Social Media Addiction: Reading While You Poop and Other Tips to “Unplug”

Social Media Addiction: Reading While Pooping and Other Tips to Unplug

In this fast and furiously frenzied world, Social Media Addiction may mean that reading while you poop could be the key to “unplug” from social media and other imposing stimulants. If you struggle with “clocking in and out” of the online world, you may find these coping mechanisms useful – or helplessly humorous.

Read more: Social Media Addiction: Reading While You Poop and Other Tips to “Unplug”

Poop-reading Material, Fidget Toys

The idea is fairly simple: identify the moments and circumstances in your daily patterns that you are the most bored, most likely to look at your phone, and prepare alternative options.

Personal examples in my day-to-day:

  • A collection of small books in the bathroom for poop time.
  • A modern witch’s journal (courtesy of my friends Chris & B) next to my bed for my before-sleep time, so I don’t spend my final waking moments looking at my phone screen.
  • A fidget cube, anywhere.
  • Listening to music I can sing along to in the car so that those long red lights don’t tempt me while I’m driving (and as a school bus & delivery driver, I drive a lot!)
  • Origami stars while I watch shows/movies. This is also to avoid biting my nails, but when we pause for bathroom breaks or snack snags, I can keep making them instead of scrolling through IG.
  • Just reading in general while I eat alone.
  • Opting for paper versions of my favorite phone games – crosswords, sudoku, word searches.

Other examples of situations you may find yourself on your phone too much:

  • On the public bus or subway. Bring a book or a magazine!
  • The morning you get to sleep in, don’t feel like getting out of bed yet, but don’t want to go back to sleep. Keep a journal or short story next to your bed, and leave your phone across the room. (It’s your day off, you don’t need an alarm anyway.)
  • Breaks at the gym. Ever sit down to catch your breath and instead catch yourself scrolling? Incorporate dynamic stretches and playful moments to your music into your gym time – they’ll keep you more focused, you’ll have fun dancing to your music, and lessen your screen (and gym) time.
  • Waiting rooms are killer. Why do you think they used to have magazines everywhere? Go to your dentist’s or doctor’s office prepared.

Excuses we give ourselves that lead to excess phone time:

  • “I’ll just check my emails real quick.”
  • “But I won’t have time to look through Instagram later.” (Who cares?)
  • “If I don’t work on this Canva graphic right now, I won’t publish it in time.” (Unless you’re a social media manager, again… who cares?)
  • “Let me look through my friends’ stories to show support.”
  • “I should always be scrolling through jobs on LinkedIn, it’s productive.” (Lieeees.)
  • “Looking through social media or watching TV before bed is how I wind down.” (There are lots of research on how screens actually activate your brain, not the opposite.)
  • “Maybe [insert your crush’s name] is online right now…”
  • “I don’t have anything better to do.” (You know good and well that ain’t true.)
  • “But I really want to finish that blog!” (Oops)

All I can say is: allocate time for productivity, don’t try to squeeze it into contemplative moments; social media will only worsen your compulsion for instant gratification and false fulfillment; and who gives a flying frick if Pretty Boy has seen your story post or not?

The Irony: Me Publishing This, You Reading It

It requires a great deal of discipline for me to write my blogs, and then stop doing so. I fail all the time. It must take a great deal of discipline for you to also fail at not regularly checking my blog for new posts! (That was a joke.)

Seriously though, let’s take a moment to appreciate the irony of ANY piece of content you see that encourages you to distance yourself from the worldwide web. The paradox that each of them (including me) establishes by saying anything along the lines of “Look away! You’ve been on IG or Twitter or Facebook for too long!” accomplishes the following things:

  • An inferiority-superiority complex. Like somehow, by verbalizing our mutual addiction to stimulation, whoever said it aloud has reached their enlightenment before you reached yours. In turn, the audience holds fear and respect (or resentment) for the piece of content, and possibly the entity who created it, and is more likely to heed its messages henceforth.
  • If you do listen to the content telling you to look away, it will have been the last piece of content you see at the end of that social media consumption session. And especially because it achieved its desired effect, and you know it, the visual or audio of it will have a lasting effect, and you may dwell on it thereafter.
  • If you do not listen to the content and keep scrolling, you are likely still to dwell on it. Maybe you realized the irony and thought – “how can they tell me to get off Instagram when their entire business model rests on IG Shop?” Maybe you’re in control of your thoughts so much that the moment you glimpse content like that, you’ve set up a mental practice to ignore it and go about your day… which may mean to keep scrolling, or to stop. Do you see how much mental work you’ve exerted as a response to the content? For better or worse. What great marketing, don’t you think?

[Social Media] Addiction to Stimulation

Maybe we’re all a little ADHD, or maybe our society has normalized constant stimulus. As someone who is, in fact, farther from being cell-phone addicted than the average twenty-something-year-old, watching others (some older than me, even) be unable to let go of their phones and TVs is very strange to me.

I grew up in Brazil with VHS, a box television, minesweeper, and gamecube, until I moved to the United States and had my mind blown. DVD, the Wii, and a laptop were simply beyond my comprehension. It happened so fast for me. Most of you who grew up with the former saw the latter introduced to you over a decade or two, and most of you who grew up with the latter had intermittent exposure to the former in in individual moments.

That my experience was peculiar matters only to the point that: my hyper awareness of our over stimulated world doesn’t actually keep me from fixating over notifications and scrolling through TikTok, but rather makes me feel twice as guilty for every minute spent online. Drives me nuts.

And it’s an issue that’s being studied. Check it out:

3 thoughts on “Social Media Addiction: Reading While You Poop and Other Tips to “Unplug””

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  2. Thank you for the witty and practical tips on managing social media addiction! Your humor makes the topic approachable while emphasizing the importance of finding balance in our digital lives. Keep up the great work!

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