Pokemon or Prayer Time



Posted: December 2023

A Week of Pokemon Sleep

I like Pokemon. So when I found out about the mobile game pokemon sleep I was interested. It's an app that gamifies getting 8 hours of sleep. I think a lot of my writing so far is about mental wellness and stuff like that, so I was interested in this game for more reasons than just because pokemon is a game from my childhood. The core "gameplay loop" involves resting your phone on the corner of your bed overnight so that it can track your sleep. In the morning, shortly after you wake up, you can see which pokemon your sleep attracted and feed them snacks for a chance that they will join your team. Cute and fun. What's not to love?

My Prayer Time

My daily prayer routine (when I don't forget about it) generally consists of a few minutes of prayerful reflection, and then reading some passages from the Bible — usually the alloted readings from my bible in a year plan or the daily mass readings. This happens the first thing when I wake up because if I don't do it then, I tend to forget about it. Over the last year I had a routine of waking up a half hour early on weekdays to do a little bit of daily prayer.

Final Solution

So for the week that I tried out pokemon sleep I was not praying in the mornings because the time intended for pokemon and the time that works for me to pray are the same time. Now, I certainly don't believe that the pokemon people picked this time on purpose to hurt my prayer life. However, it is reasonable to expect the devil to use anything he can. It should come as no surprise based on the title of this blog post that I chose my personal prayer time over pokemon.

A celebratory image of me uninstalling Pokemon Sleep

I enjoyed playing pokemon sleep for the short time I did. However, I feel better not using it because I think daily prayer is important.