Why do I do things that bring me down?
September 4, 2022 7:20 AM Subscribe
I have no reason to be unhappy. I have a great partner, a decent social life, my job isn't glamorous but it is fine, and I am going to start an academic programme I am really looking forward to. I also exercise regularly and eat healthy (most days). Despite all this, I find myself spending hours looking up random things that make me upset. How do I disconnect and live in the present - and make the most of every day?
I spend a lot of time browsing reddit looking up silly things like celebrity gossip, following totally random people's updates on Instagram (I don't post on my account), reading news that makes me sad. I want to stop accessing spaces on the internet that make me feel rotten about myself and the world. I know I cannot entirely get rid of the internet but I need to develop a better relationship with it. What is wrong with me?
I spend a lot of time browsing reddit looking up silly things like celebrity gossip, following totally random people's updates on Instagram (I don't post on my account), reading news that makes me sad. I want to stop accessing spaces on the internet that make me feel rotten about myself and the world. I know I cannot entirely get rid of the internet but I need to develop a better relationship with it. What is wrong with me?
Best answer: You just need better sources of stimulation. You're getting a little reward-hit of neurochemicals when you do this - you may think of it as "down" but it's not much different than looking at a video of a duck getting a prosthetic leg or perusing /r/visiblemending. Or, you know, touch grass.
Look, we all have the urge to scratch the sad itch now and then. See: sad songs, sad movies, sad books. Greek mythology loved some bummers and torture and misery and bad behavior. But you have a whole wonderful/educational internet with the same bandwidth as the shitty stuff, and you can stop and ask yourself every few minutes if what you're doing right now is enrichment or not. Start chasing your interests instead of gossip - learn about home repair or watch a bunch of dramatic husky puppies get their first bath (is that educational? I mean, I would definitely never get my own husky after watching that channel) or learn about birdwatching. Get up and stretch and look out a window. Journal. It'll take a few weeks of catching and redirecting yourself until your habits are geared toward better content, but it's a pretty easy switch.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:43 AM on September 4, 2022 [6 favorites]
Look, we all have the urge to scratch the sad itch now and then. See: sad songs, sad movies, sad books. Greek mythology loved some bummers and torture and misery and bad behavior. But you have a whole wonderful/educational internet with the same bandwidth as the shitty stuff, and you can stop and ask yourself every few minutes if what you're doing right now is enrichment or not. Start chasing your interests instead of gossip - learn about home repair or watch a bunch of dramatic husky puppies get their first bath (is that educational? I mean, I would definitely never get my own husky after watching that channel) or learn about birdwatching. Get up and stretch and look out a window. Journal. It'll take a few weeks of catching and redirecting yourself until your habits are geared toward better content, but it's a pretty easy switch.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:43 AM on September 4, 2022 [6 favorites]
Best answer: I put the Libby app on my phone when I recognized this exact behaviour in myself. Now I always have a library book on hand and read a page or two of a novel when I catch myself too long on reddit. Doesn't have to be a complicated thinker book. No matter how light and fluffy the novel I've downloaded, it's still miles ahead of reading comment threads. (Surprising bonus, if I've got a particularly wholesome or fun novel, it actually lifts my mood to the same measure the comment threads depressed it.)
posted by unlapsing at 8:23 AM on September 4, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by unlapsing at 8:23 AM on September 4, 2022 [4 favorites]
Best answer: Practice making your phone or computer inaccessible for as long as you can each day. Go on a two-hour walk and leave your phone at home, when you're watching TV or a movie leave it in the other room, stuff like that. Gradually aim to arrive at a place where being on your phone or computer is a time-limited, deliberate activity rather than a default thing you do to kill time or stave off boredom. Boredom is not nearly as bad as it you think it might be if you practice noticing and being present. (One activity I was doing a little while ago was keeping a little notebook where I would write down six things I noticed every day, making an effort to actively practice noticing over the course of the day.)
posted by derrinyet at 8:37 AM on September 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by derrinyet at 8:37 AM on September 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have no reason to be unhappy.
That makes you an absolutely prime target for advertisers, who will seize every opportunity to hand you so much off-the-peg, ready-made unhappiness that you'll try to fill the holes they gouge in your serenity with whatever they're selling this week.
