Breaking the Social Media Habit?
If you want to reduce or quit anything, you have to have a plan in place before you try to do so. When one is quitting smoking or drinking, for example, and the craving hits a few hours or a few days in, having identified in advance how you will counter it within your mind and/or with some kind of an action will determine your success. I think it is the same with reducing or stopping social media use. We all find ourselves using these platforms and having shitty feeling-experiences with them. Even so, our use often continues at the same levels, much as we want to reduce it. This is because the neurological movements enacted as we interface with these things occur virtually at the speed of light — as quickly as the sight of a cool, water-beaded bottle of beer triggers feelings of thirst and imaginings of brief and flashing bliss in the mind of the alcoholic.
Interrupting this instantaneous mental chain is all about plasticity — forging some kind of malleability into that currently fused series of neurological steps. Currently when I read something on social media that upsets me, my angry urge to respond is instantaneous and I find myself writing the response in a kind of trance, unaware of what I am doing. To be honest, when I write an angry response like that, I find myself in the same possessed state of blank-faced consciousness that the jag-offs who stormed the capital last week were in.
Mercifully, after ten years of entering into that Pavlovian state regularly — almost obediently — I have in recent days, identified fulcrum points within the chain of neurological steps that cause me to compose and send a post or comment. Buddhist thinkers, such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chödron, are very good on this point. This latter thinker writes about the moments that precede the draping of the cloak of anger on someone. She uses the idiom of “the hook” and says that you can train yourself to pause and observe for a moment before the hook of rage fully sets in. And at that moment, you can choose not to allow to set.
Doing what Buddhism suggests in the context of social media is a bit more complicated. We are face-to-face with the sometimes insane and hateful words of strangers or near strangers. Our instinct toward protecting ourselves, our communities and our planet are activated. What a business model! Eyeballs are on the screen because users feel a duty to stand up for deeply cherished values and to defend them. “How can I not do that? Am I still a good person if I do not engage?” These are the doubts that cause us to go back and again and again for the psychological beatings. Well, I am going to have to take a leap of faith and affirm: “Yes. I am still a good person if I do not respond to this thing that is sharply provoking me. Indeed, my well-being will increase. I will be there for myself and my loved ones in my community and our ecology daring to love and protect myself first. My instincts to defend and protect what I love will have to manifest in other ways that are not so punishing and constant.
The only way I’ll be able to explore those other possibilities for expression and action — be they cooking food for people who are hungry or writing songs and poems — is to find those tiny apertures, moments for a diversion of course when the dark digital specter stands beside me, poised to drape a coat of anger upon me.
