Social Media/Dopamine Detox: Day One

01/05/25

1.

My wife and I agreed to go on a dopamine/social media detox for an entire week. This means:

• no Reddit
• no Mastodon
• no Bluesky
• no Youtube

All I have to contend with is: email, Bearblog, and...that's it, really.

2.

Today—Sunday, January 5th, 2025—was our first day. I'm technically typing this on 1/06/2024, but I haven't gone to bed yet, so it doesn't count.¹

My morning was largely productive. I work second shift from 4:00PM till about 11:30PM. I go to bed around 2:00AM and try to wake up at 10:00AM.

Here's a rough rundown of my morning:

• 10:00AM-10:20AM: wash my face, brush my teeth, the cats
• 10:20AM-10:45AM: yoga, Buddha altar incense offering, and nembutsu chanting
• 10:45AM-11:30AM: breakfast
• 11:30AM-12:30PM: make black bean burgers (lunch meal prep), do dishes
• 12:30PM-1:30PM: put on a load of laundry, clean litter, take out trash
• 1:30-PM-3:30PM: putz around till I have to get ready for work; attempt to write, fail at writing

I'm quite ambitious with my to-do lists, but I never seem to cross off as many tasks as I'd like. Today was different. I couldn't believe it. Without getting sidetracked on my phone—whereupon I'd either get lost in a Youtube Shorts binge, endlessly scroll through my main Mastodon account as well as my alts, or get caught up with some bullshit on Reddit—I was able to stay focused.

I also had a lot more time on my hands. I wasn't trying to fill every second of my time with internet garbage. It made it easy to go from one chore to the next. I was able to just...be in the moment, focusing on doing the dishes, cooking, and cleaning. I found my mind wandering a lot, in a way it hasn't in awhile. I'm usually either on social media, talking to my wife, busy doing chores, or writing/drawing/playing video games. Being able to just spend time with my thoughts, with plenty of mental space to do so, was a really calming experience.

The only "stimuli" I really had at my disposal was music. One of my coworkers is a Gen X metalhead from Chicago, and he's gotten me into the death metal band Death (apt name). I've been working through their whole discography. As of now, my favorite albums are Spiritual Healing and Individual Thought Patterns—this one reminds me of Fugazi a little bit with how bass-heavy it is.

Anyway, I found myself listening to the music a lot closer than I would have otherwise. I guess when my brain isn't buzzing with algorithmic static overload I can pay attention better.

3.

That was the bulk of my day. I sort of waffled around after that. I wanted to write² but couldn't really muster up the frame of mind to do so. It was pretty frustrating.

My wife lives in the UK. By the time she gets home from work, eats dinner, etc, I'm getting in some leisure time before work. I texted her:

I haven't been writing as much as I wanted
I think it's like a side effect of no phone time
Just sort of generally faffing³ around. did some blog stuff
I think it's like the transition between being productive and enjoying my time
I can't really let myself veg out unless I make my brain stupid first lol

I managed to get a few lines of dialogue and a nice, chunky paragraph in the scene I was working on, but it felt like pulling teeth.

4.

I was surprised to find that I didn't have much trouble focusing on a task or finding something to do. But, as I told my wife, transitioning between two frames of mind was profoundly difficult, i.e.⁴ going from "doing chores" brain to "sitting down and writing fanfiction" brain.

I gave up on writing and went to lie down in bed with my cats, which turned into a quick power nap. The rest was really rejuvenating, and before I knew it I was coming up with all sorts of ideas for my fanfic.

I dawned on me that maybe mental transitions require some form of rest to reset, whether that's zombifying our brains with endless scrolling or taking a nap in a pile of sleepy kitties.

5.

After my nap I scraped myself out of bed and got ready for work.

The weather forecast for today was a case of Schrodinger's snowstorm—100% chance of snow, but nothing ever happened. Just lots of cold and gray clouds and ice. I hedged my bets and flipped up my windshield wipers before I went in to work anyway, just to be safe.

I oughta hit the slots, because my bet paid off: around 5 o' clock the snow started blowing in. It seemed to ratchet up in staggered intervals. Before I knew it the roads were laid down with thick sheets of snow.