I know I cannot entirely get rid of the internet but I need to develop a better relationship with it. What is wrong with me?
There is nothing wrong with you. Your attention-directing facility is under constant attack from a whole lot of very expensive machinery operated by people who have devoted their lives to making a buck off seizing control of your eyeballs, and your body is responding in exactly the expected fashion. It's not you, it's them.
I recommend a healthy dose of Fuck This Shit, a thorough reading of The Hidden Persuaders to kindle a thoroughly nauseated understanding of just how much of everything that's wrong with everything is because of modern marketing, and then spending the rest of your life on a quest to insulate yourself from as much of this wannabe-omnipresent commercial misery generation as you can possibly arrange.
Just installing a competent ad blocker would be your minimal first step if you've not already done so.
posted by flabdablet at 8:49 AM on September 4, 2022 [4 favorites]
That makes you an absolutely prime target for advertisers, who will seize every opportunity to hand you so much off-the-peg, ready-made unhappiness that you'll try to fill the holes they gouge in your serenity with whatever they're selling this week.
I know I cannot entirely get rid of the internet but I need to develop a better relationship with it. What is wrong with me?
There is nothing wrong with you. Your attention-directing facility is under constant attack from a whole lot of very expensive machinery operated by people who have devoted their lives to making a buck off seizing control of your eyeballs, and your body is responding in exactly the expected fashion. It's not you, it's them.
I recommend a healthy dose of Fuck This Shit, a thorough reading of The Hidden Persuaders to kindle a thoroughly nauseated understanding of just how much of everything that's wrong with everything is because of modern marketing, and then spending the rest of your life on a quest to insulate yourself from as much of this wannabe-omnipresent commercial misery generation as you can possibly arrange.
Just installing a competent ad blocker would be your minimal first step if you've not already done so.
posted by flabdablet at 8:49 AM on September 4, 2022 [4 favorites]
Best answer: Also, algorithmic feed curation is not your friend. It's a wholly pernicious influence that operates to sclerose and narrow your interests over time, and the fewer instances of it that you choose to engage with, the less unhappy you will be.
Convenience can also be corrosive if pursued to excess. Every day, try to find some way of doing something small that's slightly less convenient and slightly less commercial.
posted by flabdablet at 8:54 AM on September 4, 2022 [5 favorites]
Convenience can also be corrosive if pursued to excess. Every day, try to find some way of doing something small that's slightly less convenient and slightly less commercial.
posted by flabdablet at 8:54 AM on September 4, 2022 [5 favorites]
Best answer: For me it was two things, which are connected.
1) is mindfulness. Practicing pausing more often to be aware of what you're thinking and doing and observe it neutrally, without judgment. Sometimes mindfulness is enough to realize, oh, I'm doing something that is making me feel uncomfortable or bad and I can choose to do something else. The key here is doing it frequently, even when you don't 'need' to. It's kind of like that old trick for learning to lucid dream by, while awake, randomly looking at clocks and checking if the time changes, or flipping lightswitches to see if they do anything.
2) is noticing and questioning assumptions. Like for me, there was still a part of me that felt like I was responsible for knowing the news as soon as it happens, or for keeping up with social media accounts and not missing a post. And so even when I stopped reading the news on Twitter, I still felt bad because of that underlying guilt at shirking a responsibility. The more I practiced mindfulness, the more I noticed and questioned the underlying assumptions that were tied to my emotional responses. No, I'm not really responsible for this, I'm 'allowed' to miss a post or wait until tomorrow morning to find out about the day's news.
posted by capricorn at 10:07 AM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
1) is mindfulness. Practicing pausing more often to be aware of what you're thinking and doing and observe it neutrally, without judgment. Sometimes mindfulness is enough to realize, oh, I'm doing something that is making me feel uncomfortable or bad and I can choose to do something else. The key here is doing it frequently, even when you don't 'need' to. It's kind of like that old trick for learning to lucid dream by, while awake, randomly looking at clocks and checking if the time changes, or flipping lightswitches to see if they do anything.
2) is noticing and questioning assumptions. Like for me, there was still a part of me that felt like I was responsible for knowing the news as soon as it happens, or for keeping up with social media accounts and not missing a post. And so even when I stopped reading the news on Twitter, I still felt bad because of that underlying guilt at shirking a responsibility. The more I practiced mindfulness, the more I noticed and questioned the underlying assumptions that were tied to my emotional responses. No, I'm not really responsible for this, I'm 'allowed' to miss a post or wait until tomorrow morning to find out about the day's news.
posted by capricorn at 10:07 AM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I have no reason to be unhappy.
