169. How to Put Your Phone Down For Real with Erick Vargas of Sabbath Space

Carrie: Today on the podcast, I’m very excited that we’re gonna be talking about cell phone addiction and how to have better boundaries with our phones so that we can be present in our lives with our family and with God, and do the things that are most important to us. Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock.

I’m a Christ follower. Wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith.

I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Here with me today, I have Eric Vargas, and I’ll just let you introduce yourself.

Erick: Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here and talk about Sabbath, Sabbath, space tech addiction, phone addiction.

I am a Christian entrepreneur. I run a couple of different kind of software startups. My main one is a CRM for the construction industry, and that’s kind of my nine to five. But then I have a couple of projects on the side that, um, are really meant for Christians and serve the church and Sabbath space that helps with tech Addiction is one of those.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got to the point, uh, from developing this app and like the need that you saw it for it in your own life and in other people’s lives.

Erick: Yeah, so it was two things. We all know that we’re on our phones too much. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it’s obvious. It’s not like it’s in plain sight.

There was two moments last year. I got a notification on my phone that I spent six and a half hours on my phone, and I was like, this is crazy. And it was really surprising to me because I. I run software companies and I just graduated from seminary. I have a young family. I don’t see myself as like wasting a lot of time, and because of that I was like, how did the six and a half hours, where did that come from?

Then around the same time, my toddler, he looked at me, he can barely speak, and he’s like, dad, I put phone away. Oh, wow. And I’m like, okay, this has gone far enough time to make a change. And so that’s how we started to come up with this idea and how to solve this problem. I.

Carrie: So we know our cell phones and technology, it’s very addictive. Why does it seem that we can’t put it down even when we want it to? Why are we so drawn to that?

Erick: To put it starkly, there are multi-billion dollar companies investing in you picking up your phone and your willpower is up against these. Tech giants. So if you could just imagine a portal through your phone screen with thousands of people, billions of dollars trying to reach the goal of you just picking up your phone, and they’re very effective at it.

Me being in the technology space I have like under the hood understanding of what they’re actually doing to make it so addictive and attractive. Some of those things are the feed, the invention of the feed. If you were to rewind to like the early two thousands and you go on Facebook or some social media, no one remembers this, but you would get to the point where you reach the end of what all your friends posted, you saw all the

Carrie: updates and that

Erick: that was it.

And that’s it. And then, but what they noticed is that that’s when you exited the app. So they came up with the feed and what they did is that’s where you put your ads in and it becomes endless. That’s one thing that they invented to keep us scrolling for hours and hours and hours. That’s one thing. They enhance the photos and the images and the colors, just to make it more enticing to look at and to prove that to you, how effective that is.

There’s a mode on your phone called grayscale, and not a lot of people know about this feature, but in your settings you can make your phone completely black and white. And I did that for a couple of weeks and it cut my phone usage in half just because like TV versus a newspaper.

Carrie: Okay. Not as vivid and exciting.

Erick: Yeah, exactly. Or like put a newspaper and a comic book in front of a five-year-old who just learned how to read, what are they gonna choose? And then another thing is the vibration. Your phone buzzes and it just like it gets your attention and you pick it up.

Carrie: All the notifications. Yeah. That are happening all the time.

Erick: All the time. 24 7. Actually, just in our time today, in a few minutes, I’ve gotten like six notifications, so I’m gonna turn on outside space so it’s not distracting me during our time. Yeah, those are just some of the things that they’ve invested in to keep us addicted.

Carrie: I think that this is important for when we’re talking about obsessive compulsive disorder, and that’s my area.

It’s like you can get really, really fixated on things, and I think that there is a potential for pathway towards addiction. It can show up in a lot of different ways. I have definitely had clients that were also addicted to things like pornography, but I hear many times my clients say, I know I’m spending way too much time doom scrolling.

That’s the new word out there. I’m not really focused and on what I need to be focused on. And then we have all of this input in our brains and it’s just too much. And then I think part of that problem is then we go to be. Quiet or we go to be still in our spiritual life. We go to open the Bible and read, and our brains are just going like a hundred miles an hour because that’s what they’re used to when we’re engaging with all of this content all the time or like constantly putting it in there.

Erick: And to your point, like what it does is it’s triggering those minor dopamine hits in our brain. Imagine yourself just like at zero when it comes to like dopamine hits. But if you spend your downtime scrolling on your phone, you’re raising your dopamine levels, and so that becomes the new standard level that you are used to, and then the phone goes away, and then your attention span is not as big as it used to.

