Have Feelings
When you don’t have a screen in your face every moment of your life, you may suddenly notice that you’ve been using technology to cover up some uncertainties, emotions, insecurities, trauma, etc. Now you can begin to see them.
As well, just from the repetitive action, and the human brain’s aversion to change, your brain might get very upset about you taking away its social media access privileges. In response, it will throw up all of the junk it can think of (literally) to get you to react, to control feelings, to chase certainty, to feed it new stuff, new problems to fix, etc.
What have you been chasing online?
Notice how the brain tries to push you back into using your phone or your computer when you don’t need to. Notice what it craves when the internet isn’t an option for you. What fears is it reacting to? What uncomfortable physical sensations trigger it?
We’ve often used the internet as an easy ritual to feed some need. And it’s not that the need is necessarily bad. It’s just we haven’t learned how to interact with it in a healthy way. For example, somebody might be flipping through a dating app to get matches to reassure themselves that they’re likeable. They love the high they get from the notification of a new match, and they chat with that person for a bit, maybe even go on a date, and then ghost them to hunt for more matches to reassure themselves that they’re likeable. So the thing to work on there really isn’t an addiction to the matchmaking app like they might have initially thought. The thing to work on here is that need to reassure themselves they’re likeable. There are probably some issues to dig into around relationships, maybe some difficult experiences in the past where they felt unliked, maybe bullied, maybe there was a bad breakup. That’s going to be the real work to do. So don’t lose sight of what you discover underneath when we remove the online compulsions. You could say we’re removing these compulsions just to find out what’s underneath. The online compulsions are merely an easy sedative.
EXERCISE: Draw what you’re trying to fix with the internet.
What are you chasing? What do you want to get? What are you covering up?
- To do this, grab a piece of paper and draw three horizontal stripes and four vertical stripes. The three horizontal columns give you morning, day time, and night. We often use the internet differently at different times of day. And in that first vertical column, draw yourself during that time of day.
- In the second column, draw and write what you do online at each of those different times of the day. You might just write some website names, or draw a logo for an app, or you can do something more detailed if you want to show the actions you’re doing, like if you’re trolling people, or compulsively shopping, or trying to hookup.
- In the third column, draw and write the things you’re trying to cover up, chase after, or control. Are you posting photos to get reassurance that people like you? Are you comparing yourself to others on social media? Avoid the challenges of human interaction because of painful past experiences? Just reacting to the uncomfortable urge to play a game again and again until it’s perfect?
- In the final column, identify the skills you want to build. Draw or write them in there. The previous column was identifying needs. Maybe we’ve been chasing those needs in a way that we now see is unhealthy for us and not truly delivering what we want. By understanding that we can find healthier ways to meet our needs or learn how to interact with urges and other brain stuff differently, so we’re not played like puppets by our brains or our phones.