DIY

2. Leave your phone out of the bedroom + get an “old-fashioned” alarm clock

When I used to use my phone as an alarm, my first waking thought would be about the state of my status in the world (of social media) and what I’d missed while asleep. It kicked my day off with anxiety, comparison, compulsion, and a general dizzying headache. It was anti-productive and exhausting. Back to bed?

Leaving the phone out of my bedroom gives me what I call a “breakfast buffer” and “bedtime buffer”, undistracted time free of persuasive apps designed to hook me from bedhead to bedtime. All of this was possible with a nostalgic rekindling of my “old-fashioned” alarm clock. Cheap, best sellers linked below. ↓

3. Understand WHY the psychologically-driven designs of social media can be potentially harmful to mental health

Before I dove into this discovery, I would blame my unease and negative mood at the end of a long social media session on me simply not being high enough in the hierarchy. “If I just had more followers/’likes’ I’d have nothing to complain or obsess over!” BS.

Attention is finite, and social media apps are engineered to be as competitive as they can to mine that resource from you. Vanity metrics, constant social feedback, and persuasive habit hooks that exploit our sensitivity toward rejection are just a few methods of extraction.

Educate yourself on all the sticky details of persuasion. The following books helped me do just that: Jaron Lanier’s “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”, Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism”, & Mitch Prinstein’s “Popular”. Linked below. ↓

4. Proactive = Productive

Relying on good ol’ self-control when it comes to usage might be too optimistic, or at least it didn’t work out for me. I started seeing healthier usage, and subsequent improvement in my mood, after discovering tools like Freedom and the Remove YouTube Recommended Videos extension on Chrome.

Freedom allows you to block certain apps that are particularly distracting for an extended amount of time (works on desktop and phone). The Youtube extension removes the homepage “recommended section”, liberating you from 2-hour potential YouTube rabbit holes in your fight for focus. Active blocks on these apps were a game changer for me, second to removing the apps from my devices all together (the next practice). Linked below. ↓

5. Delete distracting apps off of your device

The allure of social media apps comes with their easy accessibility with the glossy swipe of a finger at all times of the day. This nonchalant usage might not feel damaging in the moment, but it’s the accumulation of this time spent scrolling, creeping, commenting, and comparing that takes a toll in the long run. It’s the apps vs. impulse control.

A great practice to mitigate these effects is to take charge of designing your own online experience, rather than being pulled and prodded by algorithms and sneaky techie tricks. Arrange your media management in a way that encourages you to question your usage, i.e. “Do I really want to spend the next 2 hours of downtime comparing myself to Instagram strangers?” Delete those questionable apps off your phone, so if you really do need to use them, you’ll have to go through the extra step of downloading. Sounds irritating, but, you guessed it—that’s the point.

6. DON’T POST…for a week

The most significant shift in my usage came once I tried some of these practices for myself. I was outraged by various articles explaining the link between high usage and compromised mental health. I was also fully aware of my negative mood accompanied with high usage. Nevertheless, I went on engaging with the apps. Especially with my work as a musician, I felt it was practically my duty to keep listeners updated on my every move, meeting, and meal. I know many of you feel the same.

Then I decided to stop, just as an experiment to see how I felt. I discovered the incentive, for me, was greater than any promise of followers, fans, and virtual freebies.

The coliseum competition of constant posting led to an unbalanced experience, heavy with status-oriented maladaptive means of communication, body dissatisfaction, and the inevitable compare and despair.

I couldn’t have experienced the difference had I not freed myself from it for at least a little. The psychological oxygen I needed to understand the differences between my compulsive, addicted side and the calm one didn’t exist in the Insta-environment. And that was just my result. The best practice is to trial and error it for yourself, making your own honest decision about what healthy usage means to you.  

7. Turn off notifications on all social media

Dings, tweets, buzzes, chimes, and rings; the robotic symphony that never stops. Social media companies know we can’t resist their behavioral ballads.

Quick tip, turn them off! That is, all social media notifications. I only keep my text, phone, and calendar notifications on. It’s bogus that I’d need to always be “in the know” about every “like”, follower, and comment as it happens in real time, though app developers know I might want to. I get a little hit each time by keeping them on, reminding me of my social currency, my clout cash reserves in the virtual world.

