A Tactical Guide to Social Media Use
Regain your focus, be more present, avoid Dopaminergic Downregulation
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." - Dorothy Parker
Gentlemen. Hot take: Boredom is good for you.
This shouldn’t be a hot take, this is a fact Boredom breeds creativity. It is the starting point from which you can explore your innate curiosities. Lack of stimuli gives you the headspace needed to generate a strong sense of self.
I recently watched Battle Royale, a Japanese movie filmed in 1999 (If you haven’t explored Eastern Asian cinema now is a good time to do so). Two of the main characters got expelled from school for stabbing their teacher. They subsequently got banished to their rooms.
What did they do with their free time? One of them played guitar while the other read a book. Think about that. These two guys are legit delinquents and they killed time by pursuing musical and intellectual advancement. Compare this to what a modern-day delinquent would do with ample time on his hands. He’d probably alternate between Pornhub, Fortnite, and beheading videos on LiveLeak.
I bring this up to show you that boredom used to be a pathway to personal development. Leave somebody in a room for long enough and they’ll find a (hopefully) constructive way to entertain themselves. Ask your parents what they did when they were bored as a kid. It was probably one of the following:
Read an encyclopedia
Learn how to crochet
Play the drums
Hunt squirrels
Disassemble & Reassemble the family car
Count to 1,000 in multiples of 8
Are some of these arbitrary? Sure. But they all required some level of deliberate attention & practice. A little bit of cognitive elbow grease.
If you’re reading this, it means you have some semblance of attention span so I assume you grew up without an Ipad.
Think about what you did when you were bored as a kid. Mostly constructive things! Toy trains, dinosaur books (my personal favorite), Lincoln Logs. All of these contributed to your unique cognitive capacities as an adult.
Even better, you probably spent time doing nothing at all. You left entertainment up to your imagination. This was crucial for your ability to function as a free-thinking adult. Something that this younger generation has lost.
Consider us lucky at least our brains developed without the hyperstimulation of TikTok and Youtube rotting our frontal lobe. But that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. Our ability to reap the rewards of boredom-induced exploration is threatened every. single. day.
Our attention spans are fried. Most of us can’t get through a youtube video, let alone a novel. Imagine how great life would be if you actually enjoyed activities of substance. Where would you be in life if work was stimulating? If learning was fulfilling and talking to strangers gave you a sense of joy? What if the only thing standing in your way was your relationship with devices?
So where did things all go wrong?
The invention of the iphone market the death of boredom as we know it
The Attention Economy was the beginning of the end. Ever since our attention was monetized, we’ve been put on a one-way train to scatterbrain city.
Go watch some TV shows from the early 2000s. Friends. Curb your Enthusiasm. Pick your poison. Look at how much differently social life is portrayed. Everybody’s slower, more present, more engaged. Now go to a public cafe, gym or restaurant. Observe how detached we all are. Heads down, on our phones, ignoring the people in front of us. We’re more connected than ever yet wonder why loneliness is at an all-time high.
I was always put off by this. I’d watch movies with my friends in college and we’d be playing Clash of Clans, watching Snapchat stories, and texting, completely ruining the moment.
The nefariousness of these distractions didn’t hit home until I started building software. I read a book called Hooked by Nir Eyal that laid out the playbook on how to get people to keep coming back to your app. I made it my sole objective to make my product as addictive as possible. It gave me a certain clarity on how I had been hooked on other apps, and I was disgusted.
"Reducing the thinking required to take the next action increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously." - Hooked, Nir Eyal
The gamification, color psychology, notifications. I was a dealer getting high on my own supply. So like any informed drug dealer. I cut out all of it. Deleted social media, threw away my X-Box, Changed my phone to greyscale mode.
The months that followed were the most productive and fulfilling of my entire life.
I swapped scrolling social media with articles
I swapped Netflix before bed with philosophy
I swapped TV series with computer science courses
I experienced complete and total behavior change in a matter of weeks. Simply by replacing modern media with less stimulating alternatives.
Social media is an addiction. And what’s the best way to deal with an addiction? To distance yourself from it as much as possible
Drinking problem? No alcohol in the house. Stop going to bars. Stop hanging out with alcoholic friends
Social media’s not as black & white. There’s intrinsic value to online presence. Some of our livelihoods depend on it. Not all of us can quit cold turkey like I did in 2020.
So what can you do? Maximize Friction & Set constraints.
The Ubermensch Stack for Healthy Social Media Use
There are few more suited to speak on this topic than myself. My entire life is predicated on social media use. Before creating my own content I had a TikTok agency. My work depended on me being on the app
I shut down my agency out of sheer repulse over the platform and its effect on our attention spans.
The Attention Economy has been a disaster for the human race
Candidly, reintroducing social media has destroyed that focus I worked so hard to build back in 2020. Casualty of war I suppose. But I like to think I’ve faired better than others thanks to this one primary distinction: I accept the fact that I’m an addict
Social media somehow always creeps its way into my routine. I’ll be answering a text message and BOOM I’m scrolling a Dagestani wrestling page on Instagram. This is a serious problem, and serious problems require serious solutions.
So lets get into the steps
Step 1: Identity Change
Like all effective habit change, you need to start with an identity shift. If you want to quit smoking you need to stop identifying as a smoker.
I don’t scroll Twitter. I don’t engage on Instagram. I don’t even comment happy birthday on my aunt’s Facebook page anymore (I call her instead).
