I successfully quit Twitter. I used to be on it ~2 hours a day, now I haven't opened in for almost a year. Unfortunately that habit has been replaced by others and I still have FOMO from not being on Twitter when I see colleagues sharing Twitter links.
It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.
Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.
Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.
It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.
Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.
Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.