I wrote this out for a friend, and I am hoping my experience might help some others. I was hopelessly addicted to looking at twitter in 2019. I was losing time at work due to it causing me panic attacks.
While this is a bit of preaching to the choir on cohost, the truth is, if I was still where I was at in 2019, even the "better" aspects of this site would not have helped me. I had to make some drastic changes to my relationship with the internet to make a dent in my mental health. Replace "twitter" with any social media site in this post, and read it the same way.
I took action because I didn't want to get fired, panic attacks are bad, and I was becoming a generally more anxious, paranoid and unpleasant person to be around. If you spend more than an hour on social media everyday, I would so encourage you to try to spend just a couple weeks reducing your time on it. This post is less about why to do it, which I've seen a lot of posts on, this is on HOW I did it, which I've seen less of.
Here’s what worked for me:
Use a blocker.
I used Freedom, because its cross-platform capability combined with a buy it forever option worked best for me. There are other blocker apps that are free, and I hear Cold Turkey is great, and it's even cheaper.
My reasoning:
- Social media is designed so specifically to target your attention. It's one of the most difficult things you can ask yourself to quit. Its impact on us is going to be a subject of science for a long ass time.
- Are you strong enough to do it on your own? Probably! But you won’t get rewarded for the pain. I also don't actually think it makes you “better” at not relapsing in the future, it just makes it easier to not fully commit and not feel the full effect of not looking at all.
- It's much easier to commit to the process AND prevent relapses if you have a button to click to free yourself.
Please. You might think “I don't need a blocker app, I should just use my sheer willpower to not do this thing I don't want to do anymore!” But I’m here to tell you, it's okay. Fucking block the sites. Wasting my will power on guilting myself about looking at twitter never worked, but going to twitter and seeing the little blocked message made my life immediately better.
Block all sites that load forever or have user generated content that will always have something new when refreshing (twitter, tumblr, reddit)
- For a little while I thought it was just twitter that was bad for me, but moving my habit to any site produced the same result of over-consuming. I blocked everything during work hours, but reduced the block to just twitter at night.
- This includes “better” versions of those sites, like cohost and blusky
- This sucked when people sent funny memes during the day, but getting sent funny memes was how I was getting into an endless cycle of looking at social media. I just committed to memes after work and it was fine.
Remove all bookmarks, shortcuts, and other easy means to get to those places
- This helps make the habits more permanent, because now you have to type in the URL to get to a place which makes you sad.
- This includes the app versions on your phone.
- The bathroom is not a neutral zone where the rules don't apply. If you can't help it, use a blocker app that's cross platform.
REPLACE bookmarks with a couple sites that are extremely slow updating blogs, where if you look at them even twice in a day there might be nothing new.
This is where you sit down and think critically about what healthier internet usage might look for you. This is an important part, because if you are Of The Internet, taking it all away wont feel good. If you can articulate to yourself what might be better, you can start to figure out what will stick. This is that worked for me:
- I replaced all my major news sites with:
- Tech news (Ars, Engadget, and later 404),
- Art news (this is colossal),
- Career related stuff (Ask a manager),
- Local news (Austin chronical, the community impact for my zip code, local flier that comes with the utility bill)
- I still have these on a block list for “I really need to get some work done for the next few hours”, but they are more sanctioned than the “Hit the emergency hell-site button” which was twitter/reddit.
- My other bookmarks are to creative tools I use, and that's it (notion, docs)
What's important about this part is you focus on what your brain tells you need the poison for, and you counteract that with more enriching versions of it.
- Tech news was a slower drip of some current events with one of my core interests at heart.
- Art blogs were a creative vector without having to filter out the Art Discourse of the day.
- The local news ensured that if my immediate surroundings were on fire, I got a heads up. I also opted for the local, once a month rag that is art and culture forward. My town also has some text alert systems for road closures and floods.
My partner replaced Instagram with duo lingo, and looks at different news sites, but only once in the morning. There are so many slow moving news sites, on architecture, music, management, all sorts of shit. Find them.
Create simple rules for closing and blocking a site for the rest of the day.
You keep this rule in your back pocket for the days when you are having a little poison, as a treat. If I had twitter unblocked because I was posting art that day, my rules to close twitter were:
- The first time you see a comment in complete bad faith
- The first hot take that makes you want to engage
- The second time you see a news story that you have no tangible, actionable next steps for, but makes you extremely anxious.
This was the rule set that actually got me to stop looking at twitter forever. The first rule about bad faith comments was so prevalent that the first popular tweet I would look at would trigger blocking for the rest of the day, and I would feel free.
Actively seek out an alternative platform for actual socializing, and consciously try to be more active in multiple communities spanning different interests.
For me that's discord and small friend groups in signal for my non-gamer IRL friends. You need to have some healthy discord/social groups to make this work, but this was a big motivator for me to seek out more places where I felt comfortable in the community and trusted them.
Conclusions
After about a year of blocking, I can look at a meme on a SM media site and then close it after, and so I stopped blocking all day every day. I still occasionally use freedom when I want to focus without temptation, for both work and creative time.
If not looking at the news, or not seeing the news when it breaks scares you, I get it. I was really worried about this too. I decided that being the worst version of myself (an anxious, always paranoid, angry person who was having constant panic attacks) was not going to be able to do much with the news I took in on any given day. I still have the power to hear about current events and consciously seek a few sources to try and broaden my world view. I just dont do it every hour of every day of every week anymore, and that is better for me.
If another person reads this and decides to walk this path, you are not weak for needing to take real, tangible steps to reduce your time online and change your habits. You're strong for deciding that you have the power to make things better for yourself. No amount of plugged in will be good enough for a voice in your head that insists you're never good enough, so take the steps to carve out happiness instead. Life is so short.