How I Beat My Social Media Addiction
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” — Warren Buffett
This is a personal review of how I beat my social media addiction.
I hope that by going through the method I have described below, you will be able to apply it to your own life.
Background:
Around November, I started reading Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio. I picked up a key point from the book. That point was if you could overcome one really bad habit you can drastically improve your life. I decided that I would attempt to overcome my addiction to social media.
The time I spent on social media was cutting into my personal goals and creating lots of unnecessary stress in my life.
It always felt like I did not have enough time in the day to get through everything I wanted. As well, I had trouble doing deep work. Deep work being deeply concentrated on a task for more than 1 hour without any distractions.
All those countless hours spent scrolling and looking through posts were very unproductive.
I tried using apps that would lock your phone, but that did not have the desired effect. It also locked me out of my other applications. Applications that I needed to effectively to do my job. As well, they locked me out of applications that I needed to coordinate with friends.
These “time-saver” applications were great and well designed. Unfortunately, they were not practical enough for me.
In Principles, he often cited another book. This book was called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. In Principles, Ray explained at a high level that most of the things we do every day are based on ingrained habits. It led me to strongly believe that my social media viewing was a bad habit. This habit was also especially hard to break free from.
Since there would be solutions on how to break bad habits in the book, I read The Power of Habit and worked to utilize its methods to solve overcome my social media viewing habit.
The Method:
In The Power of Habit, one of the key points is that there are four parts of the habit loop. The Cue, the Routine, the Reward, and the Craving. Here are my definitions for them:
- Cue: The event/situation that will trigger your routine (e.g. being bored).
- Routine: The action that you perform as a result of the Cue triggering you (e.g. open social media apps on your phone and begin scrolling).
- Reward: Some emotional and/or physical satisfaction that you get from performing the Routine (e.g. not being bored anymore as a result of viewing posts).
- Craving: A deep, underlying desire that influences the habit cycle(Cue, Routine, and Reward)(e.g. A desire to get more knowledge influences social media viewing habits because each post gets you more knowledge).
By reading the book, I learned that to change a habit you can only change the Routine. Changing any other element will result in likely failure. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. For example:
- How hard is it to change a deep underlying desire? (Craving)
- It will also be difficult to change emotional and/or physical satisfaction you derive (Reward).
- You also cannot prevent external events that trigger your actions (Cue).
The only thing you control, the only thing you can change is your actions after you have been triggered by something (Routine).
The Changes:
“Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” — Vince Lombardi
Once I understood the method, I designed a new Routine while keeping the other components the same. Here is my new process compared to my old process:
Old process:
- Cue: Feeling boredom and opening up social media application
- Routine: Browse social media application
- Reward: New knowledge and laughter
- Craving: Desire for new knowledge and information/a break
New process:
- Cue: Feeling boredom and opening up social media application
- Routine: Reading one paragraph from Kindle on phone
- Reward: New knowledge, laughter, boredom relief.
- Craving: Desire for new knowledge and information/a break
Every time I took out my phone to view social media I would close the app immediately once I realized I was viewing social media and immediately open my kindle app.
By changing to the new process I satisfied both my Reward and Craving. Reading from my Kindle, I learn new knowledge and sometimes got a laugh.
It’s been one month since I began this new process and it has worked splendidly.
The Results:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant
My social media viewing has decreased significantly. It is not to say that I have completely eliminated it. My daily usage has decreased from an average of 1.5 hours a day to 10 minutes. There are days where I do not browse social media at all.
By checking my phone less, I have significantly reduced by daily distractions. Thus, I created much more time for deep work projects. As well, my concentration and follow through has also improved. Before I would have been very difficult for me to complete one blog post in one sitting. But, believe it or not, I have completed this blog post in one go.
In my day-to-day, there has also been less anxiety and stress. Fear of missing out (FOMO) has also decreased. By viewing less social media there is less information swirling through my head, causing less anxiety, FOMO, and stress.
Most importantly, I learned a skill that could be used again and again to overcome bad habits. If overcoming one bad habit can change your life, then overcoming 10 will really skyrocket things. This is an extremely powerful skill to have because the opposite is also true. You can also create good habits by engineering a habit cycle.
I would definitely use this process to achieve future goals and to correct other bad habits.
The Conclusion:
“Research has shown that it takes 31 days of conscious effort to make or break a habit.” — Shiv Khera
The Power of Habit and Principles are both great books. I recommend you to read both of them. Both of these books bestow so many great lessons. As well, they are both great for a second read if you need a reminder.
As well, I would love to hear about any methods you may have to correct bad habits or any other reading suggestions.
