I have heard of dopamine fasts. I have not tried them recently. I do remember in the past I just tried a 3 hour period one day day spent away from my computer and phone and books and just chilling on the balcony, just pacing around in the sunlight and thinking about stuff and forcing myself to be with my emotions and thoughts rather than finding ways to numb them or escape them if they ever got uncomfortable. I sometimes find that I use videogames, social media, youtube videos etc. to escape uncomfortable thoughts and emotions rather than being with them and processing them effectively or taking action based on them, e.g. if I’m guilty I haven’t emailed someone back, just email them back. Instead I don’t email them back because I’m worried about messing up the email, and then I avoid the feelings by engaging in the above activities, and then later before sleep or whenever I can’t just escape the feelings/thoughts, I engage in them again and feel bad – I think this has been happening less often recently though, because I seem to just be taking more action and doing less worrying. Kind of like that idea of: Can I do something about it? If yes, do it. If no, don’t worry about it, because I can’t do anything about it.
I’ve been living that out a bit better than I used to ~6+ months ago, but it’s still not great. I do still worry about things I can’t much about and shouldn’t worry about, or worry about things I can do things about without actually doing the things I can do to effect positive change.
Discord is my main social media and it might be hard for me to function without it before 3pm, but I could try it and see how it feels. Other than that I think this forum is the closest thing to social media past discord. I don’t really use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn (I sometimes feel bad when I check LinkedIn every year or two and see a message from someone that I didn’t respond to in a timely manner, but I guess it’s not a big deal if it’s kind of clear I’m not active on LinkedIn and so they shouldn’t expect a response any time soon), TikTok – Ah shit, I just realized YouTube is totally a social media now, with their community posts, commenting features, and also the algorithm showing me more videos that I can easily get lost in a loop on if I’m not paying conscious attention and going there with a specific purpose.
YouTube is definitely a problematic social media for me. Staying away from it before 3pm could be productive to try, or just in general follow a rule for myself that I will not autopilot to YouTube.com when I’m bored and click recommended/home page videos, and instead I will go there with a specific purpose and for a reason, and then leave the site once that purpose is fulfilled, or at least re-evaluate my reasons for staying once the purpose is met.
I do feel glad that I have stopped autopiloting to reddit.com as I used to do that basically any time I didn’t know what else to do. I’m not sure how/why I stopped as it wasn’t a conscious decision to stop, I think I just got busy with other things and reddit seemed less interesting and valuable compared to other ways I was spending my time and other websites I was visiting often. I did often visit curi.us to see if there were new blog posts instead of typing in reddit.com, and sometimes I’d do site:curi.us if I wanted to read old blog posts about some topic that was on my mind and see what you thought about them in the past. I often learnt new, insightful stuff that way and got fresh perspectives on things that I was taking for granted. I like that even like 15+ years ago you wrote about stuff in a unique way and challenged the status quo with good reasoning. I want to learn to be more capable of doing that in my day to day thinking. Simple answer to that is I guess just learn philosophy and get better at thinking for myself rather than being second-handed about most things like I currently am (I hope I’m using the word second-handed correctly there, I’m not confident in my understanding of it, but basically I think of it like I’m socially influenced and kind of follow the herd with many of my opinions, and haven’t thought them through for myself and decided what fits my own values and goals)