Currently, you are spending your time helping others succeed without getting any piece of the pie. Second to that, by doing so, you’re actually harming yourself by reducing your attention span. You’re decreasing your social intelligence. Finally, you increase craving in novelty, which leads to a reduction in personal persistence.
Social media addictions are holding us back from doing what we should be doing.
Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, and all the others are amazing for their ability to create movements, but in general, they are leeching bloodsucking collective amygdala’s.
Let’s identify the problem together and fix it, today!
The problem
Think about it. How many hours a day are you consuming content that others have produced? For me, it was 3-4 hours a day. On weekend days it could easily be 6 hours plus.
How many hours do you spend looking at influencers and liking their stories of success and personal achievement? Really, think about it for a second.
Look at today. Look in your phone and check out your screentime. I want you to feel the impact of watching influencers all day, and I want you to feel how much time you’re investing in them.
Does it feel like a miss alignment of your energy already?
If you’re reading this, that means you and I are probably pretty similar, or at least we were.
You need your yogis, productivity guru’s, and you’re make-up artists and your spiritual beings. You need to see them, and you need to know how they’re feeling, what they are doing, you need to stay on top of them, their businesses and their everything.
We need all of that, we need it like a drug, a fix. We are content junkies.
I still am a struggling content junky, but I’m starting to move away from my addiction one step at a time, and so can you.
Why you should quit with consuming so much content
You are literally watching others achieve their own dreams every day, and you’re not getting anything in return.
Let me tell it to you differently. You’re trading in minutes of your hard-earned time every day so that others can collect these minutes and translate them into wealth that can be used to buy the freedom that you crave all day.
And the funny thing is, the more minutes you invest into someone, the less you get out of it and the quicker the influencer achieves their aspirations and the more absent-minded you become in the process.
Keep the following in your mind: That fitness guru you love watching on Youtube is not there for you, some of them are partly altruistic, but most of them are there because they can make money.
She’s there for her own dreams and aspirations. She’s probably a nice girl without bad intentions, but trust me. She’s there to reach her own goals, and I respect that.
In the end, she needs us to help her with clicks, likes, shares and follows. And we can give it to her. And we oblige without thinking about it.
Why do we spend so much of our time on others?
What if we spent that time that we dedicate to others on ourselves.
What if we made one little switch. One change in our behaviour. What if we viewed it from a different angle. What if we saw every minute we gave them as a lost minute that we could have spent on ourselves?
Stop helping others achieve their dreams. Be selfish. It’s no big deal to be selfish ones in a while, as a matter of fact. Doing things for you isn’t selfish in any way. It would help if you focused on you. As long as you choose to help others along the way, or create jobs or create value, it’s fine to focus on you. And even when others don’t benefit at all, that’s also fine. Remember to be nice to others in the process.
How to break down the addiction loop
I had to go cold turkey on exposure. There could be no stopgaps or fail-safes.
I had to shut off the content dams instantly.
I knew this method would work for me since it had worked with smoking a little more than 450 days ago.
I just had to stop abruptly. And so should you, no looking back.
Like everything in life, stopping something abruptly needs some preparation. You need to keep it up and need some tricks to keep up the abrupt behaviour change.
The key here is minimizing exposure. It would be best if you created an environment in which you’re not confronted with the pull of social media.
I’ve done this in two ways since I used to consume social media on two devices: My phone and my laptop. I needed to reduce exposure to social media for both.
For my phone, I deleted all my social media apps. It sounds hard but trusts me; you should try it. It’s freeing.
After this, I thought I was free, but I wasn’t. These tech companies are smarter than you and me, and somehow they lured me into using their products on the internet browser of my iPhone.
The brilliant engineers, neuroscientists, PhDs, MBAs, and psychologists at big tech were winner, so I had to go one layer deeper to defend myself from their vicious attacks.
After some searching, I found out that you’re able to block certain links and URL’s on your phone. This prevents you from seeing any website that has the URL you block in it. You won’t be able to go to anything with Youtube, Twitter or Facebook in the URL anymore. This was the fix.
I used the simple steps in this article to block certain social media websites on my phone. The steps in the previous article work like a charm.
After a while you forget where the blocking feature in your phone is located. So reversing it becomes annoying and you should stop trying.
If you have an iPhone, click on the link now and do the steps. It’s amazing. It will help you to achieve a life you want instead of drooling over the lives of others.
My phone is done, now only my laptop remains. I did another google search, and I found the SelfControl App for macOS. This little app is great and elegantly simplistic in its functionalities.
You type in a list of all the URL’s the app should block and it will do so.
There is no dead man’s switch. Ones you flip the switch and say start after you’ve chosen the time you want to extend the block, then there’s no way back.
