The Social Media Plague

I’m no expert on social media usage and mental health (or any of the allied fields). These are just some of the observations I’ve drawn from my own life and some methods that have worked great for me.

When I first tried to estimate my phone usage, I estimated I was staring at my screen around 60-120 minutes every single day.

However, I was way off! I used the app YourHour to track my screen time and learned I was spending approximately 180-200 minutes each day.

It is safe to say that I was addicted to my phone. I kept checking it without any purpose and instant gratification had me in its grips. This unfortunately translated into my personal and professional life as well. I was procrastinating at almost every single task, I was missing deadlines, producing work which wasn’t up to the mark; frankly, I was not in a very good place.

I’ve read, in my vain attempts to beat procrastination, that instant gratification has been hard wired into our brains evolutionarily. Which makes sense for a cave-dwelling pre-agricultural revolution Homo sapiens. Back then you didn’t know when you were getting your next meal and high-calorie sweet food was extremely rare. Eating as much as you can in one sitting was necessary for survival. But it isn’t now. Somehow these predispositions to overeating, or more generally, over-consumption have stuck through the eons. Food, TV shows, likes, comments, subscribers, followers, we want more of everything and modern companies have found just the right formula to keep bringing consumers back. Providing intermittent rewards, mimicking a slot machine, creating dissonance-free bubbles, gamifying almost every task, priming, the list of not-so-obvious tricks up their sleeves is almost never-ending.

They seem so harmless, and will never hurt any of its users directly. But the psychological impact is almost lifelong. The attention span of each successive generation is reducing, specific phone-use related problems (such as neck injuries) and mental health problems due to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle are rising.

All of this beget the question, how do we stop?

A few coping strategies that helped me reduce my dependence on my phone are -

Shifting work to the laptop.

I have almost completely stopped using my phone to browse Reddit, or other meme-sharing websites. Now I have to specifically turn my laptop on for these things.

Note that I haven’t banned the activity of browsing memes entirely, I have only made it a little inconvenient. This ensures that the chances of relapse are low.

I also now answer emails on my laptop, making me unlock my phone lesser times than needed. This shields me from unknowingly wasting time on my phone.

WhatsApp usage at home is almost purely on laptop. It isn’t as easy to send messages and hold long conversations with little to no significance.

Banning all notifications from apps I find most distracting.

I haven’t banned all notifications, just for the apps I spend way too much time on.

‘In and Out’ apps on the home screen.

The apps found on my home screen are only very essential and non-time consuming apps. I cannot spend hours on Gmail or Google Chrome with no purpose (technically, Chrome gives me access to boundless distraction from the internet, but I’ve never used it for anything besides looking something up for lectures.)

Time-monitoring app.

I’ve been using “YourHour” to track the time I spend on each app. It gives me the exact amount of time spent and also has a real-time clock on my screen which keeps me from losing track of time by falling into the social media blackhole.

Grey scale home screen.

My home screen is not technically grey scale, but I have made it very minimal with no other colors.

Deleting all non-essential apps.

If it’s something I could easily do on my laptop and has nothing of immediate importance, it’s out of my phone. As a side benefit, I have a lot of meme storage space, but I’ve stopped browsing memes on my phone…

Wearing a wristwatch!

Sounds stupid or obvious, but wearing a wristwatch has kept me from checking my phone screen a lot of times.

Besides all the above mentioned strategies to beat phone usage, I’ve been using an ad-block on my laptop. This keeps Google or other websites from tracking my activities on the internet which could later be used to dig deeper, more customized rabbit-holes of content on my social media feeds.

The immediate benefits of these strategies include increased free time to cultivate good habits.

By simply not using my phone when not required, I set off a chain of good habits and decisions. For example, the time I previously spent on Instagram and Reddit while riding the train I now use to read. When I read a particularly interesting book, I seek out to learn more about it and makes me read even more books/articles. This means that my attention span has been gradually increasing and my knowledge base has been expanding. Just because I didn’t use Instagram.

I have been more up to date with my notes and submissions, which means I have less stress to deal with during the exam times and I don’t lose a stray mark or two due to tardiness. My health has improved (surprisingly!) Colds, which were a weekly occurrence for me during winters, have almost entirely vanished. I don’t think that all these benefits are entirely due to my reduced phone usage but the decision cascade effect it started definitely has a hand in it.

The long-term benefits are not so obvious right now, but even if I improve the quality of my life by 1% every single day by not using social media as much, the effect would compound over the years. My life in 5 years, or even 1 year down the line will be unrecognizable from what it is today.

Though it may seem like it, I haven’t ventured out on a witch-hunt against social media, and I’m not saying it’s all bad. But, the over-use of each and every social media platform has far-reaching and invisible consequences. The ease through which someone gets addicted is alarming and one of the best ways to tackle this is being mindful of our activities.

Technology has given us these amazing gadgets, but we must use them carefully.

“Just one more video” or “just a few more minutes” are the wardens of our digital prisons.