I decided to try one day with no feed at all. The effect surprised me more than I expected: real mental clarity and a completely different level of motivation.
I have spent 3 days without a social media feed.
An interesting experiment has started.
The day before yesterday I came across a video on YouTube by a very well-known psychologist explaining how our brain works, and how dopamine, and the lack of it, affects our motivation and focus.
I already knew that when we spend our attention on a social feed, we get a quick, small hit of dopamine from short-form content. What I did not know is that by doing this we never let the body accumulate dopamine for bigger, more important tasks.
The video explained exactly how we torment our brain, and why we can get so tired after literally 15 minutes of scrolling.
Before I watched it, my phone screen time in social apps was about 20-30 minutes. I do spend a lot of time in DMs, of course, because dozens of new people write every day and those conversations take time.
I decided to try one day with no feed at all. No video tab, no text posts, no stories.
The effect surprised me more than I expected. I felt a completely different level of mental clarity and motivation.
Generally speaking, I am obsessive about health. I go to the gym three times a week. I exercise every day. I drink slightly alkaline water and take various useful supplements. I see an osteopath and a massage therapist every week. I do not drink alcohol at all and I do not smoke. I eat no meat and no sugar. I rarely get stressed and I do work I love. I have a happy family.
If you asked me to rate my emotional and physical state, I would give it an 8 out of 10.
But now that I am on day three without the feed and without stories, my state has improved noticeably. Clarity and lightness arrived. Motivation went up. I was able to take on several very important, and very unpleasant, tasks. I started a course I had been putting off for months.
My internal battery holds up well even after 10 p.m. and keeps giving me energy. Original solutions and good ideas keep showing up.
I am starting to understand what it feels like to accumulate dopamine instead of pouring it into a reels feed where you cannot remember the clip you watched five seconds ago.
When I gave up sugar four years ago, my taste receptors began to clear and I started tasting familiar food completely differently.
The same process is happening now with my “information receptors”. My brain stopped suffering from the scroll and stopped burning dopamine on nonsense. As a result, dopamine started accumulating, motivation went up, and so did the general sense of enjoyment in life.
Today I had lunch at a cafe with nothing playing in the background, the way I usually do it, and simply enjoyed the food. Then I walked down the street and actually noticed the nature and the people around me. It felt great.
If someone had told me a week ago that giving up social media could produce this effect, I simply would not have believed it.
I will keep you posted. The experiment is still running.
Have you ever done a digital detox? Have you spent a few days without social media?