How to Break Your Social Media Addiction

The famous management consultant, Peter Drucker, once said, "Tell me "what you value, and I might believe you, "but show me your calendar and "your bank statement, and I'll show "you what you really value." And it's true. While I might say that I value truth,

justice, and always eating my spinach,

a detailed look into those two troves

of information would yield quite different answers.

Digging into my bank statements would reveal an enormous

amount of money spent of coffee,

and wooden gnomes from eBay, and a look

at my calendar, not my Google calendar,

but an actual real-time log of

my life's events, if such a thing were possible to build, would shed light upon way more time

than I care to admit, spent scrolling through Instagram,

and Twitter, and other social media apps.

And I would bet that if we were

to look at your calendar, we would see

something similar, if not worse.

Comparisons aside, though, I think

it is safe to say that most of us,

myself included, spend more of

our time and attention than we would like

to on these apps, if we were to look

at our lives from a more rational birds-eye view.

And that is why, today, I wanna give

you some tips for breaking your social media addiction.

Whether you actually call it an addiction,

or whether you're in denial. Now, as astute and long-time viewers

of this channel may know, I am a big fan

of the author Kyle Newport, especially

his book Deep Work, which

actually has a chapter called Quit Social Media.

Given that fact, you may be surprised

to know that I'm not gonna recommend quitting social media in this video.

At least, not right up front, and

that's because I'm an advocate of moderation, and I also recognize

that social media can bring a lot of benefits,

but along with those benefits come drawbacks,

and as the ex-Facebook data scientist,

Jeffrey Hammerbacher once said,

"The best minds of my generation are thinking "about how to make people click ads." And of course, to make you click

those ads, those minds also have

to think about how to keep you

on their platforms for as long as possible,

which means that, at the very least,

these things are meticulously engineered

to be huge time-sinks, but that isn't the only criticism you can level against them.

They also can make you a less happy person,

as repeated research has shown.

When you're spending a ton of your time scrolling through these feeds of meticulously crafted posts

that show the highlights of people's lives, including people that you probably know

in real life, and you're comparing them, sometimes subconsciously, to your own life,

the entire thing, warts and all,

you can start to make comparisons

that really put a damper on your happiness.

So the question is, how do you use

these tools, and treat them like tools,

to get their benefits, while avoiding the drawbacks.

Let's start off with something that is very easy to do, kill your notifications.

Notifications are like that ringing bell

that made Pavlov's dogs salivate, only instead of giving you food,

they deliver a quick dopamine rush

in the form of a new comment, or DM,

or post from someone else.

Now, there is nothing wrong with checking

these posts, or answering your DMs,

but when you look at them in response

to a notification, you are establishing a habit,

you are establishing a craving,

and when those notifications come,

in the future, you're going to have fewer mental defenses for avoiding them.

And the problem, here, is that

these notifications have no respect

for your time, or the fact that

you need long, uninterrupted periods

of concentration to actually get your work done.

So go into your phone's notification settings, for each and every social media app

that you have, and destroy those notifications.

Secondly, I'm going to suggest that you redesign your phone's home screen to remove all social media apps from it,

and this is something that I actually did recently.

You may have seen the video that

I put out just a couple of months ago,

on my iPhone home screen, but even

that home screen layout has now gone the way

of the dodo, because it had social media apps on there.

I think Twitter was on there, and Instagram was on there.

And at the time, I kind of justified it,

because, as a content creator,

I use those platforms for my work.

But I am also a consumer, on those platforms,

and more often than I liked, I found

myself scrolling through them,

wasting my time, so I just got them

entirely off my home screen.

I created an entire second page

of apps on my phone, and I buried all

those social media apps inside of folders.

So if I wanna go to one, I have to look for it.

It's a very intentional thing. Now, if you are on an iPhone, like me,

there is one thing you have to do,

beyond just shoving those apps into folders,

You have to actually turn off Siri's suggestions, as well, because, in my case, when

I would swipe down to search for a different app

that wasn't on my home screen, I would always see Instagram and Twitter sitting

there, which is basically the same thing

as having them on the home screen.

So if you are on an iPhone, you can go

into the settings, you can go into Siri app suggestions,

and you can disable them on an app-by-app basis.

Now, to suggest another option

that would actually negate the need

to do all of that, what if you

only used social media on your computer?

