Reversal of Social Charisma
It’s time to solve the social dilemma and get back to our roots.
The numbers are killing you. Futile scrolling over the tabs you’ve already gone through seems inevitable. Like, shares, views, or comments are the numbers on which your happiness depends. What is up with these numbers? These obsessions indicate the impact of social media and numbers on us. When I started reading on Medium, my reading list was filled with superfluous articles on self-help, productivity, etc. After trotting over twenty such articles, the point which always squeezed its way inside the article was Social Media. These apps are cajoling you into their web, and it's nothing less than Folie à deux between you and your Instagram. Astonishingly, involving only one living person.
Every article had pointed out why social media is bad, why we should stop looking at the screens as soon as we wake up, and many other things, which never made sense to me (until now). The most popular was that “Phones should not be the first thing you see in the morning.” But, I usually woke up just because of my feed. Otherwise, I could have ended up sleeping for more than ten hours. After a few minutes of scrolling, my morning fog was gone, and social media worked as a good sleep-remover for me.
I discovered the problem affiliated with facing the screens immediately after opening my eyes when I started writing. Glancing over the sentences greatly differs from framing them, and my conversion from reader to writer had provided a different lens for vision. Let’s break up what a newbie writer does —
- Frame ideas inside the mind and keeps the ideas inside the head.
- Writes an article in a day and thinks little about the article for the next day.
- He sleeps with some ideas and tries to frame out another piece in the morning.
Oh! I missed one point, a newbie also stares at the screens before going to sleep, wakes up just to stare at the screen again, and eats up the most crucial time of “thinking.” After completing the staring process, he freshens up and sits on the desk to let ideas come out from the ether. I struggled to write new things just after few days, and I discovered the snag after analyzing my habits. I was killing a crucial time of thinking about the article, and the early morning social media was successfully deleting any crucial ideas that I framed last night. This applies to every regime; I have presented the writer’s perspective but can be extended to almost anything. Each niche requires creativity and social media kills your creativity.
An amazing snippet from Willian H. McRaven explains the impact of small thing you do —
If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another.
Also, Laborit’s law signifies the importance of avoiding “brain draining” tasks like social media interaction in the morning.
From my experience, I can tell, using a mobile phone immediately after waking up doesn’t give any sense of pride; it rather provides a guilt episode if you end up staring at it for pretty long. Making your bed does give a sense of satisfaction. I realized a weird thing about human nature after quitting the social media morning ritual, which I thought was part of my routine. A person tries to back up and provide strength to his beliefs by various excuses. I didn’t feel the need to use my sleep-remover anymore in the morning. Numbers weren’t affecting me anymore.
The most tragic thing is that reduced mobile usage helps you get better sleep, and I experienced it. Every night when I slept after my eyes became tired of watching pixels; my sleep wasn’t doing its job. I use to wake up with the same tiredness and dizziness of the last day, and it almost felt like I didn’t sleep. Reducing my screen time have had massively improved my sleep cycles and mental productivity.
Breaking Out of the Loop
People don’t realize that they are in the social media loop. When a person opens his phone, first he goes to Instagram, then Snapchat, then WhatsApp, then Twitter, and then locks the mobile. Within few minutes of completing the loop, you can again find yourself in the path of the same loop. Why does this happen? You know that nothing new might have happened in just a few minutes. According to the scientist at Harvard University, social media interacts with the same brain area, which involves addictions. It provides a similar kind of feeling to what a drug provides to an addict. On a vague scale, there is very little difference between meth-heads and social media addicts.
Apart from the neurological effects, your infinite looping might also be affiliated with procrastination or fear of failure. Sometimes, people avoid a task because it might lead to failures, and they don’t want to experience those adverse feelings. But the clock is still ticking. They can’t just think about the task which they aren’t doing, so to fill up the time people shift towards mobile phones which is much easier. As elaborated by Cal Newport in his best-seller book ‘Deep Work’, we are distracted so easily by these distractions because it feels easy.
It is indispensable to move out of these loops. The small habits that add up to create huge differences can help you escape this ‘web’. The best and most effective way is to follow a routine that includes perfect slots for using mobile, the internet, or any other distraction. It is not possible to abruptly halt the use of social media; we can’t. The habit we have cultivated for a long time can’t be quitted in just one day. We need slow but regular moves to win this game. Cal Newport defines these slots as Internet Blocks. Just fix a time for using your mobile phone and persistently follow the routine. You’ll be surprised by the results.
A final quote by Warren Buffett sums it up —.’
Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.I see people with habit patterns that are self-destructive when they’re 50 or 60 and they really can’t change it. They’re imprisoned by that.
Don’t let your habits imprison you. Saying that “I can quit these habits anytime, you feel like, but I don’t have reason or motivation” is proof of the chains around you. It’s never too late to build something great, and for building something great, you need time. Don’t let pixels blur your visions.
Break the chains.