The trappings of what you have now often don't correlate to your inner landscape. I agree with others have said about that dopamine hit, but also maybe you do have reasons to be unhappy and you're trying to talk yourself out of that. Maybe letting yourself be worried and sad with external triggers is how you access old sadness or worry or trauma you haven't faced or processed. Maybe you're punishing yourself for not being where you think you should be. Or perhaps you have depression and this is how you're letting yourself feel shitty or at least feel something.
The WHY, if you can get to it, might answer some bigger questions.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 10:20 AM on September 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
The trappings of what you have now often don't correlate to your inner landscape. I agree with others have said about that dopamine hit, but also maybe you do have reasons to be unhappy and you're trying to talk yourself out of that. Maybe letting yourself be worried and sad with external triggers is how you access old sadness or worry or trauma you haven't faced or processed. Maybe you're punishing yourself for not being where you think you should be. Or perhaps you have depression and this is how you're letting yourself feel shitty or at least feel something.
The WHY, if you can get to it, might answer some bigger questions.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 10:20 AM on September 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
For this same behavior in myself I use browser extensions with really aggressive blocking behavior, such that the tab closes automatically when I try to open it; my wife has the password to the adult content blocker on my phone, so that there are certain websites I can't access unless she unlocks them for me on special occasions. Willpower or mindfulness based techniques did not work for me at all. YMMV.
posted by peppercorn at 10:22 AM on September 4, 2022
posted by peppercorn at 10:22 AM on September 4, 2022
You need a news fast. (For "news" insert all that stuff above.)
posted by mono blanco at 11:06 AM on September 4, 2022
posted by mono blanco at 11:06 AM on September 4, 2022
Why do I do things that bring me down?
There's a more general answer to that overarching question in Judson Brewer's book Unwinding Anxiety, a really good piece of work that everybody should read.
The nub of the thing is that there are specific brain regions that handle choosing between the options that are presented to us, and those regions are not directly involved in the post-facto rationalizations about those choices that our consciousnesses construct to explain them to themselves.
The degree to which any given option gets evaluated as better depends scarcely at all on what we think about that option, but relies on a stored evaluation of it based partly on previous experiences with it - and if we're not putting our attention squarely on the quality of the experience that immediately follows such a choice, that stored evaluation simply doesn't get updated.
So if an experience is specifically designed to distract us away from what we're actually feeling in the moment - and this is a design feature right at the core of pretty much every social media experience - then we just keep on choosing that experience out of habit, even decades after it's stopped being good for us or even feeling good in the moment. We just don't notice how crap reddit actually is because it's specifically designed to stop us noticing that, so we just keep on chasing the ghost of the pleasure hit we got from those earlier experiences of discovering like minds online because that's just how the human brain do.
This is a big part of why certain kinds of mindfulness practice can help some people alleviate the issue you're currently facing: in some cases it's completely feasible to pay enough attention to the consequences of a choice that its associated quality evaluation does get updated, and Brewer covers a lot of that territory at length and in detail, both in his book and on his website.
But there's always going to be an arms race between a human being's ability to stay focused on their own responses and a ML-trained machine's ability to wrench that focus away, which is why brute-force removal of the entire option is the only thing that works for many.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 AM on September 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
There's a more general answer to that overarching question in Judson Brewer's book Unwinding Anxiety, a really good piece of work that everybody should read.
The nub of the thing is that there are specific brain regions that handle choosing between the options that are presented to us, and those regions are not directly involved in the post-facto rationalizations about those choices that our consciousnesses construct to explain them to themselves.
The degree to which any given option gets evaluated as better depends scarcely at all on what we think about that option, but relies on a stored evaluation of it based partly on previous experiences with it - and if we're not putting our attention squarely on the quality of the experience that immediately follows such a choice, that stored evaluation simply doesn't get updated.
