I find myself spending way more time than I’d like scrolling this site, Reddit, Twitter, etc. I want to limit my digital use to bare necessities, but when I’m mentally exhausted (poor sleep, after work, etc.) it’s kind of all I have the energy to do.
I feel like doing literally nothing, getting lost in my thoughts can be even MORE tiring than using the internet lol. Maybe that’s normal, or maybe it’s like my depressive/anxious brain refusing to shut off or be nice.
Anyway, if you weren’t spending your time online, how would you shut your brain off and unwind?
I basically used Hexbear as substitute for other social media, now I have only one addictive site.
I’m trying this but including some discord’s as well. Day ten. For me it isn’t about unplugging it’s about resisting the emotional conditioning of likes and retweets. Twitter will happily make you feel like dunking on someone matters but it will never produce the meaningful change we need… so I feel like it’s function is to be a heatsink for radical energy.
Before smart phones I would read a book or two a week to the point I would start reading through my collection again when I ran out of new ones.
Quitting cold turkey doesn’t generally work. Turkeys are warm-blooded, and also lazy. If you want to quit a thing, instead focus on doing less of the thing than yesterday.
You also can’t spend your time not doing something. So if you want to log off, you need to pick something else to do in that time instead. Doomscrolling is pretty fucking bad for you, so you’ll still be doing better for your mental health if you play video games, or sit there like a lump watching anime. You don’t have to jump straight to using that time to compose the next great novel or whatever the fuck.
Finally, if you’re routinely too exhausted to play video games, you need to start working out. Even if that’s just three squats and a pushup after work for now, building up that habit will get you better sleep and, paradoxically, more free hours in the day.
Use a redirect extension and set reddit and twitter to something that frequently doesn’t work, libreddit and teddit both break quite a lot. I also trained myself to ask if I really want to do what I’m doing or if I’d rather do my hobbies, that helped me cut bad video games a lot. Sometimes I’ll have a video playing in the background and that’s enough to satiate whatever in my brain likes dumb shit. In my experience energy is absolutely a prerequisite though, if I’m tired then it just doesn’t really matter what I do.
Start small: 20 minutes every weeknight toward an [unplugged] activity you want to do but currently don’t.
Yeah this is great! Don’t be like “oh I locked my phone for 3 hours” - just replace that time with something else. If you don’t plan it out, you won’t want to actually unplug- for good reason. Honestly staring at your phone is a much better use of time than staring at the wall.