We were dead as all hell as a result, which was fine by me. For lack of anything to do I helped out my metalhead coworker and deep cleaned the lobby while he hit the back room. I pulled out all the table and chairs and booth seats in the whole damn place. It was quite the workout, but I've been overdue one anyway, and it helped pass the time.

The lobby radio is set to a local station that plays Delilah. I've loved Delilah my whole life.⁵ I remember being out late for whatever reason, my mom or dad driving home in our minivan, and my sister and I in the back, nodding off with our ears slung up in our seatbelts as Delilah talked all soft and soothing while dark, flat farmland rolled past the windows.

She got me in a nostalgic mood tonight. Three songs in particular hit somewhere deep in my brain; each one made me feel older than the last:

• Heat Waves by Glass Animals (2020)
• Some Nights by Fun. (2011)
• The Lazy Song by Bruno Mars (2010)

It's weird hearing music I grew up with on the oldies' station. I mean, I've been playing Twenty One Pilot's new album on loop in my car for a reason. They literally wrote a song about it. (It only made me tear up a little when I first really listened⁶ to it.)

Nothing else of note happened at work, I guess, besides my two other coworkers showing me Super Humman—an earnest juggalo and self-proclaimed stuntman, who does all sorts of redneck ass tricks involving random garbage, lawn chairs, kiddie pools, and barbed wire. Think monks walking across a bed of hot coals, but if they were from rural America and drank PBA and listened to ICP.

At first I thought it was dumb, but I caved and watched a couple shorts they shoved under my nose (I don't think that counts against my break, seeing as it was partly against my will and not of my own volition). I have to admit, I sort of want to watch more of him now, even though it's all the same thing: just him jumping on random shit trussed up in barbed wire.⁷

6.

So, that was work.

I'm finishing this post in the future. At least, the chronological future.

The lack of dopamine started to hit hard when I got home from work last night. I was physically exhausted from hauling furniture around and mopping all night at work, but mentally I was totally wired; this combined into a weird as fuck dissociative combo.

I got in, fed the cats dinner, took a hot shower, made a tea, and sat down at my laptop, churning out every other section of this post besides the present one and those that will follow.

By the time my wife woke up (1:00AM here in snow-fucked Illinois, 7:00AM in gray and sleepy England) I was frenetically typing away, blasting Bad Mouth by Fugazi and mildly headbanging.

7.

Brief aside to highlight these lyrics in Bad Mouth:

You can't be what you were
So you better start being just what you are
You can't be what you were
The time is now, it's running out
It's running out, it's running, running, running out

You can't be what you were
So you better start living the life
That you're talking about
You can't be what you were
The no movement, the no movement
The no movement in a bad mouth

I love it so much. The message, the punchy-ness, the in-your-face-ness, the get-the-fuck-up-and-do-something-ness of it all.

I think one day I'll get You can't be what you were / So you better start being / just what you are tattooed somewhere innocuous, like my leg or something. This song was sort of my theme song when I was young and in the closet, wrestling with being trans, dysphoria, mental illness, etc.

Anyway—

8.

So that was the vibe. Keep in mind I'm trying to wind down to get ready for bed.

I complained to my wife, then reflected:

i think there is something to be said for having to be more intentional with how we like
curate our spaces and moods etc
when we can't just binge on bullshit⁸ until we exhaust ourselves lol

To which my wife said:

It's not relaxing, its our brains giving up lol
Like we're responsible for it

And I guess that's the lesson I learned on my first day with no social media, that—

9.

We have to become responsible for ourselves, our states of mind, and be intentional in how we modify our environment to transition from one state of mind to another.

It takes work, and it's annoying. It'd be easier to just engorge ourselves on dopamine machines and let our brains get overstimulated to the point of shutting down—which we can then sort of manually reset, like a computer, to a new blank state.

Or, we can go through the hassle of bringing our minds down, giving them some rest, and then bringing them back online ourselves.

I think that was the biggest realization on my first day.

Our brains are vehicles. We can either cruise on autopilot, following the routes laid down in front of us by dopamine machines, or we can drive manual and go off-road. It's not as easy, and it's a rough ride, but it's the only way we can fully be in control behind the wheel.

✘ Posted on — 01/05/25
✘ Last modified — 6 months, 4 weeks ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/social-mediadopamine-detox-day-one

Footnotes

#blog #detox #internet #mental health #writing