I’ve struggled with focus earlier this year. I felt pulled in all directions, overwhelmed by the world, and generally miserable. I decided to abstain from using social media for a week to see if anything would change.

The Joy of Missing Out was so strong that I ended up staying off social media for 3 whole weeks. I realized that engaging with social media harmed my mental health, and I could develop strategies to improve my relationship with it.

The social media I use

Text-based social media

I used Facebook in my youth but deleted my account about 10 years ago. Since then, I’ve been using text-based social media. I primarily browse Mastodon and Bluesky to know what people in my circles think about and to follow the news.

I tried actively using LinkedIn for a while but couldn’t endure it. The feed is full of inauthentic posts, sales pitches, and outrageous takes to get engagement. LinkedIn is primarily a DM inbox for me now.

I abandoned the rest

I used to browse Reddit via the Apollo third-party client. In June 2023, Reddit decided to charge for its API, effectively making Apollo unusable since the developer couldn’t afford the absurd amount of money they charged for it. Given the time and attention sink it had become for me, I decided use Apollo’s decommissioning as an opportunity to quit Reddit.

I tried Instagram, but it just didn’t stick. I’ve also explored Pixelfed to find inspiration from fellow photographers, but the behavior of its single maintainer didn’t inspire confidence, so I left quickly.

TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and other short video platforms are the opposite of what I want. I need calm and room for nuance. I occasionally watch videos on YouTube but never follow the recommendations.

The impact social media has on me

I knew social media could influence people, but I thought I would notice if it dramatically changed how I feel, think, and behave. It turns out I was wrong. Social media changed me in several ways.

(In)tolerance to boredom

At the beginning of the experiment, I still had social media apps on my phone. The first thing I noticed was how often I grabbed my phone with my thumb hovering over the Mastodon app icon out of pure habit.

Forcing myself to stay off social media made me realize that the only moment I was left alone with my thoughts was in the shower. Even in bed, I frequently grabbed my phone to check something or see what was happening while I couldn’t sleep. The anxiety-inducing nature of social media made it even more difficult to find sleep.

Sense of overwhelm / FOMO

When I grabbed my phone at night, when I browsed social media after a meeting, when I checked my feed after being focused on something else, I saw new posts.

I tried to curate my feed, but whatever I did, new content kept appearing. Always more posts crafted to get my attention. Always new things to care about. The world would never stop and constantly go in the wrong direction. It felt overwhelming.

Speed of thought

The influx of information in my feed was too massive for me to ingest, besides my family and work duties. I ended up skimming through the posts and articles they linked to instead of taking the time to read and understand them properly.

Skimming content didn’t just make me lose information. It also made me mentally switch to a “high-speed mode,” where I didn’t take the time to think and do things properly. Once in this mode, I felt restless and rushed things. Focusing on anything was painful.

Big Bad World

I am not part of many minorities, but I care about making the world a better place for as many fellow humans as possible. I need to hear about other people’s problems and consider them when elaborating solutions for my own issues. In other words, I care about the intersectionality of struggles.

To that effect, I subscribed to accounts reporting what their minority is struggling with, effectively building a depressing feed. Awareness of what others struggle with is essential, but being completely burned out by a constant flux of bad news is draining.

Punchline thinking

Mastodon’s developers try not to make it a dopamine-driven social media. But the concept of short posts that people can boost and like is naturally dopamine-inducing. I had already noticed that I am prone to addictive behaviors and pay extra attention to that.

However, I hadn’t noticed that whenever I wanted to talk publicly about a problem, I tried to find a punchline for it. I tried to find concise, impactful sentences to catch people’s attention and craft a post that would make the rounds.

Writing longer-form posts on my blog forced me to consider the nuances, but I don’t write a blog post for every single opinion I have. Thinking in punchlines made my thoughts more polarized, less nuanced, and, truth be told, more inflammatory.

What I changed

I embraced not knowing

I acknowledged that I don’t need to know about things the moment they happen. I also realized that sometimes people will make an issue appear bigger than it is for the sake of engagement (even on the Fediverse).

My solution is to get my news from outlets I trust. These outlets will not only tell me about what happened but also about the consequences and what I can do about it. It helps combat the feeling of powerlessness in an unjust world.

I also subscribed to news via RSS. I am using miniflux as a minimal, cheap, and privacy respecting RSS service, and the ReadKit apps on macOS and iOS.

I added friction

Social media can take a significant toll on me, but it’s not all negative. They have helped me meet excellent people, discover fantastic projects, and spread some of my ideas. I have not vanished from social media and will likely not.

But I added friction to make it more difficult for me to browse them compulsively. I removed their apps from my phone and logged out of their websites on my computer. If I want to browse social media, I must be in front of a computer and log in. This has to be intentional now, not just compulsive.

I monitor my screen time

When I wanted to lose weight, a very effective strategy has been to count calories. Knowing how many calories I burned when exercising and how many calories I absorbed when eating a cookie made the latter less appealing to me.

The same applies to screen time. Knowing how much time I spend in front of a website or app helps me realize that I need to give it less attention. Apple’s Screen Time feature has helped me monitor my usage.

With all these changes, I feel much happier. I can focus on my work, read more books, and happily spend an hour or so every night reading documentation and working on pet projects.