Block Everything
We begin with a useful challenge: A week with no social media and as little internet as humanly possible.
This course is about developing the skills to be around the internet all the time and make healthy choices without needing extra supports other than your own choices. But to begin with, we’ll cut out as much as possible. This is to give you some space, to see that you can live and function without checking your phone every ten minutes. We’ll take a step away, gather some new tools, and then return to the challenge with fresh eyes, ready to grow something that’s more useful to us. In the following weeks of the course, we’ll gradually introduce more time around the internet and reduce any restrictions, firewalls, apps, etc that you’re using during the first week.
As mentioned above, for this first week, use whatever will be useful to you. If you want to lock your phone up in the trunk of your car overnight, lock that in the garage and fill the garage up with angry sharks to keep you away from it, that’s up to you.
Tips to make this work
- Block sites. Do it right now before your brain notices what’s going on. You know the sites you frequently visit that get you sucked into compulsions. There are multiple website blocking apps and browser extensions for your laptop. Grab one and try it out. Many will even let you set time limits on general usage, so get going and give yourself that extra help this week.
- BE HONEST & KIND. You know you’ve tried to do this through anger and judgment and shame and every other mean thing you can do to yourself. Consider that’s actually part of the compulsions we get hooked on. We often self-sabotage and turn ourselves into problems to fix. Let’s take a step away from that. Blocking these sites is an act of kindness to yourself. Give yourself a vacation from shame and judgment.
- Give yourself an easy-to-access activity you can choose instead. This isn’t about saying you’ll give up social media and replace it with a serious physical fitness practice for the first time in your life. Starting a physical fitness practice would be a challenging change on its own. So have something you can do instead of the internet – create a smorgasbord of options for yourself so it’s easy to choose. Get some interesting books or magazines and have them by your computer so you can choose them instead. Or setup a painting or drawing station beside your computer so you can grab that when your brain is screaming at you to just check that pointless website one more time. Have something ready beside your bed so you’re not lying there with only your phone to pickup.
Download This Week’s Exercises
If you’ll find it useful to really cut back on screen time this week, you can do all of this week’s exercises from a printable handout. We won’t be doing this for the following weeks of lessons, because then we want to work on making healthy choices while online. But right now, if you’d find it useful to have some extra space, click the button below to download the week’s lessons:
Is today the right day to start?
This may sound like a surprising coincidence but today is actually the perfect day to start. We’ve already checked your astrological charts, your blood type, the balance of your Big 5 Personality Traits, and your Myers-Briggs Type. For optimal chances of success, they all point directly to today being the ideal day to get started on making healthy changes and learning new skills.
Should I binge compulsions one last time?
This is another trick that brains love to pull on us. You’ve probably already noticed that bingeing on compulsions one last time and then promising yourself you’ll quit for good this time, hasn’t worked out for you. It generally has the opposite effect. You might make it a few days and then only crave the compulsions even more! We find that it’s more effective to simply walk away from the compulsions. There are some websites or apps you’ll simply never use again. You can let them go. No special ceremony necessary.