Putting iPhone into Recovery Mode

Today, my iPhone 6s had an issue and would not boot no matter what. I let it sit for a few hours and realized how hard it was to work without my iPhone. I can't just quickly bring out my laptop, write down a reminder, and put it in my pocket in a dining hall. While it's nice that we have alternatives and work arounds, there's no denying that a smartphone is essential to almost any lifestyle. So when my iPhone wouldn't boot, I knew I had no other choice. I had to put it into recovery mode. For iPhone 7 users and above, please replace every instance of "home button" with "volume down button." I held the sleep/wake button and the home button. Hold it past the startup screen. Keep doing this until you see the iTunes logo appear. I plugged my iPhone into my MacBook Pro and I was presented with some options. I tried updating it, in hopes it would resolve the issue without needing a restore. That didn't work. I had to do a restore, meaning wiping all of my data and restoring from an iCloud backup. Thankfully, I had a recent backup from the morning before. This weird iPhone hard-lock was not preemptive, with the exception of more and more slowdown (but I was used to that), so paying a little bit for extra iCloud storage for backups just paid for itself. While it was a bit tedious and time-consuming (especially with Apple Pay and Apple Watch), I got my iPhone back up and running. It's a little bit snappier now too.