The problem with social media apps

on your phone, and one of the biggest things

we're trying to get away from, here, is that they can become pervasive

throughout your entire life, and

that's because your phone is in your pocket, or in your purse, all day long,

meaning you have constant, easy access to these tools.

But if you were to delete all these apps

off of your phone, you'd still be able to use most of them on your computer,

in a more deliberate manner.

Maybe some of them are a little bit hard

to access, like Snapchat.

I'm not even sure if you can get to that on a computer, but most

of them do have a desktop site,

and in fact, my friend Martin

even found a way to post his photos on

his Instagram profile using a desktop computer.

So if you're finding yourself mindlessly opening Twitter, or Snapchat,

or Instagram, on your phone all the time,

try deleting those apps from your phone,

and just using them on a computer, for awhile.

See how that works out for you.

Now, going back to that problem

of social media becoming pervasive,

throughout your entire life, the next suggestion

I have is to deliberately only use

it at a specific time of the day.

Treat social media like you treat Netflix,

or video games, or anything else

that you only do at specific places and times,

and if you wanted help enforcing this,

you could use a Website and app blocking tool,

like Freedom, which is the one that I use,

and this has been a very helpful tool for me.

I use it to block all sorts of social media sites,

things like Reddit and Hacker News,

and all kinds of other places that

I tend to waste time on, during

my mornings, so that way, instead

of procrastinating during those hours,

I'm writing, or I'm reading, or I'm actually getting my work done.

Now, so far, all we've talked about is the binary choice of using these social media apps

at specific times of the day or not using them,

but this next tip actually kind

of gets into the middle ground,

because social media tools and apps are

actually collections of many different features.

Take Facebook, for example.

Facebook has the news feed, but

it also has the messenger tool,

and it also has the events tool,

and the groups tool, and some of

those tools might actually be very useful

to you, like messenger, or the groups,

while others, like the news feed,

may be completely valueless in your life.

So instead of asking yourself,

"Should I block it or should I use it?" what if you blocked certain features.

And if you use a tool like Todobook,

you can actually block the news feeds

of most major social media platforms,

and other Websites, like Reddit and Hacker News,

so you can only use the more useful functions,

and when you go to look at the news feed,

you're gonna see a to-do list, reminding you of things that

you're supposed to be doing, instead. Okay, so we've talked about all of the rational middle ground answers,

and now we're going to get to the question of, should you quit social media?

Or should you at least stop using

certain social media platforms

in the way that you are currently using them?

So in his book, Deep Work, the author,

Kyle Newport, talks about

something called the "any benefit approach", which is something that people use

to justify using social media tools.

They basically say, if there's any benefit that I can get out of this, that might improve

my life, no matter how small of an improvement

it may make, I am justified in using it.

And, as he writes in the book,

"The problem with this approach, "of course, is that it ignores all the negatives "that come along with the tools in question. "These services are engineered "to be addictive, robbing time "and attention from activities that more directly support "your professional and personal goals." So if those goals are a priority

for you, then you should seriously ask

yourself, "Do I need all the social media accounts "that I currently have?" And you can also get more granular than that, as well,

such as asking, "Do I need this particular app on my phone?" For example, I don't keep the Pinterest app on my phone, because I find that

it's just a time-waster, there, but I haven't deleted my account entirely, because I do find it to be a useful repository

of design, inspiration, and ideas,

that I can go look at, when

I wanna, say, redesign my Website.

But, on the other hand, I found,

recently, that Snapchat offered

me no value, whatsoever, so I actually went

in and deleted my account, there.

And that brings me to my final tip,

here, which is for people who feel

that they are truly addicted to the social media platforms.

If of all the other tips in this video haven't helped you so far, if you just can't resist opening these apps and wasting your time on them,

then try a 30 day serious social media detox.

Get completely away from all of it.

And the first step to doing that would be deleting

those social media apps off of your phone,

blocking the Websites on your computer,

making it generally as difficult as possible to access them.

Keep in mind that your ability

to maintain self-discipline is highly influenced

by your environment, so just like

somebody who's on a diet and trying to avoid junk food needs to get all the junk food out

of their house, you need to get all

of the access to social media out

of your immediate vicinity.

And then, once that 30 days is up, you can start

to slowly reintroduce these tools back

into your life, and see if you can use

them in a way that does benefit you,

but doesn't cause you to waste too much time. And then, once you've gained back that time that you were previously wasting,

scrolling through your Facebook and Instagram feeds,

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