It happens. You’re surfing the web, maybe checking out your networks that are social, and bam – it’s stuck. The iPhone screen is no longer responding and you’re stuck staring at gif shared on Twitter that is now stuck on a frame that somehow makes it lose it’s hilarity. You swipe left, right, then up, down – nothing. You begin pushing the home button to no avail and finally start pushing the power button in an effort to reset the now useless iPhone and try and pretend nothing ever happened. But what if that even fails, what do you do then?

The answer is what we call a “soft reset”. There are two different kinds of resets in the mobile world: soft and hard. A hard reset is what you do when you need to not only restart the phone without being able to use the screen, but – because of its severely screwed up demeanor – you have to wipe everything off of it for it to work properly again. Here’s a video example of a that on a Nokia, if you’re interested.

A soft reset, on the other hand, is when you just need to tell the phone to simply restart when you are unable to use the screen.

Almost all phones have some type of soft reset at least built in and the iPhone is no exception. So, if you find your iPhone screen frozen, here’s how to do an iPhone reset.

1. Hold down the Power and Home button.

2. Continue to hold them until the screen turns off then let go.

3. Hold the power button until the screen turns back on.

Simple, and effective. You’re device should boot back up and you should be good to go. Good little trick to have handy as it’ll most likely happen a few times during the life of your phone (and even more so if you are jailbroken and getting a little fancy with the jailbreak tweaks).

Hope that helps! Let me know if this saved you from a mad dash to the genius bar or if it’s something you might have figured out on your own.