So if an experience is specifically designed to distract us away from what we're actually feeling in the moment - and this is a design feature right at the core of pretty much every social media experience - then we just keep on choosing that experience out of habit, even decades after it's stopped being good for us or even feeling good in the moment. We just don't notice how crap reddit actually is because it's specifically designed to stop us noticing that, so we just keep on chasing the ghost of the pleasure hit we got from those earlier experiences of discovering like minds online because that's just how the human brain do.
This is a big part of why certain kinds of mindfulness practice can help some people alleviate the issue you're currently facing: in some cases it's completely feasible to pay enough attention to the consequences of a choice that its associated quality evaluation does get updated, and Brewer covers a lot of that territory at length and in detail, both in his book and on his website.
But there's always going to be an arms race between a human being's ability to stay focused on their own responses and a ML-trained machine's ability to wrench that focus away, which is why brute-force removal of the entire option is the only thing that works for many.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 AM on September 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
Best answer: If tl;dr then the here's the essence:
In suggesting periodic news fasts, I’m not advocating that you become uninformed about the state of the world. But in addition to the recommendations I make about how to nourish your body, I think it is important to become aware of what we put into our consciousness as well. Many people do not exercise much control over that and as a result take in a lot of “mental junk food.” My goal in asking you to practice news fasting now and then is for you to discover that you have the power to decide how much of this material you want to let in.
"Mental junk food." That's a good way of thinking about it. I love burgers fries and a shake too. But, everyday?
posted by mono blanco at 11:09 AM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
In suggesting periodic news fasts, I’m not advocating that you become uninformed about the state of the world. But in addition to the recommendations I make about how to nourish your body, I think it is important to become aware of what we put into our consciousness as well. Many people do not exercise much control over that and as a result take in a lot of “mental junk food.” My goal in asking you to practice news fasting now and then is for you to discover that you have the power to decide how much of this material you want to let in.
"Mental junk food." That's a good way of thinking about it. I love burgers fries and a shake too. But, everyday?
posted by mono blanco at 11:09 AM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
As someone who has cut out recreational Twitter use since June (my major source of the same feelings you describe), I can offer this: simply reducing my “junk food” intake has only improved things partially.
I no longer spend time formulating arguments against people who have the wrong opinion about something I don’t really care about, which is a step in the right direction, but I now find myself staring at my phone wondering “hmm what do I click on now” (usually Metafilter, :P ).
Anyway, this is all to confirm that changing your content diet may not be all that is necessary, and I will be taking a closer look at the advice offered here (so thank you for asking the question).
posted by TangoCharlie at 1:39 PM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I no longer spend time formulating arguments against people who have the wrong opinion about something I don’t really care about, which is a step in the right direction, but I now find myself staring at my phone wondering “hmm what do I click on now” (usually Metafilter, :P ).
Anyway, this is all to confirm that changing your content diet may not be all that is necessary, and I will be taking a closer look at the advice offered here (so thank you for asking the question).
posted by TangoCharlie at 1:39 PM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I now find myself staring at my phone wondering “hmm what do I click on now”
I've had quite good results from answering that very question, every single time it arises, with either the Power Off button or the foobar2000 icon. I have over 6000 mp3 files in an absurd variety of genres stored on the phone's SD card, foobar2000 has a Shuffle All Tracks function, and my life has definitely improved since I started making a regular practice of letting randomness, rather than similarity to what I'm already listening to, be in charge of what I'll hear next.
posted by flabdablet at 1:50 PM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've had quite good results from answering that very question, every single time it arises, with either the Power Off button or the foobar2000 icon. I have over 6000 mp3 files in an absurd variety of genres stored on the phone's SD card, foobar2000 has a Shuffle All Tracks function, and my life has definitely improved since I started making a regular practice of letting randomness, rather than similarity to what I'm already listening to, be in charge of what I'll hear next.
posted by flabdablet at 1:50 PM on September 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thank you for these insightful responses. Definitely going to incorporate mindfulness and yoga into my exercise routine to begin with. I also wanted to share this article from The Guardian, published earlier today: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/06/doomscrolling-linked-to-poor-physical-and-mental-health-study-finds. Guess I am in good company.
posted by bigyellowtaxi at 11:32 AM on September 5, 2022
posted by bigyellowtaxi at 11:32 AM on September 5, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
I find that when I meditate for at least 20 minutes each day I get much better at being present and at derailing my diversions into the muck.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:36 AM on September 4, 2022 [7 favorites]