The Healthiest Relationship to Social Media

Use the timing for encoding memories to balance it out.

I’ve done the digital detox. And the habits always come back.

I managed the flow by using browser extensions to hide the feeds from me, so that I don’t go through doom scrolling. And yet... sometimes I get around them.

Then I looked at my most productive and enjoyable days, and I saw a pattern.

It’s extremely simple but just takes self-control at two key moments.These are the most influential moments of our lives. The ones that imprint to memory:

So when we check social media/news/etc first, then we miss a big opportunity.

The thing about consuming social media is it makes time disappear.

Everything is so quick that you barely even remember the exact content one minute after you watched it.

I won’t tell you what to do with your morning routine. I’m just telling you what not to do, from experience. It’s hard, it’s a total habit change.

But it works better for our dopamine production, because dopamine is the drug of anticipation. And when we spend all that anticipation on something so ultimately meaningless, we don’t have that kind of motivation to do the important things.

So simply don’t consume social media right at the beginning and right at the end of your day.

That’s it.

Then we can really start engineering experiences.