This constant overstimulation, fear of chronic rejection, and lack of solitude left me with a perpetual low level anxiety buzz all day, as I pondered when my next validation would vibrate. My boredom tolerance was at 0%, and self-reflection was a relic of the past.

Conscious choice making was the answer here. Bye bye birdie!

8. Avoid replacing in-person social interaction with solo “social snacking”

Social media is an infinity pool of fun, but thinks it’s the ocean. The endless social interactions extend as far as the eye can see. It’s like all your friends showed up for the same digital celebration, and the bottomless “likes” and ceaseless connections leave you Twitter tipsy. We revisit tagged photos with the nostalgia of a summer sunset, and the cool waters of discovery sections sway us smoothly from side to side. Nevertheless, those interactions are confined to the app’s dimensions. Every pool has a plug.

Platforms give the impression of boundless connection. This successful stunt is one reason why so many of us are hooked in the first place. Not only are we hooked, though, we are prioritizing online interactions over the real thing: face-to-face relationships.

“Social snacking”, a term coined by W. Gardner, refers to symbols that provide temporary stopgaps for social hunger when in-person social interaction is unavailable. Social media “snacks” include bright notifications, photos, approval metrics, and comments, all which do fulfill, if only temporarily, some desire for social contact. The issue is that so much of our lives are being consumed by this often low-quality contact, favoring quantity of connections instead.

Identify in your social media use what “social snacks” you’re most susceptible to over-consuming, especially when substituted for the real thing. Snacking is enjoyable every so often, just don’t let it ruin the meal.

9. Get “Buff”

An expansion on practice #2 (leave your phone out of the bedroom), this one calls for strict environmental organization in order to get the best out of tech usage and to avoid the common attention traps.

Employ a “Bedtime Buffer” before bed, at least 1 hour, and a “Breakfast Buffer” in the morning, at least 30 minutes, during which there is zero phone usage. This can be accomplished with the help of previously mentioned apps like “Freedom”, or simply keeping your phone in a drawer in another room (most importantly, out of sight). A breath of fresh air and a brush with solitude, just that little bit of space can help you to identify what is necessary vs. habit-driven use, as it did for me. Those lessons can be extremely helpful when approaching further usage patterns and pitfalls.

I’ve found it necessary to take an aggressive, no-nonsense approach when it comes to my online experience. Psychologically-driven engagement baits will win out over sloppy self-control any day. Phonelessness might sound extreme, but a taste of it is the simplest, most straightforward way of gaining the autonomy of mind needed to decide, for yourself, what type of usage makes you the most fulfilled—not the most entertained or the most popular.

My hope is that platforms will become incentivized, economically and societally, to organize their apps in a way that does not call for mind games. Until then, a little muscle in this digital arm wrestle can help.

10. Don’t let fear of disapproval stop you from connecting with friends, family, co-workers, etc. about your concerns

A huge improvement in my mental state and relationship with tech appeared once I started to simply express various issues I was having with product designs and philosophies. Between discovering online communities which voiced similar concerns, to simply having conversations with fellow musicians and friends about the pros and cons of constant use, I would discover that I was not at all alone in much of my skepticism.

My initial hesitancy came from a sense of insecurity: (1) I felt I had no right to express concern over products which had assisted me so immensely in my career. I was worried I’d sound like a whining pessimist, a hypocrite damning the very products I owed much of my statistical success to. (2) I hate conflict, I’m debate-averse. Tech is the booming industry of our time, and to combat this rolling stone in any way seemed like tattooing a target on my back.

An important distinction: I’m not a tech-rejecter. I use it every single day, and it has added value to my life in many ways. Still, my experience with it is tainted in moral compromise. The way social media works now does not, for the most part, bring out my best side. I don’t like who I am addicted, outraged, anxious, and envious in use. Speaking with others, I’ve realized that these issues are not unique to me. Surely, opposition is always looming around the corner. In my experience, it’s been absolutely worth the risk. Chances are, if you’re honest with others about your concerns, you’ll find both understanding and disagreement, but it’s not so scary. Utilize both to bolster your sense of personal accountability in tech use. My hope is that very agency will help incentivize platforms to upgrade to humane design philosophies that serve us more holistically.