I’ve often mentioned here how I’d like to sort of get away from all social media and all silly entertainment, and I finally feel now like I’ve pretty much done that. YouTube had long since been the holdout, but I’ve been using the Screen Zen app and it has successfully gotten rid of the habit.
It’s not that I don’t ever use YouTube now, but the app basically just bugs me to get off it, and I do. So I went from averaging probably almost 2 hours per day on YouTube down to maybe 10 minutes per day. Which is great!
But I feel like a lot of wiring in my brain is being reworked.
I’ve been practicing a ton of guitar and reading a lot. And… Not much else, beyond work and normal, in-person socializing.
What I spend my time on has seen a massive shift away from mindless entertainment and far more onto productive practicing and reading in other languages. Both are things I’ve wanted to prioritize, and now I am.
But I think it necessitates a recalibration of many things. Some of this will happen naturally, and some I probably need to put some thought into.
Historically, almost any time I found myself home alone on a weekday (or worse: weekend), I found myself feeling very lonely and itching for some kind of distraction.
And I always found that distraction: mostly in mindless entertainment.
Over the years, any time I felt that tinge of restlessness or loneliness, I would just turn to YouTube or just watching movies or shows, and I could successfully ignore it.
But now I’m not doing that. The feeling is still there, but I’m channeling that energy into practicing things and reading.
Whereas in the past I never saw those as pleasurable activities, I feel like they are slowly becoming so as more and more time goes by and I get away from any social media or entertainment addiction.
I’ve heard a lot about “dopamine resets,” which may be largely nonsense as a concept. But while there may be no way to “reset” things in one go, I think that if I can avoid all of the mindless entertainment as an ongoing state that it will greatly increase my enjoyment of good, healthy things.
Since it’s all still kind of new, I don’t know for sure, but that certainly feels like how things are going.
So I’ll keep paying attention to that and see where it gets me.
I’ll also work on avoiding giving into any temptation when I feel that boredom or loneliness or… Whatever.
I think being bored is a gift. Maybe nothing productive or healthy sounds fun in a moment, and that’s okay. Maybe I should just be bored for once.
I don’t need to be stimulated every second of every day.
We’ll see how things go in the future, but I’m hopeful they will keep improving in this area.