You can’t sit down to read a book anymore. You can’t go on a walk because you’ve just artificially elevated your dopamine constantly. That’s the hard part of having your phone constantly by yourself.

Carrie: I think two people have a hard time sitting with their own thought processes and talked about that before.

It’s a way of getting out of our own head. It’s a distraction from the stressors of life, and we’ve all fall down that rabbit hole. Tell us the iPhone has this ability to set screen time limits. Tell us why you feel like that’s not sufficient and what makes. This app that you’ve created, Sabbath Space Different.

Erick: It’s not sufficient because I’m too addicted. Think about it this way, from like a business perspective, if Apple is investing in you to be on your phone, why would they create something to prevent that? It’s really just a kind of PR kind of, we’re trying to do the right healthy thing here, but the problem is it’s so easy to bypass.

I noticed, like my wife was on Instagram and then the time limit popped up and she clicked 15 more minutes, and then guess what? She did it 15 minutes later again and again and again. Right. So I’m like, why do you even have that? It’s just pointless. But it’s designed that, right. That’s why it’s inefficient, because the addiction is so strong with every other addiction.

What do they tell you? Don’t be around it.

Carrie: Move your alarm clock to the other side of the room. So you don’t just keep hitting snooze.

Erick: Exactly. You have to make it difficult for yourself to actually engage in these things. That’s what makes Sabbath space different. Not only is Sabbath space an app on your phone.

It comes with this physical device, which is a key chain.

Carrie: Okay?

Erick: We also have a desk stand for like your desk if you work from home or something like that. I have mine by my bedside, so I’m not scrolling on my phone at night. And what this device does is a chip in it that activates and deactivates the app.

You cannot access your social media apps unless you scan the device.

Carrie: So it’s a little bit like ping with your phone or something like that. Similar technology.

Erick: Exactly. So if you ever scanned your phone in to pay for something or something like that, it’s a similar technology. Okay. The idea is just to like really solidify it.

If you’re on a diet, don’t keep junk food in the house. Yes. Rather keep a better, healthy option in the house. The idea is, is like you’re probably not going to, if you have a sweet tooth, you’re not gonna like get off the couch, go to the store, and then buy the cookies. Takes a lot more effort to do all that stuff.

Exactly. That’s the idea. At my house, I have these, buy my door, I scan my phone when I come in and now I only get phone calls and text messages to my phone. Okay. Then I can play with my son and my phone’s not distracting me. I can have dinner. My phone’s not distracting me. We have one on our dinner table so everybody scans in at dinner time.

And it creates a Sabbath space, a culture within our family. So we can say we wanna make this a special space where our phone is intruding in on us.

Carrie: I think that’s great, and you were also telling me that you have work mode on there. Like if someone wants to just only access their work apps versus their social apps and other things, which I think is great too, to have those work boundaries so that you’re maximizing your work time, which as you know, when you’re working for yourself, that’s super important to make sure you’re working when you’re working.

Because nobody else is making sure that you’re doing that except for you.

Erick: It’s true. You can customize your mode. That’s what we call that. Okay? For me, I have a work mode. I have a devotional mode, and I have a house mode, work mode. I only have my phone, my email, and my slack. Everything else is blocked. My house mode, I just have my phone and my email, and then my devotional mode.

I have my Bible app. The idea there is, is like I, countless times I would wake up. I would like, all right, it’s time to do my devotionals. I open up my Bible app, but then the Instagram notifications, the Facebook notifications start to roll in, and then boop, you click it. Now you’re scrolling on social media, and then an hour later you’re like.

Oh, I’m supposed to be doing my Doos.

Carrie: Yeah,

Erick: it silences all of that. So you can be focused.

Carrie: I love that. So you are using this in your day-to-day life. What’s the change been? Tell us like how long you’ve been using these different modes and what changes that you’ve seen in your phone usage time and in your relationships.

Erick: Have space has just been out for a month now. So it’s pretty new and it’s exciting to hear all the stories, but really I built it for myself because I wanted to have this kind of culture within my own family. But I looked at my screen time tracker and I reduced my screen time, 81%. That’s huge. And guess what?

I don’t feel any different, meaning I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on social media. I don’t feel like, oh, I wonder what my friend posted. What I did with Sabbath space is I removed social media from the 30 minutes here, the 30 minutes there. Sometimes on a Friday night, I’m like, all right, let’s check out what’s going on on Instagram or Facebook, but it doesn’t consume my life.

