Like housework, the Internet expands to fill the time you give it. Take it from a thirty-year veteran of housewifery: more time doesn’t necessarily mean better results.
Internet addiction is as real and serious a problem as gambling addiction. It’s potentially more dangerous because the internet is everywhere and open all the time. Our minds can’t get enough of instant access to friends, gossip, news and interesting information. It’s easy to cave into that craving and end up feeling like you’ve wasted life’s most precious commodity—time.
Here’s how to resist the allure of Facebook, Twitter, Huffington Post, National review, TMZ, or whatever your Achille’s heel is. Pick at least one from each of the three steps listed below.
1. GET READY
Keep a log of time spent on the Internet.
- Note when you start, and when you finish.
- What did you intend to do, and did you actually do it?
- What did you drift to when you were bored or frustrated?
Learn about what happens in your brain when you click from site to site, or play online games over and over.
- Volumes have been written about addictive behavior, and more information is coming out all the time, but a few helpful facts:
- Checking e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and other social media compulsively is not about keeping up with your friends or work. It’s about soothing your anxiety.
- Anxiety is a product of perfectly natural hormone cycles and physiological feedback loops that powerfully control human behavior. Working to understand why we do what we do, helps us change.
2. GET SET
Acknowledge that your mind will resist. “Just Say No” doesn’t work, but there are tricks to fool your brain into going along.
- Declutter your space. Internet addiction is characterized by an inability to dive deeply into a task or topic. It’s even harder to stay focused when you’re surrounded by dishes needing washing, paperwork needing attention, dust needing dusting.
- Declutter your computer desktop. It’s also hard to be calm and directed if your gorgeous screen saver is covered with unfinished projects.
- Each day, when you’re (a) the most clear-headed and (b) not online, set goals. Make a list of what you need and want to do on the Internet. Do you plan to read the newspaper, buy flowers for a friend, arrange a meeting? Write those things down.
- Resist multi-tasking. It feels efficient, but it’s not. It muddles your mind. Stick to your list. Do one task, then the next, then the next.
- Turn off the internet at regular intervals and work as much as possible without it.
- Sign out of e-mail and social media sites when you aren’t using them. The small irritation of having to sign in is often enough to remind you not to mindlessly use it.
- Here is a cool app that allows you to “demetricate” Facebook, that is, stop Facebook from telling you how many notices, comments, likes, etc. you have waiting for you.
- Take charge of e-mail. Constant e-mailing contributes to unhealthy levels of stress. Check e-mail only two or three times a day.
- Keep inbox empty by trashing, answering, filing. If you do nothing else, this alone will make you feel great.
- Vary where you use the Internet.
- Try going online only when away from home. See if your habits change when you’re around other people addictively clicking and checking.
- Conversely, I work from home, so I go to coffee houses without internet and get some of my best work done.
- Don’t sleep in the same room with your computer, smart phone or iPad. If they are there, you will use them.
- The wavelengths of light produced by your devices interfere with the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin.
- Leaving your phone out of the bedroom can improve marital relations. This survey showed the 62% of the female respondents felt that their partner’s use of a cell phone interfered with their relationship.
Have you struggled with spending too much time on the Internet? How do you deal with the problem?