My tip here: be generous and type in as much content garbage sites as you can come up with.
Here is a list to start with:
www.facebook.com
www.twitter.com
www.youtube.com
www.tiktok.com
www.reddit.com
www.instagram.com
www.pinterest.com
www.linkedin.com
www.snapchat.com
www.tumblr.com
Disclaimer: when you need any of these for work-related things, please be advised to take them out of the list. There is no turning back ones you flip the switch.
Another small tip: You need to block everything for days. The thing is that when you active SelfControl you can only give it a 1-day max duration. I think. this is like a safety measurement to you can’t fuck up in the first try.
For me, I need days of restrictions and not hours for this thing to work. The fix to this is to start the timer for a period that you like and then afterwards you’re able to extend the timer with as long as you want.
Click on the button: Extend Block Timer, and now you can add as many hours as you like. I usually extend with 200+ hours. It sounds like a lot, but you’ll need so much time to lower your cravings for content cookies.
Do not continue reading; download the app now, and add 200 hours to your timer. Please share it on Twitter or where ever for some added social pressure. Oh wait, you can’t since you blocked yourself out of the social media universe.
Well done.
Now you’re free. You’ve locked yourself out of the content slurping and consuming world. You’re unable to grant anyone else your valuable minutes. Let’s reverse the roles. Now it’s your time. It’s time to focus on yourself. Let’s focus on your goals.
GO HARDCORE: If you want to go banana’s when it comes to blocking out literally all distractions. Add a list of all the news sites you want to block to the list of social media apps in SelfControl. A quick google search will give you large lists of all the major national and international outlets to block.
Production over consumption
Now we’re going to use our time to do the complete opposite.
We’re going to create, make, share, build, write, and speak. Production of anything, working on something. It’s so rewarding and so powerful. That’s what you should spend your additional free time on.
The moment you start doing instead of consuming, you’ll feel it in your body. It’s different. It’s an activity, it’s thinking for yourself. It’s doing for you.
You gave yourself time and energy to do something with your time. What do you want to achieve?
I myself wanted to be a writer, I want to write more, I want to speak out my voice, and I want to share what I think. What are your dreams? What do you want to work on?
No one will help you with the next step. That’s for you to come up with. What I can say though is do. Do something. Please do it now, do it long or short, maybe carve out 30 minutes tomorrow, make something, write something, and produce something. Small steps, that’s what it takes. Get into the habit of creation instead of the habit of consumption.
The moment you find something that you love, you’ll stick around and get better at it. It’s the truth.
How quitting social media will make you feel
You will be afraid and anxious at first, it’s a normal side effect.
It’s because it has been a while since you were alone with your thoughts. It has been a while since you had some time to think.
You don’t have any distractions in front of you anymore. You are left to your own devices. You’re getting bored, the most dreaded feeling in our society today.
You must decide what to think and need to decide for yourself. For once, you need to decide what to care about and what you want to do with your minutes, hours and days. It’s scary.
Your days of collective thinking and a constant bombardment of group thinking are over.
It won’t come easily. It will be scary at times, but you’ll get through it. You need to get through it if you want to achieve anything in your life.
Concluding thoughts
Always stay positive. Times are bad, and I feel it too. Heck, I’m extremely negative myself these days. Even though I quit social media, things still get to me, and the collective social discord still reaches me.
We need to be vigilant constantly. We have to watch out for negative thoughts every minute of the day. Those thoughts will take us down, and they will make us crave the quick fix of social media feeds. These negative thoughts will push us to make a bad decision.
For example, yesterday, I noticed that my negative thoughts ratio compared to my positive thinking was way off.
I wanted to grab my iPad PRO that I use for work and start up the youtube app in the browser. I almost did it. But I was able to stop myself from pushing through. I even went so far as to block all social media websites on my iPad too.
We should never forget that easy choices give us hard outcomes.
Do better and become better. Use positive self-talk, don’t be ashamed of inner coaching, do it every time you feel down. Do it every time you feel sad.
Before you go, please take the following question into the rest of your day, night or week:
- Why am I spending so much of my time looking at others achieving their dreams?
- What are my own dreams?
- What can I do within 30 minutes that gets me closer to my dreams right now?
- How will I self-coach myself when I’m having a weak moment. How Will. I break the cycle?
Finally, my wish for you is to read this and think; He’s right. I’m depositing so much of my time into others under the disguise of self-soothing behaviour.
Say to yourself that you’re done, say to yourself that you’re following the steps in this article and that you’re shutting yourself out of social media.
That is what I wish for you to do after reading this article. Shut it off and turn yourself on. Have a good one.
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