I have one next to my bed because I don’t want to have that and not sleep. So I’ve improved my sleep, which is huge. I have a sleep mode as well. Okay. I’m tracking. I’m like, oh wow. I got eight and a half hours of sleep, which is great because I’m not wasting an hour or 30 minutes or whatever it is.

Scrolling. I just scan and I go right to sleep.

Carrie: Wow. That’s good. Kind of like a, just a nice built-in way to track your sleep time too. That’s convenient. The fear of missing out is that one of the ways that we get pulled into all of these apps as well? Like we’re afraid, oh, if I’m not on here, somehow I’m gonna miss something.

Or if I don’t check the notification that I’m gonna miss something important. Does that draw us back in? After being on the other

Erick: side of it, I’m gonna say social media causes fear of missing out more because then you’re seeing the fake life of all your friends and family and all these people that are posting.

But really, when I’ve removed social media from my life in the way I have, I’m not really thinking about everybody else anymore. Now I’m cherishing, me and my wife, were joking, like we’re crawling into bed and we go to sleep super early, like it’s nine o’clock.

Carrie: Yeah,

Erick: everyone is so surprised that we go to bed at nine o’clock and I’m like, what is everybody doing at nine o’clock at night on a Tuesday?

And I’m like, oh, they’re just watching TV or scrolling. And then they’re wondering why the next day they feel sluggish and tired.

Carrie: I. Do you feel like your mind’s clear? I just know for me, when I spend a lot of time on social media, my mind feels a lot more cluttered versus when I take breaks and take a step back, or I only go into Facebook to check a couple groups that I follow.

Those types of things that I feel like that’s most important. I wanna see what these. Few things are happening that my mind feels just, I don’t know, more clear or better able to problem solve. You’re bringing up a really

Erick: good point. Our minds weren’t meant to handle what we see on social media. Here’s a clearest example.

Recently, if you’re on social media, you’ll see every single day something about plane incidents, and you would think planes are falling out of the sky. But statistically, there hasn’t really been more any more than there’s have been like normal incidences. We’re just seeing it now because it’s a trending topic.

To be honest. It’s being highlighted on social media. We’re not supposed to know that this murder on the other side of the country or this murder in another state. Just think about 20 years ago, we wouldn’t be privy to that kind of information. We would just know what’s going on in our neighborhood or our community.

’cause that’s what we were built for. All this anxiety that just comes in through our phones. We’re not supposed to have this kind of omnipotent kind of view of the world because we can’t handle it. We’re not, God,

Carrie: that’s a good point. It’s important for us to be able to let things go and recognize like what’s completely out of our control.

What do we have to give to God as far as that information that’re receiving. So right now you said Sabbath space just came out and it’s for iPhone only right now, and maybe in the future you’re gonna build out something for Android. Tell us about that process. They can just search for it in the app store and tell us about pricing and all that.

Erick: Yeah, so I’m happy to say that we’re actually in development for Android right now. It’d be out in two months or so, so it’s March 12th, hopefully May-ish. We’re gonna release that. We’re excited about that. I, I’m getting a lot of questions on it. We try to make it as cheap as possible. It’s $39 for the whole year.

Okay. And with that you get the free key chain and then if you want the dust stand that is extra ’cause we have to manufacture these and all of that. Yeah, there’s a cost to it, but this is really my way to serve the church, serve Christians in my own kind of unique way. The point’s not to make money, everything’s at a break even, so that we can really reclaim our time and that’s really the hope.

Carrie: That’s really a gift. I think that this is a great idea. I haven’t tried it out yet. I’m waiting for the Android version, but very excited for this and I think the possibilities that it gives people. I have hear from people all the time, I don’t have time for this, I don’t have time for that. And it’s amazing how much time that we can reclaim when we put our phones down and walk away and do other things.

Especially when you have young kids, they grow up super fast and you’re like, whoa, how’d.

Erick: Everyone that tells me that they don’t have time is say, pull out your screen time. Let’s see how much time you’re wasting.

Carrie: Yeah,

Erick: absolutely.

Carrie: Well, thanks for being on the show today. I think this is gonna be very informative for people and I encourage them to just try it out, see how it goes.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it. To receive weekly encouragement, find out about our monthly Meet the podcast host Zoom meetings, and receive information on exclusive sales. Become an email insider today. All you have to do is go to kerry bach.com and scroll towards the bottom of the page.

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