Addicted to social media, games and youtube

I'm pulling the plug on both laptop and smartphone. I have certainly become an addict. For original post see at the bottom of this post. This is a first week report.

The agreement

After a little more thinking I understood I had to use internet for some reasons: Business e-mail, administration (I still have my accounting on the cloud), contact with people that would forget I don't read whatsapp, etc.

To accommodate this, I decided the following:

  • Bring away all games and don't touch them for a month
  • Leave my laptop and smartphone at brother's place
  • Use the last two for 3 max hours each week (no more than 1 hour recreational)

Only one hour recreational. I better type this fast.

Day one

Simon Sinek says in a video that every message was a dopamine release in the brain. It's what made me finally decide to do this experiment. He wasn't kidding, the first day I was completely at a loss to fulfill a nagging inner desire. It was really hard. I picked up my phone again and again... to realize that it only had a couple of important contacts, no games, no internet. Picked it up again and again to look at that stupid Alcatel phone. The question of whether I was an addict or not had been answered pretty quickly. What do I do with these seas of time? Let's read a book. Let's organize some stuff in my house. Let's see what they're saying in the whatsapp gro... oh shit I can't.

Day two

Okay I finished reading the book that I started the day before. That's more than I've read in two weeks. I've got a lot of time left. Let's read some more. Let's go to that new year's party anyways, I'm bored. On new year's eve a friend has to work at 10:00 and tries to convince me to workout out and keep him company in case no people show up. That means only a couple of hours sleep. On the other hand, my equilibrium has changes. Where normally I am really frugal with my time and particularly with setting up get togethers under less than ideal circumstances, now I'm hungry to meet up rather than do a solo workout later during the day. I show up. We train, we talk. Good times.

day three-seven

I've started reading a fourth book this morning. At this rate I'll finally be through my booklist that I was hardly making a dent in in a month's time. I feel a lot calmer. I am less forgetful. When I'm stressed, I feel more... confident in going towards what is stressing me.

I did have some sort of panic moment once this week, where I was under a lot of pressure to fulfill competing obligations. Normally, I would have played a game for 20 minutes and it would calm my nerves. Now instead I had to wallow in and feel the panic. Instead I coped with it by thinking it through and realizing I had to prioritize one over the other.

I know it might sound really simple and straigthforward as I write this down, to the point of being juvenile. To that I can only say in this respect, I am/was juvenile. As such I recognise that this is not applicable to all readers. Though certainly there must be more than a couple of people who are addicted to getting social media messages/validation.

Positive effects:

  • Reading a LOT (previously I couldn't read for more than 10 minutes before checking my phone messages)
  • More social (allowing myself to be bored makes me desire social interactino more)
  • Less anxious (the time in between things allows me to reflect, accept and move on from things that trouble me)
  • Do a lot more work and feel less tired
  • I don't seem to be as forgetful
  • Paper diary gives better privacy
  • Lack of GPS gives better privacy
  • I reflect on things more
  • I am more creative
  • Cleaner more ordered home

Negative effects:

  • Finding some things without GPS is hard
  • I can't look up product information/advice on the spot
  • I am not staying in touch with current events/developments as much
  • It is a hard period of withdrawal
  • A paper diary is a bigger liability, since I might lose it

criticism

I think one of the best critiques I've gotten was:

/u/JcHgvr :

Next thing you'll see is people posting some bullshit about superpowers they got from not using their phone for a month.

Everything in moderation, especially moderation. If you lack self control it doesn't matter if it's masturbation, social media or even drugs or gambling. None of those are the problem. You are.

And just like the zealots from no fap you'll start advocating that all tech is bad. It's not. It's your lack of will power.

And he's absolutely right. But I've been trying to build self-control for 8 months and I had far too little progress. In fact, I missed more than half of goals I made. I agree that the problem was me, but I was not able to figure out how to change me. How to do it different. I tried so many things and they almost all failed immediately. Those ways that didn't, failed after a week. I think for most people, they don't need to do this, but I certainly had to.

Conclusions so far

Best decision I've made since 8-year old me decided to always do at least 1 sport.

All of the productivity ideas and tips I've gotten the last year, this is the one I needed. I've reached each of my productivity goals. Maybe it's just because I'm shaking things up. Maybe it's the old thing that if you sacrifice things big enough, then you really appreciate and work hard with what's left. But I don't think so. I think it was the technology-employed habits that got me to not do what I set out to do far more often than I wanted. Like the casino lights, always distracting. I can see the book "Hooked - How to create habit-forming products" taunting me from where I'm sitting.

Lessons learned:

Somehow, of all the ideas I've tried, this one I've tried far later than I should have. I had a serious blindspot. I didn't realize how addicted I was until I took it away. Every time I entered the house; my brain signalled: Let's game! Every time I took out my phone. Every time I lay on bed. Every time I woke up. Every time I went into the kitchen (I normally played youtube vids to listen to if I was alone). I resisted the idea at first, but then I thought; resistance always means something (thank you "the war of art" by Steven Pressfield). It's why helping people by giving advice is rarely enough; if they didn't immuninize themselves to that advice spefically, they would have learned the lesson long ago. I try to apply this knowledge to my own life, but it's hard to find your own blindspots.

It was important that I set clear boundaries to keep myself honest. I'm doing this for 1 month. 3 hours is absolute max per month.

I'll keep a bigger log on lessons, but my hour is up. In Mark Twain's words: I'm sorry for writing a long post, I didn't have time to write a short one.

Original post: http://archive.is/RsgTM