Leading Myself in Quiet Rebellion

A few months ago, after a church sermon about the insidious ways our phones are shaping us every day, I did something that didn’t feel particularly dramatic at the time. I removed the YouTube app from my phone. I also turned off notification emails from the creators and channels I followed.

No declarations. No grand plan. Just a quiet attempt to reduce one source of noise.

I wasn’t trying to become more productive. I wasn’t trying to optimize my time or prove a point. I was looking for some more stability.

I’d been working for months to lose a little weight, establish healthier eating habits, and learn to live with the recent addition of depression and anxiety to my life. I knew I needed something to help me be more present in my own life. Less reactive. Less scattered. More anchored.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as reclaiming control. But looking back, that’s probably what it was. A small effort to stop handing my attention—and with it, my time and my mind—to whatever surfaced next in my feed.

What surprised me was not how easy the change was, but how much it revealed.

Over the next four or five months, I noticed I was less distracted. I stayed engaged in conversations instead of drifting toward my phone. I wasted far less time watching videos that made me feel like I was “doing something” when I wasn’t actually moving anything forward. I could sit with a thought longer. I could stay with people longer. My mind felt quieter—not empty, just less pulled apart.

That single change opened the door to a larger realization: much of what I had been experiencing wasn’t about discipline or motivation at all. It was about the training I had unwittingly been undergoing for years.

Are Distraction and Anxiety Related?

Once the YouTube app was gone, something else became more visible.

I began to notice how often my hand reached for my phone without any clear reason. How quickly that desire to make sure I didn’t miss anything showed up. How uneasy I felt sitting still, even when nothing was wrong.

I don’t think my experience is unique.

Many people feel anxious when they’re away from their phones. Many of us struggle to go more than a few minutes without checking something. Notifications, vibrations, banners, and badges train us to expect interruption as the default state of consciousness.

I found a strange side effect to my constant stimulation: I felt busy and restless at the same time. Consuming content creates the feeling of action without requiring commitment. We learn about ideas, strategies, opportunities, and other people’s progress—but we don’t necessarily move forward ourselves.

Removing one app didn’t solve that problem. But it made the pattern hard to ignore.

It raised a question that kept coming back: What changes is this unconscious training making in me?

It makes me feel like I’m in control when, actually, it’s pulling me further and further from who I want to be.

The Science of Attention

We live in an environment that is extraordinarily effective at capturing our attention. Phones and media platforms aren’t neutral tools. They haven’t been for a long time.

They are carefully engineered systems designed to reward novelty, speed, and constant engagement. Each swipe, click, or notification offers a small hit of stimulation that keeps us coming back for more.

From a neuroscience perspective, this matters.

Repeated exposure to novelty-driven rewards trains the brain’s dopamine system to pursue frequent stimulation. Over time, this can reduce tolerance for sustained focus and increase restlessness when stimulation drops. Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has consistently shown that frequent task-switching and interruption increase cognitive load, elevate stress responses, and degrade attention over time. [1]

The important point here is not that phones are “bad,” or that media consumption is inherently harmful.

It’s that our nervous systems adapt to what we repeatedly practice. Attention is not a fixed trait; it’s a capacity that is shaped by environment and repetition.

When constant novelty becomes the norm, stillness (inactivity) starts to feel uncomfortable. Thinking deeply and focusing intently feels painfully slow. And anything that requires long-term commitment often begins to feel vaguely threatening—not because it is wrong, but because it doesn’t deliver an immediate reward.

This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a predictable outcome of the on-going training we’re all subjected to.

And once I saw that in myself, another shift began to take place.

What am I Chasing?

What changed for me wasn’t a loss of ambition or a rejection of meaningful goals. It was a shift in orientation.

I began to notice how often I was scanning for something better. A better idea. A better system. A better opportunity. A more impressive (or lucrative?) path.

Watching videos about the next new business model or the latest creator changing the world can be inspiring—but it can also quietly undermine my commitment to pursuing the things I say matter.

Focus, by definition, narrows the field of view. It prioritizes one thing and excludes others.

That exclusion comes with a cost. There’s discomfort in acknowledging, “This is what I’m doing now,” resisting the pull to keep options open indefinitely, and deliberately choosing to exclude other things that might produce a faster result.

But with those choices also come a sense relief.

When I stop constantly re-evaluating my direction, I start to settle. I don’t have to recalibrate every time a new possibility appears. I’m no longer asking my brain to decide—again and again—what matters most.

Over time, I’m beginning to see that much of my background anxiety isn’t coming from lack of opportunity or dissatisfaction with life. It was coming from too many open loops. Too many half-held identities. Too many paths considered but not walked.

