Spend less time scrolling and more time strolling. Outside. Unmediated. Just you and your walking shoes.

This is my summer challenge. Are you up for it?

By now, we’re aware of addictive scrolling’s many ill effects. But sometimes our “this is bad for me and I know it” posture toward smartphones stops at resigned awareness. What we need are alternatives. If I’m not scrolling, what am I doing instead?

Here’s an idea: Go for a walk.

Meander in your neighborhood, a park, or an urban area you’d like to explore. Leave your phone at home. Do this on your lunch break or first thing in the morning. Post-dinner walks at dusk are magical. The science is clear that walking 30 minutes a day provides a host of health benefits. But don’t discount the mental and spiritual benefits too—and the training of that elusive but all-important muscle we call wisdom.

Make time for it. Do your best to resist the strong urge to multitask on your walk (e.g., listening to a podcast or audiobook). As often as you can, take unmediated walks. If you’re like the average American and spend 5 hours and 16 minutes on your phone per day, surely you can spare 30 minutes to replace scrolling in virtual space with strolling in God’s creation.

It’ll be hard, I know. But it’ll be worth it. Here’s why.

Vertical Attention: Commune with God

When we go through life with our heads down, eyes glued to our phones, hands frantically grabbing for our devices whenever we have any downtime, we simply have less attention to direct to other places. This is a spiritual disaster. Spiritual health depends on giving our attention to God, communing with our Creator, seeking the Lord in prayer, contemplating his attributes, praising him. We need time and space to do this. We need what Walter Brueggeman calls “attentive fidelity.”

Do your best to resist the strong urge to multitask on your walk.

Our scrolling habits usually pull us toward attentive infidelity . . . constantly “cheating” on God, tempted more by algorithmic lures than by his covenantal love.

Phone-free walks are one way you can carve out time to intentionally reconnect with God. I cherish unmediated walks because they provide time for focused, lingering prayer. With nothing else vying for my attention (a rare event for a busy husband, dad of three, and full-time employee), I can seek God in quietness—bringing him my petitions, expressing gratitude, praise, and utter dependence.

As I walk outside, what I notice—a chirping bird, the jacaranda-purple blossoms, the early summer scent of jasmine—enhances my devotional posture. Being in God’s creation in an observant posture, looking at and listening to what’s around you, inevitably prompts praise and gratitude.

So go on prayer walks. Maybe sing or hum a hymn as you do. Stroll, look around you at what God’s made, and look up. Sing like the songbirds do. Be a grateful creature in his creation.

Horizontal Attention: See Other Image-Bearers

One of the saddest—and sadly common—sights in our scrolling world is a crowded public place where everyone is in his or her own iWorld, retreating to the safety of screens rather than risking a human interaction with a person in close proximity. In airport terminals, coffee shops, and classrooms in the five minutes before the bell rings, the scene is the same: the eerie paradox of “alone together,” sharing close quarters with other embodied beings but opting for virtual “presence” instead.

This is also spiritual death. We’re relational beings, created to commune with others. We lose much when we’re so busy fidgeting on our phones that we don’t even make eye contact with the grocery check-out clerk, or the barista making us our coffee, or the flight attendant trying to give a safety demonstration, or the person sitting next to us on a four-hour flight. The phone is a convenient way to avoid actual human interactions. But that trade is like choosing poison over medicine.

The phone is a convenient way to avoid actual human interactions. But that trade is like choosing poison over medicine.

When you go on phone-free walks, you can look up long enough to see other people, to smile at them, to say hi. Your habitual walks might set you up for serendipitous encounters with a neighbor, a dog-walker, a pair of kids manning a lemonade stand, or a stranger for whom a friendly greeting from another human being might be urgently needed. Device-free walks can be a ministry, a roving hospitable presence God just might use to bless someone in your path.

If you walk around only looking down at your phone, or always with your air pods in your ears (signaling unavailability), you’ll miss out on this ministry every time.

Internal Attention: Reflect, Process, Daydream

Another consequence of addictive scrolling is the degradation of our inner life. Mental health is suffering, critical thinking is atrophying, memory skills are waning, and a vital component for wisdom—contemplative time—is being quietly eradicated from existence.

In a provocative recent article, “On the Death of Daydreaming,” author Christine Rosen laments the loss of moments of idleness, boredom, staring out windows, and daydreaming—which she calls “fallow time.” She writes, “To be fallow is not the same thing as to be useless; it is to let rest so that cultivation can occur in the future. When mediated experiences co-opt our idle time, we are left with fewer and fewer of these fallow moments, moments that are central to the experience of being human.”

Fallow moments are critical for my creativity as a writer. No amount of rich inputs—all the best podcasts, books, and articles in the world—will do me any good if I don’t have ample time to process them and turn them into new, helpful output. I often go for a “thinking walk” before I sit down to write an article or a chapter in a book. I need fallow time to collect my thoughts, connect the dots, and see where my meandering thoughts go.

Psychologists and neuroscientists believe the meandering mind is vital not only for creativity but also for memory processing, future planning, and even one’s sense of self. The technical term for this state of mind, when the brain isn’t focused on any external tasks and can “wander,” is the default mode network (DMN). While it’s a relatively new frontier in neuroscience, the DMN is thought to play a role in creative thinking, problem solving, wise advising, understanding others, and developing a sense of self.

The DMN is why you sometimes have your best epiphanies in the shower. And yet in a digital world, where most of our “downtime” interstitial moments are now colonized by content, crucial DMN time is being crowded out. Here’s how two brain scientists describe what’s happening:

Take a look at people walking down the street, driving in their cars, eating alone in restaurants and cafes. Not so long ago, these people wouldn’t be doing anything else. Their minds would wander and they would daydream; their DMN would be active. . . . But as first the Walkman and then the iPhone came to dominate our free time, the DMN has slowly been squeezed out of our daily lives.

We can reclaim DMN time by embracing the role of a device-free flaneur, allowing our mind to wander as our feet move on autopilot.

For your spiritual, relational, physical, and mental health, get off your phone and go for a walk. Give your fidgety fingers a break and let your feet get some movement in. Give your overstimulated mind a chance to make sense of things. Get far enough from your phone that you can pray, praise, and ponder. Relax your optimization obsession long enough to let this “unproductive time” do its vital work.