Joe Robinson: Bald Guy, Marketer, Self-Improver.

The idea of getting rid of all your different social apps and becoming some kind of mental powerhouse is a satisfying idea on paper. But it’s not always practical to quit social media, and even worse- it’s become a cliché. So I did this instead.

Too Much Of An Okay Thing

When you think of Christmas, you think of excess. Eating too many of things that are too rich, having the heating up too high, drinking too much, staying up too late. It’s excellent. This year though, I noticed a different kind of excess happening- although there’s no way it was the first time it had happened.

I was scrolling for too long on too many apps and feeds. I was wasting ages just watching short-form videos one after the other, or scrolling endless festive posts. I enjoyed it in the moment but I kept getting to the end and thinking “shit, I could have done something with those 30 minutes”. I was finding it harder to concentrate. Or to go 10 minutes without reaching for my phone just to find something to look at. Even great telly or a real-life interaction was hard to stay focused on. It was starting to feel detrimental.

Brain un-Rot, without resorting to clichés

The 2nd of January is rarely lived by your best self; more a version of yourself who has a hangover, a wildly out-of-sync body clock and a general slimy feeling from 2 weeks of eating cheese, bacon and chocolate for every meal. For me, I was worried that 2nd January version of myself was also going to struggle to concentrate on anything worth concentrating on for very long at all.

So I did something about it. I’m still doing that thing now, some 6 weeks on, so I figure it’s gone quite well.

I did not quit social media. Nor do I plan to. I enjoy it in moderation; the issue arises when I stray too far from moderation. I wanted more control over when and how I use social media, and I achieved it well enough to decide it’s my new normal.

Often, productivity is made to be about efficiency. Making things faster, easier, more fluid, harder to fuck up. But years of clever optimisation from experts on a sticky user experience make it so the efficiency of your social apps is working against you. So instead, I flipped the problem upside down.

In mathematics there’s a concept called ‘proof by contradiction’: you prove something is true by assuming it can be false, then laying out all the logical constraints and conditions that would need to be satisfied for that falsehood to come about. Somewhere along the way of examining those conditions, you find an impossibility. The conditions can’t be met, and so your original statement must be true- you proved the opposite outcome was impossible. I borrowed from that method, a little bit.

Instead of making it easier to get off my phone (difficult to influence this), I started off by making it harder to use social media (I can achieve that). I left my profiles where I could get to them, but I made the experience slower and clumsier.

First it got worse (bad)…

I started with the obvious; uninstall the apps. For me the strongest vices are Instagram and Reddit. I never made a TikTok account- my struggles to pull myself away from Reels and Shorts tell me I categorically do not need the app that made that content format what it is. Facebook is old news. Threads is just Twitter 2 and the original only ever pissed me off anyway. So it was all about my big 2.

Initially I sought a compromise in my phone’s web browser. I logged back into both platforms on Chrome, which meant I could have a quick scroll but the lack of gestures and general sluggishness made it much harder to get sucked in.

That was true in theory, anyway. For Reddit this probably made things worse instead of better. You mean to say I can scroll an endless feed just like before, but now any semi-appealing post that catches my eye can be opened in a new tab until I’ve got 25 of them, and once I’m finished with the main feed I can trawl through the comments of every single side-tab and easily kill 45 minutes? Fuck. This was like quitting coffee by starting amphetamines. I’d missed the point somewhere. I took the nuclear option and logged out of Reddit completely. Gone from everywhere, even my laptop (where it’s just as easy to amass dozens of browser tabs). It’s just too sticky. Maybe when I’ve changed my habits I can safely come back to it.

…then it got worse (good)

Instagram in the browser, though? Now we’re talking. I can still see posts. Still read messages and react to the silly memes people send me so I’m not ignoring them. Stories are all still there. But it’s all just a little bit groggy. Enough to catch up on the day’s events but not enough to get sucked in. Reels are a non-starter for me in this format, which was the icing on the cake. Even liking a post doesn’t have the same fluidity- the little heart doesn’t seem to leap out of your thumb so much and your brain chemistry notices every single time, even if you don’t.

Suddenly it was clicking for me. I could literally feel myself gaining less satisfaction from scrolling and craving the platform less. I’d separated that need to stay “connected” to friends and sports teams and content creators from a growing reliance on quick-fire dopamine.

I notice myself looking at my app list on my phone and realising there’s nowhere to doomscroll. The friction is enough to stop me. Sometimes I just put my phone away and stare at the ceiling instead. It’s good for your brain. Brains need rest and the endless stimulation from a never-empty feed is as harmful as the content in it. Giving yourself a split second to think “I can just do something else instead” is absolutely massive.

I often reinstall the app on weekends; so far that’s working for me. It means I can more easily catch up on my Watch Later list and keep up with the uptick in posts from people I actually know. Uninstalling it on a Sunday evening is part of my back-to-work ritual. It makes me feel like I’m shifting mindsets, ready to be productive.

When “bad” is harder, “good” gets more appealing

Quitting social media is a cliché and something about it just feels like overkill to me. Frankly it would mess with my job too much anyway. I believe in the good social media can do by connecting people, and I’d rather fix it than quit is out of frustration.

Deliberately making it worse has honestly improved my relationship with it.

Overall, I’m so much sharper now. I don’t get that weird little itch when you haven’t checked your notifications for a while. I don’t get sucked into wasting my time. My attention snaps to the thing I want to focus on much more easily. When I’m bored, there’s nothing to fill the fog with; I’ve systematically removed all those things from my reach.

I have to stop and think, and manually cure my boredom. Remember being bored? Lying on the floor as a kid waiting for something to happen; It’s so hard to come by these days that there’s almost a nostalgia attached to it. But you know what? There’s always something to fill the void with. A book, or a person I’ve been meaning to text, or a hobby. Or just watching the telly with 100% of my attention; the same shows are better when you do that.

You might not need to quit social media. You might just need to sabotage it a little bit.