In a sequence of posts I clarify, utilizing teachings from the early Buddhist scriptures, how we will free ourselves from habit to social media. You’ll find these teachings within the Vitakkasanthana Sutta. That is an historical educating which outlines 5 methods for overcoming our compelling urges. (Listed below are hyperlinks to the Introduction, Half 1, Half 3, Half 4, and Half 5.)
The Picture
This week we’re going to have a look at the second device, or technique. That is the place we study the drawbacks of getting a thoughts that’s uncontrolled.
I like this explicit description as a result of it incorporates a very graphic and visceral picture.
The discourse says:
They need to study the drawbacks of these ideas: ‘So these ideas are unskillful, they’re blameworthy, and so they lead to struggling.’ As they accomplish that, these dangerous ideas are given up and are available to an finish. Suppose there was a lady or man who was younger, youthful, and keen on adornments. If the corpse of a snake or a canine or a human had been hung round their neck, they’d be horrified, repelled, and disgusted.
Isn’t that a terrific picture? I’ll come again to say extra about it later.
The applying of this device to social media is sort of apparent. We have to have a look at the disadvantages of social media, and of our habit to it.
We have to do that to counteract the way in which that Fb, Twitter, and so forth, steal our consideration.
Now it’s vital that we be taught to acknowledge that these applied sciences are literally designed to be addictive. Social media have been rigorously engineered to hook into our brains’ reward circuits. They do that so that we are going to maintain coming again for extra stimulation. They demand that we maintain coming again to see if anybody has appreciated, forwarded, or commented on our posts. They hook us by making their streams limitless, by autoplaying movies in order that you must take motion to disengage, and by displaying us when somebody is composing a reply to one thing we’ve written.
The Drawbacks Results of Social Media
There’s now a lot of proof of the unfavorable results of social media. We’re not simply speaking about a couple of individuals who develop into severe addicts and have their lives utterly ruined. There are in fact folks for whom this does occur.
In response to a 2019 examine on social media habit, carried out by researchers at Michigan State College and Monash College in Australia, individuals who use Fb closely have impaired decision-making abilities to the purpose the place they carry out as poorly in psychological checks as people who find themselves hooked on cocaine or heroin.
We Waste Time
However we’re just about all hooked. In response to one examine, the typical individual now spends 4 hours a day on their telephone.
We Change into Depressed and Lonely
Social media make us anxious and depressed They make us really feel lonely.
They con us into pondering that we’re doing poorly compared to others, as a result of different folks have a tendency to indicate a falsely upbeat view of their very own lives on social media.
Analysis exhibits that the extra time we spend on social media, the extra our sense of happiness and life satisfaction drop.
We Enable Ourselves to be Manipulated
And naturally, dangerous actors are utilizing social media for social engineering. They’ve develop into propaganda instruments designed to affect our political decision-making. These propaganda instruments are so rigorously designed that we don’t even notice we’re being manipulated and typically will deny it when it’s identified to us. In maybe the final word irony, Fb found {that a} Russian web company had arrange a web page on mindfulness, of all issues, as a part of an try to affect elections within the US.
The primary disadvantage for me, personally, was the sheer period of time that I used to waste on social media. If I wasn’t cautious I might choose up my telephone within the morning and simply spend an hour or extra studying information tales and shopping Twitter. That’s time that I might use going for a stroll, or meditating, or working. Social media has a possibility value.
So these are a number of the disadvantages of social media. However there are various others: there’s the way in which we keep up too late, observing screens. There’s the way in which we scale back our productiveness by continuously interrupting our work to verify for brand spanking new updates. There’s the way in which we get so absorbed in our units that we don’t take note of our family members (I see so many dad and mom ignoring their youngsters!). There’s the way in which we get into on-line conflicts and the way in which we discover it arduous to remain centered the way in which we used to. Presumably all that is very acquainted to you.
Struggling Masquerading as Happiness
The factor about an habit is that regardless that it has a unfavorable affect on our lives it guarantees to be a supply of happiness. It is a phenomenon that the Buddha included in his teachings of the vipallasas (or viparyasas in Sanskrit in the event you’re extra acquainted with that language).
Vipallasa is a phrase that we might translate as “cognitive distortion.” These distorted methods of seeing issues classically embody assuming that impermanent issues will final perpetually, seeing issues which might be ethically unattractive as engaging, and seeing issues that aren’t who we’re as being intrinsic to our sense of self.
The cognitive distortion right here is our assumption that issues that trigger unhappiness could make us completely happy. It’s our assumption that happiness comes from collaborating in social media, taking part in on-line video games, studying the information, and so forth. It’s our worry that we’ll be disadvantaged and endure if we don’t do this stuff.