What I’m trying to say is use your ego (in the Freudian sense) to reinforce desired behavior. That behavior being NOT using social media.
You are NOT a doomscroller
You are NOT somebody who likes cheap entertainment
You are NOT somebody to waste time reading tabloids
Accept it, embrace it, burn it into your brain.
Step 2: Remove Temptations
Willpower is for simpletons. There’s no point in expending mental energy avoiding something when you just get rid of it instead. You wouldn’t leave a sleeve of oreos on your kitchen table if you’re eating healthier. Why leave Instagram on your homepage?
Remove temptations entirely. Make it require deliberate effort to access Social media on an as-needed basis.
Don’t keep social media in your bookmark bar
Don’t have TikTok widget on your homepage
Don’t Make YouTube your browser start page
More friction between you & bad habits, less between you & good ones.
Step 3: Different devices for different functions
Your brain is sneakily effective at the association game. Do something somewhere one too many times and your brain will eternally link that behavior to that place.
That’s why I have a dedicated chair for writing. A dedicated song for linear tasks. Why I don’t bring my phone in bed (I want to associate bed with sleeping, nothing else).
I messed up a bit with my computer. I’m getting better but Twitter has triggered my brain to associate laptop with notifications. That sweet sweet dopamine of a notification bar.
You see, this is how they get you. Color psychology & variable reward. 9/10 my notifications are superfluous: Auto-DMs asking me about my newsletter, steroid accusations, post likes. But the variable reward aspect makes it so addictive. Its like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.
This was the same reason I was obsessed with Call of Duty. The uncertainty of the mystery box, the upgrade boxes in the older games. All variable rewards. This anticipatory dopamine spike is why millions of people have thrown their life away for gambling. Its why posting is addictive in & of itself, you never know whats going to pop off and what will flop. Humans love variability. Keeps us on our toes.
Sure, turning off notifications is great, but its not enough. If anything it makes it worse. When you get notifications, you know what you’re going to get. When you turn them off, you have no idea how your account is performing until you check. Its like a handheld Schrodinger’s cat experiment
The best bet is to delete social media from your phone entirely. I do. It creates more friction between you & unintentional consumption. You may think this will hinder your content creating capabilities, but its quite the opposite. I will breakdown my workflow stack at the end
Step 5: Use Tools to Block habitual behavior
Modern problems require modern solutions. Use the same technology that robbed you of your focus to get it back. Here’s some tools that will help you be more intentional with your social media use:
OneSec (Mobile App & Chrome Extension)
My personal favorite. This puts a timed delay on all of your troublesome apps and websites. 10-20 seconds for you to question whether or not you actually want to use the app.
It shows you how many times you’ve tried to access said app in the last 24 hours too. Nothing to make you feel ashamed like seeing you’ve habitually opened twitter 137 times in the last 24 hours.
NewsFeedEradicator (chrome extension)
This Chrome Extension blocks all newsfeeds and replaces it with an inspirational quote. Helps avoid scrolling when you actually need to use the app. I like this especially for YouTube.
BlockSite (chrome extension)
This blocks websites entirely. Good for work sessions & a staple on my work browser. It also has a redirect tool. Every time I habitually type in twitter.com it redirects me to examine.com. Reinforcing beneficial behavior at its finest
Step 5: Fill the Void
If you’re cleaning up your diet, you’re not going to just stop eating. Of course not. You’re going to replace those bad foods with better ones. Same goes with your information diet.
Replace that Apple with an Oreo. Replace that Youtube Video with a a podcast. Replace that Instagram doomscroll with a Substack newsletter (like Health HQ Insider). Those aforementioned tools will give you the buffer time needed to identify when you’re about to fall into a bad habit & let you swap it out for a better one.
Its good to have “ideal behavior” In mind when cutting out junk. Every time you catch yourself falling into social media use, immediately jump to the better alternative. Do it long enough and that will be your default action
Keep a list of go-to resources that you can pull up whenever you get triggered:
Articles
E-books
Audiobooks
Make these the new Doomscroll defaults
It’s good to pepper in physical activity too. Every time you open Instagram unintentionally, do 5 pushups. Take 10 deep breaths. Gets you out of your head and into your body
My personal distractionproof stack
No social media on my phone. If I really need to access it on the go I log in via mobile browser
All content is written in notes app or Typefully
All video/photo content is recorded on my phone & automatically uploaded to ICloud. I then post on iPad or Laptop
Two separate browsers: one with all social media blocked, one with newsfeed eradicator & OneSec
I don’t go on youtube unless I know what I’m looking up. Newsfeederadicator blocks all suggestions
I don’t bring my phone with me as default. Don’t bring it in the bathroom or bedroom.
If I really need to get work done I use FocusMate, an app that forces you to tell another person what you’re doing for the next 25-50 minutes on video call (i’m using it as we speak)
That is all. This may seem like a lot, but once you implement it, it becomes your new MO. Hopefully this was helpful. Godspeed.
This really hit home.
What's crazy is stimulating activities (TV / Movies) are now not even enough for most and it coincides with a side of doom scrolling, vaping & junk food.
Even when I go to the football now, I see kids literally playing games on their phone instead of watching the live game right in front of them.
Low key fucked.
Great article.
Be good to get back to the days where you can enjoy a film, beer with your mates, any kind of sport, reading a book, (anything really), without fucking checking our phones every 10 seconds.
Also, if you wanna get even more depressed, look at any old music festival pre 2010- looks UNREAL. Now all you see is an endless stream of iPhones in the crowd...