Pipkin

Chances are you are reading this blog on your smartphone. If so, it will have come to you by email, a now old-timey communications pathway. If you are a normal American, you will use that same smartphone for a chunk of today for scrolling. Scrolling news, scrolling the socials, scrolling cat videos, killing time and feeding that dopamine hunger. We’ve written a lot about how to engage smartphones to keep ministry relevant – their use is how we live our lives now. But there’s an alternative idea. What if our ministries were safe spaces to check out and chill for a while? To leave all that scrolling behind and practice living in the sacred moment once more?

I’ve written a lot in this space over the years about using smartphone interactivity in ways that keep ministry relevant in the culture. After all, it’s just the way the world works. We’ve become dependent on those little pocket computers as portals to the wider universe. We use them to entertain and connect us, and we use them to facilitate our daily logistical routines. It is, therefore, a simple expectation for anybody who comes through our church doors that any vibrant community is going to be fluent in the cultural reality of instant communication, social media narratives, and mobile administration (for sign-ups, information access, scheduling and payment options).

It’s just the new reality. It’s a functional base line.

At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that the relentless presence and pressure of 24-7 connectivity is having harmful effects on us all, especially young people.

Jonathan Haidt’s newest book, The Anxious Generation, is on the best-seller list. Its subtitle, “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” makes his case clear: the rise of smartphones and social media, which has become part of the lives of children at younger and younger ages, is causing social disconnects, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and dopamine addiction (the chief symptom of which is scrolling, scrolling, scrolling at all hours and in all settings). [Haidt also cites helicopter parenting and omnipresent surveillance of kids as an issue, stunting their development of independent decision making and problem solving.]

It’s not just the kids who aren’t all right, however.

Just this week, the NY Times Magazine published a compelling interview by Lulu Garcia-Navarro with psychiatrist and addiction specialist Dr. Anna Lembke with the striking title, “Digital Drugs Have Us Hooked.” She makes the stark argument that we’re all fighting addiction now:

We live at a time when everything is available at every moment. Just on your phone, you can order lunch, bet on sports, read this story, watch porn, chat with a friend, chat with a stranger, chat with a large language model or buy a car. Dr. Anna Lembke says that all that convenience and abundance is making us less happy, and there is plenty of research to back her up: In the developed world, we are lonelier, more anxious and more depressed than ever.

If you have managed to not fall into the smartphone rabbit hole yourself, you will have anecdotal evidence of people who have. Lembke first broke into the cultural consciousness with her book, Dopamine Nation:

Lembke argues that our brains are wired to constantly seek stimulation, and that modern life, with its never-ending stream of content and stuff, makes it nearly impossible to fight that urge.

She doesn’t really think we’ve all lost our bearings. It’s a struggle that varies from individual to individual:

When I use the term addiction, I am talking about a form of psychopathology, which is a spectrum disorder. So there is mild, moderate and severe addiction. When we see severe addiction, we all recognize it. It’s obvious, right? People are struggling, they’re suffering, there are incredible consequences as a result of their use, and yet they can’t stop using without significant help. On the less severe end, it’s much harder to tell when we might cross over from healthy recreational and adaptive use of a substance or a behavior into unhealthy, maladaptive use.

We will, each of us, have travelled this path of managing our attention and fighting the endless “dopamine-hit-inducing” scroll. We will have dealt with it on our teams, and we constantly see it in our ministry participants, people who can’t stop looking at their phones no matter the setting, who can’t focus on real-world events because they are so tied to the online world, who can’t define themselves in activities and relationships other than the online variety, and who have checked out of in-person interactions because it’s so much easier to lead a curated online existence.

The local church can be a refuge from the techno-scourge!

We can be a place where people bring themselves to re-engage with relationships and in-person connectivity.

In the past decade most of us have leaned into being part of the relevant culture by giving people encouragement to keep their phones engaged in worship and small groups. We say, read the Scripture on your phone; find the song lyrics on your phone and the announcements; post up your location and your thoughts RIGHT NOW on social media; make a donation in real time on our app; sign up for an event from your seat! It’s max engagement! It’s also an attention monster. In these ways we arguably level the field between our sacred spaces and every other social space in the world, and it’s worth asking how much of that is a good thing. We become one more entertainment commodity fighting for eyeballs and engagement. And, let’s be honest, if we are encouraging people to keep those smartphones out during worship for the purposes of engaging in worship activities, who among us realistically thinks that those devices aren’t also being used for checking messages, or likes, or watching a short comedy clip during the boring parts of the sermon.

There is an alternate path in which we can set ourselves apart from the culture by promoting spaces where we unplug from technology, however briefly, and plug instead fully into the work of the Spirit and the power of community, allocating our full attention to the moments we are physically spending together.

This is excellent spiritual practice, and it models good habits for our family and individual lives. It sets a holy goal of setting ourselves apart, our minds and our souls, for healthy portions of the day.

I haven’t seen a local church yet with a physical space where one can place one’s smartphone for the duration of a worship service or a class. I have heard some stories of youth groups attempting versions of this – “put all your phones in this basket for the next hour” – and it, of course, completely freaks the kids out! It would probably freak the adults out, too, so if you know of examples of this strategy, please let me know in the comments section. But wouldn’t it be a glorious thing?

Probably in our main worship services, we would be better advised to live in a hybrid model in which we let people choose if they want to be intentionally digitally engaged or intentionally digitally on sabbatical, with no judgement. But we should be talking about it. And in smaller settings, we should be experimenting with it:

Maybe no phones in small groups.
Maybe no phones in staff meetings or leadership meetings.
Maybe no phones in Children’s Church or during select youth gatherings.

We can start small and proceed gently (at least suggesting to people that they turn their phones OFF during the duration), or we could make it a big effort with Smartphone Abstinence as a stated goal and a focused series on fighting the dopamine addiction. We can sponsor prayer walks or daylong retreats to get away from the digital demands and help people get comfortable again with not being constantly connected. We can help people rediscover the slow work of deep conversations and relationship building. We can encourage a return to deep reading and quiet hobbies, prayer, journaling and nature walks, where God has space to speak to us in the un-pinged silence.

We can give kids space for lightly (but safely) supervised free play. We can reclaim what it is to be bored and let our minds wander. That’s always where some of the best thinking happens. It’s a space where our souls can grow.

Haidt offers these four strategies (in whatever setting and form they take, but obviously the local church is the perfect cultural context for these principles to be lived out – they are the things we have always been doing):

Shared Sacredness: Gathering together for an “organized moral, charitable, or spiritual purpose.”
Embodiment: Participating together in a physical ritual, whether sports or a project or singing or prayer.
Stillness, Silence, and Focus: Re-learning the value of quietness, patience, waiting, awareness, and presence.
Self-Transcendence: The value of moving beyond thinking that is centered entirely in our own wants and needs to thinking about others and the greater good, then acting on those expansive impulses through doing.

We should make this discussion an active part of our efforts in the local church. People are hungry for it. They know that riding the dopamine train is not filling their “God-shaped holes.” It is not making them happy. They are eager for guidance and alternatives.

How have you and your team been addressing these issues of squandered attention and our addiction to constant stimulation? Have you tried to give the people what they (apparently) want with more stimulation of the spiritual variety! Or have you sought ways to reacquaint them with the timeless heritage of deep and fulfilling spiritual connections and the joys of unplugged presence? I’m curious to hear what you think! But if you’d rather forego a message in the comments section for some work in your butterfly garden instead, good for you. I approve.