I don’t allow myself to have my phone in my pocket at home. I keep it with my keys. Reduces the urge to glance at it a million times. I can still hear if I get a call or text. It makes me more present with my family. So far it’s working.
Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
101–110 of 111 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#102Stop using it, it's only output is dopamine
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#103Giving up or blocking social media is much less interesting than being self-aware and looking for ways to get your social media dopamine from things that feel genuinely constructive or interesting. I found “Against Waldenponding” ( https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding ) to be, if not 100% correct and credible, at least a very novel and persuasive argument that you probably owe it to yourself to be on…
Yup. Ultimately you are responsible4 for filtering your content.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree that there are no cool tricks. See my answer below. I do agree that simply stop doing the thing is great, but that doesn't seem to work for many people. It can sound ridiculous if you have the will power, but if it were that simple we would have few overweight people, no addicts in the world, etc.
It is simple. It's just not easy. Lots of cool tricks and yet all the addicts are still there. The most important thing is to start. I even think talking too much about it is a negative because it feels like you're heading towards your goal without actually having done something. Spending lots of time talking and researching uses up energy and makes you feel like you've achived something when you actually haven't don…
Agree in concept, but now moving goal post? First mentioned that "there are no cool tricks". Many addicts _don't know_ about the tricks to help, and many of them are helped when they do have them.
I agree that I've seen many fall into the trap of thinking they have done something when they haven't done anything at all, but that's completely a separate discussion than using behavior psychology to your advantage.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are no cool tricks to improving yourself. This is bullshit. There are lots of simple tricks you can employ to improve yourself. For example: >If you want to stop eating sugar If you want to stop eating sugar, throw it all away, and when you go to the supermarket go when you have just eaten, and avoid buying sugar and sugary products. This gets recommended a lot, but because it is good - Atomic Habits by James…
So the cool trick to not eating sugar is... not eating any sugar.
No, there is a lot around that, which results in not eating any sugar.
It's really simple and intuitive once you actually think about it. If you found yourself in a situation in which eating sugar was more effort you would be less prone to doing it. Not doing something makes it easier to not doing it afterwards too.
Treatment of any addiction steers right away from the "just don't". It's silly, humans just don't work by simply willing things into place harder and harder, they can either just do things or not, in the former case it's not a problem and in the latter there are things that work and can transition into the former.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#106There are no cool tricks to improving yourself. If you want to stop eating sugar then stop eating it. If you want to stop drinking alcohol stop drinking it. If you want to get fit start exercising. If you want to stop being addicted to social media then delete it. You can make all the excuses about how you need it to stay in contact with friends, or deals on the local market, or find events in groups but in the end i…
This is needlessly nihilistic. Increment is key. Stopping cold on learned habits and sensory comforts is neurologically difficult. At the first sniff of strife we reach for them as comfort. Incrementally changing input over time is the only manner compatible with how we work.
You didn't dig yourself into a metaphorical hole with a single bite of a shovel, so expecting to step out of it in one go doesn't work. Steps in and steps out.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding > Premise: FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency. > What the "unplug for self-care" crowd doesn't…
> They are most definetely not "plugged in". I cannot think of a single way in which their lives are worse as a result. It doesn’t sound from your description like these people are in any way part of the “unplugged for self-care” demographic. They sound plugged in, and they sound normal. By your own account they’re on Instagram at least enough to find and share cool things from time to time, they post online about th…
Ok, the way you read the article is an idea I can agree with.
I still think the author's intent is more aggressive than you think, though. He repeatedly refers to Twitter bullshit as an example of low-density content he thinks one should consume, among other things. He also refers positively to extreme behaviours such as shitposting and FOMO. The creepy "become part of the GSCITC!" encouragement doesn't seem like it would fit passively browsing Instagram, it sounds like he expects active interactions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#108I hung a pihole with everything blocked (https://pi-hole.net/) directly off my router, and I (probably somewhat redundantly) also use a hosts blocker (https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) on my non-phone machines. It's annoying for the first day or two, but you get used to it really quickly.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are no cool tricks to improving yourself. This is bullshit. There are lots of simple tricks you can employ to improve yourself. For example: >If you want to stop eating sugar If you want to stop eating sugar, throw it all away, and when you go to the supermarket go when you have just eaten, and avoid buying sugar and sugary products. This gets recommended a lot, but because it is good - Atomic Habits by James…
"""If you want to stop eating sugar, throw it all away, and when you go to the supermarket go when you have just eaten, and avoid buying sugar and sugary products.""" So much easier when you live alone. My spouse buys sugary crap for my kids and then I have to resist all the time. Which I can't. Thus I am overweight.
Do you think you could communicate them that it's ok to have treats as long as they stay outside the house? Seems like they don't yet know or understand your underlying need to keep them out of the house.
Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are most definetely not "plugged in". I cannot think of a single way in which their lives are worse as a result. It doesn’t sound from your description like these people are in any way part of the “unplugged for self-care” demographic. They sound plugged in, and they sound normal. By your own account they’re on Instagram at least enough to find and share cool things from time to time, they post online about th…
Ok, the way you read the article is an idea I can agree with. I still think the author's intent is more aggressive than you think, though. He repeatedly refers to Twitter bullshit as an example of low-density content he thinks one should consume, among other things. He also refers positively to extreme behaviours such as shitposting and FOMO. The creepy "become part of the GSCITC!" encouragement doesn't seem like it…
I believe he is writing to people like himself who are already shitposters and habitual trawlers at the low-density end of things. He is telling these people there is no point in forcing themselves downward off their natural level of online activity, and that in fact there are downsides to doing so. FOMO is functional in the sense that it is signaling to you that there are costs to self-isolation, and in fact you can conceive how FOMO evolves as a beneficial instinct in a social species.
The question of whether less-online people should force themselves to be much more online than they typically are is not something I think the article even contemplates; at least, I hadn’t considered it before now. I’ll probably ask the author on Twitter about it. But either way, that difference is probably key in explaining our differing responses to the article.