You know the story — attention and focus are becoming ever more valuable. Many struggle to achieve either of them. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been, yet more lonely.
What’s the reason for this? The obvious culprit is the internet. Our psychology hasn’t evolved quickly enough to cope with the huge changes to society that personal tech has caused.
Some companies and individuals moved faster than others. Tools and services popped up and started to prey on our archaic psychology for profit.
Most aren’t aware that they’re trapped in this loop of internet consumption and dissatisfaction. It’s all they’ve ever known. However, more are waking up to the fact that this isn’t a normal existence, and they’re doing what they can to combat the endless distractions that the internet provides.
I’ve come from spending hours per day on video games to spending hours per day writing for an online business and personal brand that I run. But this wasn’t a change that took place over a short period.
Despite how long it took to make the change myself, in the next few minutes I will attempt to round up my experience and show how you can tip the scales of consumption vs creation in favour of yourself.
I was isolated from the internet when I was a child. My parents did not allow me a mobile phone at the same time that my peers were allowed their own. At this point, I see this as a great blessing because I had more chance to develop agency of myself without getting sucked down the rabbit hole of online media.
But as you can imagine, I wasn’t a fan of the idea when I was the only one without access to the technology and its benefits.
Eventually, though, I got my first mobile phone and was allowed for the first time into the vast and treacherous expanses of the internet. I wasted no time getting stuck into the social media and video games that it felt as though I’d been deprived of for the last few years.
In short, it left me hollow.
After two years of this, it became hard to focus on my schoolwork. I had only a small circle of close friends (something which at the time I considered to be a bad thing), and I felt alienated from the people around me.
There was no purpose to much of what I was doing. I was just delaying the inevitable reckoning, the confrontation of the fact that I was put on the Earth for more than just endless consumption.
Today I am someone who has largely beaten the call of distraction in the online world. I’ve published over 100 articles on Medium and written a newsletter consistently for almost 40 weeks.
The online business I started helps pay for my bills at university and the short trips away that I’m planning in the summer, all because I managed to channel my attention and motivation for long enough into breaking poor digital habits and creating something purposeful for myself.
So what changed? How did I manage this?
It all came down to having an important event on the horizon. And when I say large, I mean something that was going to determine the course of the next three years of my life, if not the whole of the rest of my life – I needed good A-level grades in the summer of 2022 to reach a good university to study for my zoology degree.
This event was something that had enough gravitas for me to realise that I wasn’t going to succeed if I remained buried in the games that I’d been so engrossed by during the last two years.
These approaching exams were enough of a kick up the backside for me to beat my computer game addiction for good. The social media addiction was a little more deep-rooted and took more time to combat, but by the end of that exam-ridden summer, I’d made some progress.
I’ll go deeper into how I managed both of these later, but what was more important was how I went back to spending my time once it wasn’t taken up by studying.
For the whole year up to the end of exams, my time was spent on computer games, and then revision. When summer rolled around I had hours of free time again.
It would have been easy to jump back onto computer games and begin the same cycle again, but instead, I turned to following my innate interests. I became fascinated by managing knowledge and creating a system that was going to allow me to thrive at university.
Productive procrastination, I know, but better than outright procrastination.
Looking back now, this period was so crucial for building the fascination that has turned into a path of writing on the internet, giving me purpose outside of my existence — again so important for withstanding internet distractions.
Once you take away the fantasy worlds that the internet can provide through computer games then you’re confronted with reality. You get to (not ‘have to’, get to) learn about how things work in real life.
From here you can learn, improve and share your insights with other people who are trying to do the same as you. It’s the most natural progression for someone who’s looking to better their life, and it’s what I did too, with this Medium account and everything else that I share on the internet.
I promised I was here to give you guidelines and advice, however, rather than to just talk about my own story. So if I had to summarise the best way to beat internet addiction, I’d do it how I set out in the following. But first, I must touch on some elementary neuroscience surrounding drive and motivation.
That’s right, it’s that molecule dopamine again.
In short, dopamine is what causes you to move forward. Your psychology and physiology receive positive signals from some things, such as food and sex, releasing dopamine. Your brain now associates getting these things with positive outcomes and motivates you to obtain these hits of dopamine again.
The problem comes in the fact that some things that are detrimental to us release huge amounts of dopamine. In the context of this piece, it’s things such as likes on social media, or hitting another level in a video game.
We have to figure out a way to gain more dopamine from the good sources (deep work and achieving goals) than from the bad sources (socials, video games).
I’ll go into more detail about this later. It makes more sense though to cover things in the order you should focus on them. So I’ll start with purpose.
