I’ve uninstalled Twitter from my phone.

Even with being careful who I follow, and which words I mute, I noticed it impacting my mental wellbeing.

How so?

Specifically for me it was instilling a “I should be achieving more right now” self-criticism.

It was subtle—I didn’t notice it for a while. But when I honestly checked in with myself, there was for sure a negative vibe in me the more scrolling I was doing.

Within my own silo, I feel I’m achieving exactly what I should be.

But layer in other people’s highlight reels and I start comparing my day-to-day inputs with other people’s (curated) outputs.

Tim Urban wrote a great article about this: how we live life one pixel at a time in a giant ‘life’ JPEG: any given pixel isn’t particularly spectacular in isolation—and if we compare our current pixel with other people’s zoomed out life picture, ours will always look worse.

It’s irrelevant whose life is ‘going better’ (if that’s even a thing). The problem is you’re comparing apples to oranges. That’s what I felt was happening—comparing my day-to-day pixels with other people’s whole (not to mention filtered) JPEG, and that was making it harder to take incremental daily steps forward.

I’m not quitting Twitter altogether for now. Just deleting from my phone—that’s the place where I find it using me rather than me using it. Where I’ll find myself absent-mindedly opening it without having first set that as my intention for how to spend my time.

But Twitter is good! I enjoy the tugs and pushes in different directions it does to my brain.

—A friend

Then keep it up! It’s likely phasic for me. All I know is that for now my brain isn’t appreciating the tugs and pushes, it’s stressed by them.

And like all these things, spirals can easily start:

• feel that I’m achieving less than others →
• gets me down and less motivated to do good work →
• I achieve less →
• feel that I’m achieving even less compared with others →
• gets me down and less motivated to do good work →
• I achieve less →
• …

The answer to a spiral is to hijack any point in it. Sometimes you can apply that hijack internally, by correcting the inner monologue (‘other people writing on Twitter needn’t get me down!! all is good!’), but sometimes a temporary hijack/intervention at the external level—like deleting Twitter—is easier to effect.

As long as you hijack somewhere, the whole spiral collapses and all is good.

How do you handle the draw to use it on computer?

—Another friend

I haven’t felt that draw yet! It’s only a habit on my phone. But if I did:

If it were something I’d consciously decided to do (so, not really a draw so much as a conscious intention) then that’s fine, I’ll do it, and keep an eye on how it’s making me feel and how long I’m spending there and whether I’m using it in the way I intended.

And otherwise, the earlier point about spiralling would apply: I’d either work to overcome the urge internally or resort to a website blocker to hijack externally.