I Short-Circuited My Brain By Consuming Too Much Short-form Content
Today in embarrassing things I’d rather not admit about myself, I came to the realization that I consume way too much short-form content. Like so much short-form content that it was becoming a genuine detriment to my well-being.
My first instinct upon this realization was to go “well can you blame me? I’m a niche internet microcelebrity. I need to know what others are thinking too“. Turns out that the answer is a resounding yes, I can blame myself for this.
I was consuming to the point where I could no longer produce anything. My headspace was so muddied by trying to process the mundanities of the 100+ different snippets of information (mostly on Twitter) that I’d read over the course of a half-hour or so, that there was no room left to let the mind breathe and flourish.
I found this manifesting in myself in a peculiar feeling of yearning listlessness, a sort of passivity in my own life. I had been chalking it up to some combination of Winter blues, stress at work, and being a Sensitive Young Man™, but my suspicions are now leaning toward the possibility of these feelings surfacing from my complete and utter lack of mental downtime.
The effects aren’t really the important part of this story — how I actually managed to make this realization and get it to stick were the tricky parts.
To get into that, let’s start from the beginning: I had just gotten back home from vacation after a paltry 3.5 hours of sleep to catch my early-morning flight, expecting a lazy day of zoning out and surfing the internet with the little bit of consciousness I was holding onto. The algorithm served me up this video by Jake Frew, called Consume Like an Artist. And hey, I’m a wannabe creative type, so why not give it a watch, right?
Instead, I found myself enraptured by the visual storytelling coupled with the central messages that Jake was trying to get across (I highly recommend watching the actual video, it’s really good), which are that you need to be more discerning with what you allow yourself to consume and you need to allow yourself some mental silence to process all the information that you’ve absorbed recently.
Immediately after watching, so much about my current personality clicked into place. I’m not sure why it was this specific presentation of this idea that sent the message home for me, but here I am, reevaluating much of my life regardless.
The biggest realization for me was going into my phone’s screen time settings and seeing that I look at my phone an average ~6.5 hours per day. That’s 15 hours of twitter and 5 hours of instagram per week. Between work, commuting, and exercise, that leaves me with ~1 hour of actual reality to experience in an average day. No wonder my mind feels numb.
Of course, the video above talks about being discerning in all of the content you consume — if you like a movie from a certain director, find out what influenced the choices and cinematography that they brought into that movie, and go watch those things.
But I’d like to shift the focus for the rest of this article toward developing a healthy relationship with social media content.
I’m defining short-form content as anything that can be consumed in a few minutes or less. Things like tweets, instagram posts/stories, reddit/forum threads, browsing online sales, etc. These things aren’t bad on their own, but stringing together a bunch of them back to back is an incredible amount of information to take in, compared to something like a book, a feature-length film, or even a youtube video that requires long, sustained attention to the topic at hand (youtube is an especially big gray area, thanks to all of those ridiculous video essays — those that are meant to be played in the background while you do other things — that now pollute the platform).
The idea that short-form content is bad really isn’t all that new — there are tons of thinkpieces lamenting the death of our attention spans. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to read this stuff and think “not me though, I’m built different“.
You are not built different.
Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into the art of capturing and commodifying your attention. As it turns out, short snippets of info can be loaded up with advertisements much more effectively than longer pieces of media.
How To Consume Media
My intentions in writing this are not to tell you to fully abstain from media consumption. I mean, it would be incredibly hypocritical for me to say that as someone who mostly makes short-form content for you guys. Plus, for me personally, I need to stay at least a little bit up to date with the current happenings in the fashion/menswear world, something that is almost entirely short-form at this point.
You know who else fully abstained from media and culture? Exactly. The Unabomber.
I will say that the Unabomber was right about oversocialization, which is pretty much the phenomenon I’m describing here (but on steroids).
Instead, this is more of an exhortation of making more responsible choices with what you allow your mind to be influenced by, and the way you choose to interact with that content.
A couple of rhetorical questions for you:
-Can you make it through a 2-hour movie without checking your phone?
-When is the first time you look at your phone when you wake up in the morning?
-How many pages of a book can you read before you start groping for your phone?