Having a purpose is critical when it comes to breaking out of the rut that internet addiction can get you into. You need something beyond the time-wasting and distraction that takes up most of your day. I mentioned what this was for me — A-level exams that determined the path of my future, what degree I’d get to study and where I’d get to study it.
To find your equivalent you need to do some goal-setting and planning. You must know what your ideal life looks like to be able to pursue it. This visualisation doesn’t have to be grand, but you can’t hide away from it, so let it confront you, questioning you as to why you haven’t put more effort into achieving it.
This is the spark. You have to reach for this life beyond your current level of distraction and dissatisfaction. See not what is, but what could be.
Hold on to this visualisation as it’s what’s going to keep you pushing through when it’s time to work, rather than jumping back on Instagram to scroll.
Break down this ideal outcome into goals that you can achieve one by one to close in on completion. You can further break these goals down into what you need to do every year, month and week to make progress. This way you have a north star, an encompassing vision that’s something greater than yourself that you can put work in for.
I understand that perhaps some parts of how you’ve become distracted by and addicted to the internet aren’t entirely your fault. However, holding this mindset to excess isn’t going to serve you in any positive way, so try not to hold it at all. You can change almost every aspect of your life and make it better, regardless of how you started.
Take accountability. The companies that have preyed on your attention in the past don’t have anything against you. They’re after progress in the same way that everyone else is. It’s the natural state to be in.
The more of your life you believe you’re responsible for, the more you can change and improve.
Once you have these mindset shifts in place you can start making moves to improve your digital habits, removing them from your life one by one, starting with the most distracting. For me this was video games, but for you it might be something else, like Netflix for example.
Take a look at the habit and see how you can most effectively minimise the chance you’re going to fall back into it. For the most part, this is going to be deleting your subscription and account with the service that is distracting you.
Once this first, largest hurdle has been cleared you can begin to target the others. Each one is going to be easier than the last as you gain momentum. You’re going to end up with more and more focus and energy to direct towards things of your choosing. We’ll cover what a good choice would be for this energy later in the piece. First though, I want to give some advice for breaking the heavier addictions — the starting ones that are the deepest ingrained…
You have to make the tools at your disposal work for you.
The platforms on the internet that people are most addicted to heavily leverage human psychology. You have to do the same to swing the odds back into your favour.
Increase the friction of using these distracting platforms. Sometimes this works if you delete the accounts, but sometimes it’s harder (check out this article about the struggles that I had with deleting Instagram when I was addicted to it). In the past, I’ve made use of a particular pair of apps to increase friction even further, to make sure I’m not going back on my commitments.
They’re called Cold Turkey Blocker and One Sec. The former is an app for the desktop that blocks you from certain websites or programs, and the latter is an app for iOS (I used Lock Me Out when I was on Android).
What they do is either partially or entirely block apps, programs and websites, meaning you can’t access them. It would have been a lot harder to make the progress I have made without the help of these apps.
There are tools out there designed to help you, make sure you find the ones that work best for you.
You’ll gain a lot of free time when you remove these distractions from your life. Now you can either fill them up with more distractions you haven’t eliminated yet, or you can do something more fulfilling.
Give yourself to the world. I know that sounds vague, and it’s meant to be. The idea is that you share your gift of life and interaction with others rather than with the content you consume on the internet.
You can create content yourself, you can create something physical (favoured by Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism) or you can spend more time and attention on those you care about. Benefits are found any which way you turn within all three of these. Find something of high quality that can fill up the time you’d normally spend distracted on the internet.
You’ll get better and better at avoiding these distractions to the point that you don’t consider yourself addicted to the internet any more.
However, there’s one more point that I’d like to make that is important — it doesn’t end. Everything’s updating, improving and becoming more and more powerful. Nothing stays in the same place for long. It would be foolish to think that once you’ve squashed your main internet addictions, you’re done and you can live a life of complete freedom.
Wrong. Our lives are too closely intertwined with the capability of connecting in so many ways with people all across the globe. And the internet is a tool of fantastic leverage if you know how to use it correctly.
There will always be internet distractions. It’s a constant war that you’ve got to be committed to waging. Sometimes you’ll put a foot wrong but that’s life, and it won’t set you back too far if you develop resilience. Make sure that you’re not put down too heavily by your slip-ups and occasional failures.
I still struggle with shiny object syndrome, especially when the distraction is a new tool or idea that promises to improve the quality of my life. Directly distracting/entertainment-based services and apps don’t have much of a hold on my brain anymore but this, dressed up as productive work? Still gets me. It’s something I’m working on. I have to block myself from using all the apps that I’ve thought were useful in the past so that I can focus on creating.
I don’t think that internet distractions will ever go away, and you shouldn’t either. Craft a vision, use all the tools available to regain your focus, build something worthwhile, and stay resilient.
Thanks for reading!