Hello friends! Thank you for the warm welcome back into your inboxes and hearts earlier this week. It makes me feel stronger to know that we are on the same team <3
How are you doing with your doomscrolling? It has been hard to avoid this week especially, as we receive yet another reminder that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy doesn’t give a shit about the lives of Black women, so there will be no justice for Breonna Taylor. This is disheartening and disgusting and depressing … but not at all a surprise. These systems are corrupt and incapable of providing anything that looks like justice. We can’t look to them to help us create the kind of world we want. We have to look to ourselves, and each other.
I find that moments like we had Wednesday are the times when I need to be the most intentional about what I engage with, and to what extent. Sadness and rage roll through the internet like a tsunami, and we gotta feel it all ... but I can’t afford to get lost.
So this week I’ve been trying hard to follow what’s happening and feel my feelings about it without succumbing to the fetal position on the couch. No. I’m preserving my energy for activities that have the capacity to create change. Donating money. Writing to you. Talking to my community. Imagining what we can create together. Getting out that vote.
So, no doomscrolling for me … but I did stay up till 2:30 am playing Words With Friends one night so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ At least it’s better than fighting with people on Facebook.
In fact, literally any activity I could choose to do is better than fighting with people on Facebook. Playing Animal Crossing, reading the graphic novel version of Parable of the Sower, sitting around with my thumb in my bum -- all are much better uses of my time than reading and writing dumb or even smart shit on social media. Why? Because social media sucks me in and then sucks me dry. And sacrificing my mental health doesn’t do anyone one bit of good.
Now it’s not like I’ve achieved some level of enlightened mastery around this … I have been struggling with a serious social media addiction for years. It really ramped up when I moved to Colorado in 2015 and had zero friends nearby. Then the election happened and … well, you know.
So I have tried a million different ways to break the habit, and what I’ve learned is that social media is tricksy and false -- it’s designed to be that way! -- and I need to use a variety of tactics to put my attention on real rest and real work, over and over again. It’s an ongoing practice to stay aware of how I’m engaging and to redirect myself when I get sucked in.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ideas to experiment with -- try some and see how they work for you!
Remind yourself why you are making this change, as often as necessary
Read everything The Nap Ministry writes. Read Cal Newport. Read Tiffany Shlain and listen to her too. Read about how shitty Facebook is. Check out studies about what doomscrolling does to us and get mad. Write about how you feel after doomscrolling and all the reasons why you need to stop. Firm up your resolve to make social media a tool that you use rather than the other way around.Fuck notifications, turn them off forever
Make social media something that you go visit, not something that gets in your face. The only notifications I get are for phone calls and texts and everything else can eat my ass until I’m ready to look at it.Use social media with surgical precision
So much of what floods us on social media is shit we clicked on once and don’t even care about anymore. Take an hour andUnfollow liberally
Leave any groups that irritate or bore you
Mute any conversation or group that’s sending you notifications you don’t want to get
Those folks you do care about? Set it up so that you are notified when they post (in-app notifications only -- not on your home screen). I did this with Facebook so I can get in, see what my favorite people are up to, and get the fuck out again
Put your devices in another room
When you settle down on the couch to watch a movie, or when you want to focus on thinking or journaling or reading a book or hanging out with someone, put your devices in another room. That way you won’t randomly pick em up and start watching Insta stories while a movie plays in the background, then realize you lost the thread of what’s happening in the movie so you have to rewind a bunch of times and it ends up taking the whole night to get through it … or is that just me?Take a screen-free day each week
Mine is usually Saturdays, though I may switch to Sundays until the election so I can phone bank on Saturdays. Invariably I feel like a new woman at the end of a screen-free day -- reconnected with the valuable parts of life and ready to engage with the rest. Remember -- doomscrolling isn’t helping anyone and you don’t owe it to The Movement. A far better offering is to show up ready to do some real work, with some real energy inside you! Here are some tips to make a screen-free day work:Make a paper list of real-life stuff you wanna do on your screen-free day -- I try to make these as tantalizing, fun, and outside-oriented as possible
Decide on your rules ahead of time -- for me, I’m allowed to listen to music, or watch something if I decide what I want to watch first and go seek it out, but no scrolling for content
Print out whatever you think you might need to refer to, and set out and projects or supplies you want to work with
Have a paper and pen nearby where you can write down the stuff that you would normally drop everything to look up. You can look it up tomorrow if you still care (but you probably won't)
On the day, get up, leave your phone in your bedroom, and go live your life like it’s 1999! And then, when you get back online, tell me all about it!
Talk with your friends
If your friend group uses social media to communicate, start a conversation about how you might be able to change that. Send them all the links from #1, let them know you are protecting your mental health, and ask them to consider it, too. Even if they are sticking with social media, make it clear that you need to spend less time there, and make the effort to check in with them via other channels.Use other means to stay informed
Instead of refreshing Twitter a million times a day, I subscribe to a newsletter called What the Fuck Just Happened Today which summarizes the day’s news and links out to other sources if I want to read more. I’ve also heard good things about What a Day, a short daily news recap podcast from the Pod Save America team.Delete the apps
I don’t have Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone. If I want to check them, I do it through Safari, which has a shittier and less addictive user interface. Makes it easier for me to hop in and hop out.Use the controls on your phone and web browser to disrupt the habit
I set my phone to lock me out of Instagram after I’ve spent an hour on it each day, and I also added site-blocking software to my desktop browser that keeps me out of my dangerous sites during certain times. These are easy enough to get around if I really want to, but how often do you pick up your phone and immediately get into scrolling and refreshing without even thinking about it? These blocker apps do a good job of disrupting that muscle-memory habit, giving you a second to choose to do something else.Crowd out social media with better stuff
I often find myself getting online to dick around because I’m feeling bored or lonely, or just don’t know what else to do with myself. Here’s what has helped me: I have a big running list of other stuff to do -- Laundry! Getting high and taking care of my houseplants! Anything on this list of actions to win in November! Literally any other activity! -- so when I get that time-to-dick-around-on-my-phone feeling, I can check the list and try to do something else. When I remember. Progress not perfection.
I’ll be back next week talking about real work and real rest, and what it looks like when we show up in the world traumatized and depleted vs. well-rested and connected to what we believe is good and worth fighting for in this life.
In the meantime, if you have any tips for breaking the doomscrolling habit, share them in the comments or by smashing that reply button.
And remember, fuck social media and all the craven rich people who get richer and more craven every time we get lost in it.
GO TEAM LIVING ORGANISMS!
Love you <3
Madge
PS -- Did you see Lizzo on the cover of VOGUE?
When I have downtime during work my first instinct is to grab my phone to kill a minute, and doom scrolling seems very quick to fill only 30 or so secs, so I went on a quest to find nicer, not-social-media apps I could pick up and put down easily in short chunks of time.
Some of my current faves:
Neko Atsume: set out food and watch cartoon cats come visit your virtual yard. Requires spending $0 & basically no ads. (And you know no ads is basically a unicorn these days!!)
I Love Hue: puzzle game where you rearrange tiles to form a pretty color gradient. And they tell you nice things when you succeed.
Color by number:
A mixed bag. I really wanted to like the ones I tried, but the ads are super intrusive, and they all required monthly subscriptions instead of a one time fee to get rid of ads. YMMV.
So these won’t help overall phone addiction, but could help swap your phone time to something less soul sucking and energy draining.