My answers:
-No
-First thing while still in bed
-About 20
Maybe you look at this and think “holy shit you’re cooked dude“ or maybe you think “holy shit if he thinks that’s bad then I’m definitely cooked“. Either way, this is enough to make me feel bad and passive in my own life, which is a feeling I strongly dislike. Hopefully you can gain some insight in the same way. Recognizing and accepting that it’s bad is the first step in rectifying it though.
My post-reevaluation thoughts on media In short:
Consuming short-form content (in moderation) is okay. Consuming long form content (without allowing yourself to split your attention between multiple things) is better. Engaging with content in a meaningful way that requires output on your end is great. Making your own stuff is even better (It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling to have created something that is well received!).
At all steps, make sure to give yourself ample time to process what you’re consuming — your brain will do it no matter what, and if you don’t allow yourself to overtly control the process, it can bubble up in maladaptive ways.
A Way Out?
My process for rectifying my fried dopamine receptors is starting with time limits for my social media apps. I instituted 1 hour limits for twitter, tik tok, and instagram — so 3 hours max per day through all 3 apps.
Again, the goal here for me isn’t to stop consumption altogether, it’s to curtail and refine it, so that the things I am consuming are done with more intention.
In the video above, Jake points out showering as one of the few moments in your day where you’re not getting absolutely bombarded with useless information, and in turn how those ~10 minutes are generally filled with creative thought or new ideas or enhanced understanding of recent events in your life (or winning arguments against the snarky strawman in your head).
I find that taking walks outside has a very similar effect, and is something that I do very regularly. I’m very fortunate to have an extremely high-energy dog that will force me to take her on walks.
I also find that writing in a journal is great for processing information — something about getting those thoughts down onto paper really empty the head. Another time I find this processing to occur is when I’m in bed trying to fall asleep. I’m someone who struggles horribly with falling asleep, mainly because I feel I can’t turn my brain off — it’s trying to catch up with all of the stuff I experienced and read about over the course of the day. Sometimes it’ll take me hours to fall asleep, and sometimes I get no deep sleep at all. This is awful for someone who wakes up at 4:30 am to go to rowing practice. A 9 pm bedtime can quickly turn into a meager 4 hours of sleep, which, predictably, absolutely wrecks me the next day.
Back to the app limits: my first day of trying the app limits was on Thursday of this week. I immediately blew through my daily expenditure of both twitter and instagram, and was surprised to find that, similar to showering, I found myself being lifted out of my mental fog. It was near-instantaneous — not some weeks-long process to get over this stuff. It took like 15 minutes for my mind to re-adjust to holding onto boredom.
From there, I felt imbued with an energy that I hadn’t felt in a while — I tackled some of the more irregular household chores I’d been putting off, I took a fit pic for the first time in a full month (literally such a simple, easy act — 5 minutes from start to finish, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it), I fixed my bike, and read 60 pages of my book.
These aren’t monumental tasks by any means, but I felt GOOD doing them, and importantly, it didn’t feel like a chore to get through them. I was enjoying the moment for what it was, which is something I haven’t felt in a while.
I don’t expect every day to be a productivity fest from now on, but I’m going into day 4 of this experiment and my head feels clear, and I’m feeling quite a bit more internally motivated than I was last week. Small wins where you can take them, right? They add up over time.
Hope you guys might have been able to glean some sort of insight from this post — just a realization about myself and our current media climate. From here I’ll be taking things day by day, just trying to be as consistent as possible with my new rules. Hopefully something beautiful comes out of it.
Until next time!
This is something I’ve thought a lot about, as someone who’s loved reading from a very early age and has certainly felt the effects of social media on my attention span.
And as a fellow insomniac, I can’t stress enough how much reading-in print!-has assuaged my sleeping issues. There’s that wonderful moment when you’re digesting words on paper, and even if they interest you, you start drifting off and catch yourself reading the same sentence three times. As soon as that moment comes I know I can fall straight off to sleep.
Good stuff starting down this path, man. I’ve had the same experience you mentioned at the end, how turning off the consumption seems to add massive chunks of capacity for real life that seemed so out of reach before. I always get pulled back in unfortunately, but this post was a nice boost to set up those timers again.