I don’t have inner peace. Far from it. My mind is always full of thoughts. One thought goes away, another one comes in. Sometimes I would be thinking of one thing, then for no reason, stop thinking about it, and start thinking something else. Most of the times, my instinct is to open chrome, type in instagram, and then start scrolling. I have lost several hours that I didn’t mean to this way.
I thought blocking instagram from phone would work. I blocked the app using an app blocker, and gave myself 15 mins per day to scroll. It worked in the beginning, but then slowly it stopped working. The blocker app allowed to easily bypass the block.
Then I removed the app from phone all together....only to download it back a few weeks later, scroll for sometime, then again delete it. This went on for some time.
But I could see the progress. My scrolling time went significantly lower. The app not being there, helped quite a bit, and I didn’t have to use my will power to fight my mindlessness. I repeated the same thing with Youtube.
It’s almost like the app takes over, and I lose all conscious control. I am aware but I am not aware. It’s a very weird state.
After around 30 to 45 mins of scroll my eyes would be watering, my brain would hurt and literally come up for air, and then I would have a short moment of lucidity. I can either stop the scroll and resume what I was doing, or go back in the dopamine pool.
I don’t want this to happen. My attention is valuable. My time is valuable.
I want to be able to stay connected to my friends, find useful information, maybe get a bit entertained, and not get pulled into endless content consumption.
After driving down such incidents, I think it’s come to a manageable level. I want to share some of the things that have been working.
First of all, a mindset shift, if you haven’t had it already. You have to fight technology with technology. It levels the playing field to some extent.
Armies of Product Managers and Software Engineers at big tech companies are working and have been working from over a decade, to deliver pure, unadulterated dopamine to your brain. They endlessly optimize retention time, engagement rate, reel load time, choice of content on feed, based on psychological studies and A/B experiments. All so that they can bypass your psychological defenses and deliver Ads to you, mixed within your feed.
Tactics anyone can share, what you need is a philosophical and motivational foundation. Only after this, you can begin to regain control and hope to succeed.
You need to start meditating. And it has to be the kind which works for you. Headspace didn’t work for me. Calm was ok, but I never paid for it. Free apps don’t offer a structured course. What worked for me was using Waking up app from Sam Harris. His analytical style helped me understand and not reject the ideas at the first point of disagreement.
In addition to this, you need to put physical barriers between you and your addiction. Here’s my stack:
On mobile, I use this app called Opal. Their free plan works for me.
On my work laptop, I don’t have any of the apps installed.
For youtube, I use youtube feed blocker. I still can see the video if I have a link, but no recommendations or comments.
For other websites like Instagram, I use otto.
I have also blocked that domain at the host level on my work laptop. Pretty useful.
Lately, I have been using a chrome extension I built myself, I call it inner-peace. I haven’t published it on chrome store (too much work, but maybe I will), its open source and available on Github https://github.com/HarshdeepGupta/inner-peace
I am pretty happy with the above stack. My only way to access these sites is to use chrome from mobile phone. And for some reason, that is just not that addictive.
This is not in any way meant to point against any of the manufacturers of these apps. They are big and important businesses. Advertisers and companies pay them exactly so that they can do what they are doing, and deliver ads to us. So that we can buy their products, and the economy keeps growing. Without these companies the economy would tank, and we don’t want that.
I only want to stay in control, and maybe find inner peas 🫛.
If you want the same, now you can do too.
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