Lent Fasting Ideas Beyond Giving Up Chocolate (15 Meaningful Practices for the Forty Days)

⏱ 13 min read

Most Lent fasting ideas, when you ask around, come back to giving up chocolate. Or coffee. Or wine. And there is nothing wrong with that — millions of people have kept Lent that way, and the small daily inconvenience does its quiet work in shaping the soul. This article is not an argument against the chocolate version.

It’s an article for the year you want to do something a little more substantive. The year the chocolate fast started to feel like a token. The year you noticed that on Day 12, you weren’t actually thinking about God when you didn’t eat the chocolate — you were just thinking about the chocolate. That’s not a failure. It’s a sign that the practice has done what a small fast can do, and you’re ready for Lent fasting ideas that go a little deeper.

The fifteen practices below are each substantive enough to last forty days and small enough to actually keep. Pick one. Not three. One. The whole point of a Lenten fast is the singular, daily turning of attention — and fifteen simultaneous fasts is just a different kind of distraction.

What meaningful Lent fasting ideas actually have in common

A meaningful fast is the daily, deliberate setting-down of one thing — for forty days — to make space for God in the gap that thing usually fills. The thing you set down should be:

• Real. Big enough that you’ll notice its absence daily.
• Daily. Something that touches every day, not a once-a-week problem.
• Yours. Specific to the place in your life where God is already pressing.
• Honest. Something you can actually keep, not the maximalist version you’ll abandon on day five.

The chocolate fast is real, daily, yours-if-you-eat-chocolate, and honest. It works. So do these fifteen. Pick the one your life is asking for. (If you’re new to the season altogether and want the longer context first, our beginner’s guide to Advent meaning in Christianity sketches the sister-season Lent grows out of.)

1. Fast from your phone after 9pm

The hour before bed is where most modern souls quietly drain. The screen replaces the rest, the rest replaces the prayer. For forty days, put the phone on a charger in another room at 9pm. What you do in the gap is the fast. Read. Sit. Pray. Talk to whoever you live with. Go to bed.

Scripture: “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” — Psalm 4:8

How to do it: Set a single nightly alarm at 8:55pm. When it rings, plug the phone in somewhere outside the bedroom. The alarm clock for the morning is the bedside clock you had to buy on Ash Wednesday.

2. Fast from complaining

Forty days without giving voice to the small dissatisfactions you usually narrate aloud. The weather. The traffic. The colleague. The supermarket queue. None of them get spoken about as a complaint.

Scripture: “Do everything without grumbling or arguing.” — Philippians 2:14

How to do it: When you catch yourself about to complain, hold the sentence in your mouth and don’t release it. After about three weeks, you’ll notice how often you were going to. After six weeks, you may notice the world has not become harder to bear without the narration.

3. Fast from social media

For most people, this is the harder version of the phone fast. Delete the apps for forty days. Not just mute them. Delete. The web version stays available if you genuinely need it for work, but the frictionless tap is gone.

Scripture: “Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10

How to do it: On Ash Wednesday, delete the apps. Write the day you’ll reinstall them — Easter morning, or the Monday after — on a sticky note on your bathroom mirror. The note is the reminder; the forty days are the practice.

4. Fast from negative speech about people

Not just gossip — though gossip is included. Forty days without saying anything unkind about anyone, behind their back or to their face. About your boss. About your in-laws. About the politician you can’t stand. About yourself.

Scripture: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up.” — Ephesians 4:29

How to do it: Keep a small mental tally for the first week. By week two, the tally is unnecessary because the awareness has built. By week three, the world around you is the only thing that’s noticeably different — it’s softer, because your mouth is.

5. Fast from buying anything non-essential

Groceries, medicine, fuel, bills — keep. Everything else — pause. For forty days, no online shopping, no impulse purchases, no “while I’m here I might as well” additions to the basket.

Scripture: “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” — 1 Timothy 6:6

How to do it: Unsubscribe from every retailer email on Day 1. Delete the saved cards from the browser. Put a written list on the fridge of everything you almost bought during Lent. After Easter, review the list. You will be surprised how little of it you actually still want.

6. Fast from screens after dinner

Television, streaming, the laptop. After the meal, the evening is for everything except a screen. Read, talk, walk, pray, do a puzzle, write a letter. The evening lengthens immediately. The forty days lengthen too.

Scripture: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12

How to do it: Have one paperback ready on Ash Wednesday — the book you’ve been meaning to read for two years. By Easter, you will have read several.

7. Fast from the snooze button

A small one. Daily. The alarm rings, you get up. Not after one snooze, not after three. For forty days the first ring is the only ring.

Scripture: “In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice.” — Psalm 5:3

How to do it: The body adapts within ten days. Use those first ten days to also fast from staying up too late, which is the real problem the snooze is solving. By week three, the morning has fifteen minutes in it that didn’t exist before — and you have a candidate for what to do with them.