Choosing focus didn’t eliminate uncertainty. But it did reduce noise.

Infinite Possibility, Infinite Cost

The reduced noise has led to less anxiety and fewer down days for me. I’m no longer paying the massive hidden cost of constantly changing goals.

Every new direction required cognitive reorientation. My brain had to rebuild expectations, habits, and priorities over and over. This consumed huge amounts of mental energy and only offered decision fatigue in return.

Research on habit formation and cognitive load shows that familiar routines reduce the burden on the prefrontal cortex. This allows behaviors to become more automatic over time. This repetition lowers the body’s stress responses and frees mental resources to focus on things rather than reorienting over and over. [2]

Exercise research offers another helpful parallel. It’s been proven that bodies adapt best through repeated exposure to similar stressors. While variation has a role, it works best within a stable framework. They’ve found that constantly changing routines scatters the body’s ability to adapt and that consistency allows progress to compound. [3]

The same principle applies mentally. When I stopped reinventing my direction, energy slowly shifted from re-litigating past decisions to deciding how to move them forward—from wandering to pursuing.

Thinking Better is the Goal

For me, depth has shown up most clearly here on this website and the projects I write about here. These aren’t activities with immediate external rewards. They don’t generate quick validation or visible progress. There are always other things I could be doing with the time I’m dedicating here.

But I’ve chosen to keep working here.

Writing has helped me frame my life more clearly. It has given me a way to process faith, health, and responsibility with honesty rather than haste.

It has forced me to slow down, to articulate thoughts instead of skimming past them.

Over time, my hope is that it will help me think better—not because I know more, but because I stay with ideas longer. Until they marinate, simmer, and become more flavorful.

Focus isn’t flashy.

It’s returning to the same work after novelty has worn off. It’s refining instead of replacing. It’s allowing understanding to accumulate gradually rather than chasing constant stimulation.

Stability’s Challenge

I’ve found that removing these constant stimulation sources creates a vacuum, though. I didn’t anticipate how uncomfortable it would make me. Without my phone filling every quiet moment, the feeling that I need to be doing something shows up quickly. The urge to do something—anything—can be overwhelming.

But instead of immediately solving that discomfort, I’ve started experimenting with staying in it. Trying to compete with myself to last longer and longer before picking up the phone. Or leaving it in another room on purpose.

I try to stay in conversations without checking my screen. Read without breaking focus every few minutes. Watch a show without multitasking. Sit quietly at the end of the day.

One small but meaningful change was putting my phone across the room at night. Not as a rule, but as a boundary. Without the temptation to pick it up “one last time,” I found myself falling asleep more quickly. The transition into rest felt smoother. Quieter.

Boredom, it turns out, is not an enemy. It’s a threshold. Better relationships and contentment are often just the other side of it.

Doing More by Doing Less

Some might argue that by narrowing my possibilities, I’ve given up on being curious and pursuing the unknown. I’ve found just the opposite.

Focus doesn’t suppress my creativity—it channels it.

Focusing in just one thing allows variation, exploration, and refinement to happen at a deeper level. Instead of exploring the world of all possibilities, I’m restricting myself to exploring the depth of just a few things.

Just like walking the same path every day helps you notice new details along the route, choosing to focus does the same. It makes deep insight and discovery possible—even likely.

For example, when we look at one thing long enough—past the initial scan and the discomfort of looking at it for too long—we begin to perceive more. Patterns emerge. Understanding deepens. What was invisible at first becomes obvious over time. [4]

It’s got me wondering how I can apply this principle to my work. My relationships. My faith. To learning new things.

Progress and purpose require patience, but they also reward them.

A Single Step Starts a Journey

I’m trying to figure out how this fits in my life. And I encourage you to do the same.

Let’s spend some significant time deciding what’s truly important to us and which pieces of our lives consume tremendous energy and resources but provide little to no benefit in return.

What is training our attention right now? Where are we chasing stimulation instead of true engagement? What might change if fewer things competed for our focus? Are there parts of our lives we’ve wanted to change that we could start changing if we only focused and consciously excluded some other things?

I encourage you to sit with these questions alongside me. Awareness of the issue is the first step to moving through it.

Stop Drifting

Removing YouTube from my phone didn’t change my life overnight. But it opened a door. It revealed how much of my attention had been quietly outsourced—and how much steadier life could feel when I took some of it back.

This is still an experiment. Still shaped by limits, learning, faith, and ongoing physical and mental health work. I’m not finished. I’m not certain. But I am more present.

And for now, that feels like a good place to be.

Note: This is meant as a reflective article about my personal situation. It should not be construed as medical advice.