The insidious addictions

Matt Frazier over at No Meat Athlete has another great post about habits and the lessons he learned during a month of practicing discipline consciously.

I could relate almost completely to point number three in his list (emphasis mine):

3. Recognize the distractions and addictions that are — to be blunt — ruining your life.

Again, I’ll point to email. It was my main digital addiction. I imagine that Facebook and TV are bigger ones for most people, but email was mine.
In short: Email is where I learn about new opportunities, so it’s fun for me to check it. Although I quickly learned that it was stupid and unproductive to leave Gmail open while I was trying to work, email remained my little reward when I was done. Soon, the addiction worsened, and checking email became my default behavior.

Just got in from a run? Check email. Finished reading a chapter in a book? Check email. Finished a walk with the family? Check email. First thing in the morning, last thing at night? Check email.
 

Checking email became the reward for everything else in life, my home base. The state of checking email was my steady state, the state I always strived to return to.

 

Centering your schedule around something so meaningless is a recipe for emptiness in your life.
 

To break free of it, you just need to learn to sit with the urge. Recognize when you’re feeling that pull to do the empty, addictive behavior, and just be okay with not doing it. Sit there. Or better, start that other, important thing — you know, the one you always say you don’t have time to do.

It doesn’t take long before the previous way of doing things — think about it, treating email or Facebook or TV as your reward for hanging out with your family? — seems pretty ridiculous. Once you’ve recognized these addictions for what they are, you can confine them to neat little time boxes, enjoy them for a few minutes each day (or just kill them entirely), and all of a sudden there’s plenty of space for richness in your life.
 

My experience has been a lot similar, especially with email and facebook. Every time I log on to facebook now (after reactivating it because a friend wanted to tag me), the posts seem largely redundant. Could be that I'm friends with the most boring people on earth or that the interesting ones do not use facebook. Whatever the reason, it has definitely lost its ability to draw me into clicking and reading on the site. Matt used the exact word I had in mind - ridiculous - when I think about how I used to compulsively check it a few years ago.

Saying that things like email and facebook addiction ruin your life might be a stretch for some people. And it is. Except when the operative word is addiction.

If you factor in the time spent on these by addicts, the way the content shapes their mind and thoughts, how they subsequently alter their actions and choices based on what they've read, the loss of focus - then no amount of TED talks and positive/interesting/funny/poignant articles and pictures that facebook or your email might provide can make up for the damage caused to your life.