From FOMO to JOMO
A method folks discuss that is by way of the acronym FOMO. This stands for the Worry of Lacking Out. After I first considered deleting my Fb account I frightened that I’d lose contact with distant relations. I frightened that I won’t study important occasions in my mates’ lives. That I’d miss breaking information, and so forth.
Absolutely, I assumed, giving up my Fb and Instagram accounts would scale back my sense of well-being. However I discovered that the alternative was the case. The much less I used social media, the extra content material I used to be. I used to be much more productive. I spent extra time meditating. I might as soon as extra concentrate on studying a guide with full consideration, undistractedly. And I loved it. This was an enormous blessing!
Chopping my ties with social media, or most of them no less than, was joyful and liberating. As a substitute of experiencing FOMO, the Worry of Lacking Out, I skilled JOMO — the Pleasure of Lacking Out.
Treating Our Urges With Skepticism
So this second device from the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, inspecting the drawbacks of our immersion in social media, is a means of undermining our habit. It helps us to look extra clearly at our want to go onto social media, or to remain hooked on it. It helps us to treat these needs with a bit extra skepticism.
We will begin to see ideas of rapidly checking our Fb or Twitter accounts as false guarantees. These ideas are saying “This can make you cheerful. This can give your life that means. You want this.” And we will see extra starkly that in actuality, our addictive use of social media makes us sad. We will see that it takes us away from issues which might be really significant.
Recognizing What Is Not Becoming
I’d like to return again to the picture that the Buddha makes use of: It’s like “a lady or man who was younger, youthful, and keen on adornments. If the corpse of a snake or a canine or a human had been hung round their neck, they’d be horrified, repelled, and disgusted.”
That’s a strong picture! Think about you’re all dressed up in your most interesting garments able to exit someplace, and somebody had been to drape the stinking corpse of some animal round your neck! How gross! So this picture encourages us to acknowledge the unwholesomeness of our addictions. We will be taught to see that social media habit is that this gross factor in our lives, like a rotting corpse.
However let’s not ignore the finery. The pictures is mindless until the individual with the useless animal draped round their shoulders is aware of what’s good and healthful of their lives. That’s there too. It’s vital to acknowledge that reality.
So we should always not simply see the presence of the unskillful in our lives, but in addition acknowledge the issues we do this carry us a way of peace and pleasure.
Honoring What’s Skillful In Our Lives
It’s solely after we acknowledge and honor the skillful in our lives that the unskillful seems misplaced.
If we had been simply to replicate on the drawbacks of on-line habit, we’d in all probability simply really feel dangerous about ourselves. Satirically, which may immediate us to spend much more time on-line, as a result of that’s the place we go to flee issues we don’t like. In order we replicate on the drawbacks of on-line habit, we’d like additionally to show our consideration to extra healthful actions. These embody issues like being extra absolutely current with ourselves and with something we occur to be doing, meditating, being current for others, specializing in significant work, attending to the straightforward pleasures of life, and so forth.
One factor I’ve discovered as I’ve disengaged from social media is that I’ve rediscovered the fun of immersing myself deeply in a superb guide — one thing that at one level I frightened that I’d now not have the ability to do. I’ve additionally rediscovered the fun of listening to classical music, and of going for walks. I’m rediscovering the delights of simplicity and presence.
Two Issues to Do
So I’d recommend that you just do two issues.
- First, spend a while itemizing what, for you, are the largest drawbacks of habit to social media.
- Second, additionally make a listing of the straightforward issues in life that you just discover most nourishing. Make a listing of the nice issues that social media takes you away from.
After which when you end up caught up in addictive behaviors on-line, name these two lists to thoughts.
Create a way of — it’s sturdy phrase however a superb one — “disgust” with addictive conduct, however stability that by creating an attraction to what’s healthful and nourishing in your life — issues that make you really completely happy and that carry you a way of peace and that means.
Abstract
So what have we discovered at the moment? We’ve discovered that:
- We will substitute the worry of lacking out with the enjoyment of lacking out.
- A method we will weaken our addictions is to replicate on their unfavorable affect on our lives.
- Social media have many such unfavorable results.
- We have to consciously replicate on these unfavorable results. It is because the addictive circuits in our brains depend on cognitive distortions, or vipallasas. These inform us that we’d like the article of our habit with the intention to be completely happy.
- We additionally want to show to what’s constructive in life. We have to acknowledge what brings us pleasure, and peace, and a way that we’re dwelling in a significant means.
These reflections assist us to see our addictive conduct as one thing gross. They offer us a clearer sense of who we’re and the way we need to reside our lives. They assist us to see habit as one thing that simply doesn’t match with who we’re and who we need to be. They assist us to acknowledge and undermine our addictive tendencies, in order that we will develop into freer, and happier, and extra answerable for our minds.
To learn Half 3 of the Social Media Sutra, click on right here: Simply Flip Away.