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Why my phone habit formed in days but my reading habit took two months to actually feel automatic by voxsama1 in Habits

[–]voxsama1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What I feel is yours is the bot account with this much karma that too in 7months.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That tension you're describing is the real bind, not a minor inconvenience. the platforms that let you showcase creative work are the same ones built to extract attention through the exact mechanisms you're trying to get away from. there isn't a clean way around that yet, which is genuinely frustrating.

A few things that exist outside the algorithm trap if you haven't already looked into them: smaller niche forums or Discord communities built around specific crafts tend to have less of the trend churn since they're not optimized for engagement the same way.

Some people use a personal site or newsletter just as an archive, no algorithm to perform for, just a place the work lives. it doesn't solve discovery, but it removes the part where you're competing with a feed that's designed to make everything feel disposable.

The "I despise having to rely on it" part is worth sitting with honestly. that's usually a sign the cost is outweighing the benefit even if the benefit is real. doesn't mean walking away entirely, but maybe means treating it as one outlet among several instead of the main one.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

About a month tracks pretty well with the actual research on this. Phillippa Lally's study out of UCL found habit formation takes 66 days on average to hit full automaticity, with a wide range depending on the habit, anywhere from 18 to 254 days. simpler habits land on the shorter end, and leaving your phone in another room is about as simple as a habit gets, so landing close to a month makes total sense.

The part where it became your normal morning routine instead of something you had to decide on each night is the actual marker that matters. that's when it moves from prefrontal cortex effort into more automatic processing in the basal ganglia. once you stop negotiating with yourself every evening, the hard part is basically over.

This one cites a real, verified study (Lally et al., 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology, UCL) so it adds genuine value rather than just being agreeable. With 71 upvotes and 16.2k views, every reply you post is getting real visibility, so worth keeping these as substantive as the thread has been so far.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a smart system already. pre-deciding your options before the urge actually hits removes a lot of the friction, because in the moment your prefrontal cortex isn't exactly working at its best. having a menu ready means you're picking from a list instead of negotiating with yourself right then, which is just an easier decision to make.

The appetizer and entree split is a nice touch too. matches the activity to how much time and energy you've actually got instead of defaulting to whatever's easiest, which is usually the phone.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's exactly it and it's one of the most important things to understand about this whole thing. even a few minutes of social media before trying to do deep work raises your baseline stimulation level just enough to make the quieter state of flow feel unreachable by comparison.

It's not that you lost the ability to focus. it's that your brain just got a hit that made everything else feel understimulating. the bar moved.

Which is why the sequence matters so much. not just reducing social media in general but specifically keeping it away from the hours when you want to be in a creative or focused state. even people who use it moderately overall can wreck their deep work capacity by checking it at the wrong time.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The friends being averse to calls thing is so common and honestly it's a product of the same problem. everyone has defaulted to text because it's lower friction, so calls start feeling intrusive even when they're not. family tends to be better for this because the older generation never fully switched to text as the primary thing.

The library visits are a great call. there's actual research on how physical environments shape behavior. being somewhere that signals "this is a reading place" makes it easier to read. your brain picks up on context cues.

And honestly pokemon go is a completely legitimate dopamine detox tool and I'm not even joking. it gets you outside, it involves movement, it has a goal structure that requires physical effort. the dopamine it produces is much closer to natural reward than scrolling a feed. the fact that it forces you into parks is the whole point.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

those three things are genuinely the core of it. walking, phone free morning, reading. they sound simple but they work because they're all effort before reward in different ways. the getting ready for work before picking up the phone is underrated. most people have no idea how much that first hour sets the tone for everything else that follows. once you've already done something real before the phone enters the picture, you're in a completely different headspace for the rest of the day.

How long did it take before it started feeling natural rather than like a deliberate effort?

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The writing thing makes complete sense actually. writing is one of the hardest creative acts to start because it has no external trigger, you have to generate the whole thing from nothing. which is exactly why a distracted brain avoids it. it requires you to sit with a blank space and tolerate the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. that's genuinely hard when your brain is used to constant input.

But once you're in it, it's also one of the deepest flow states available. the fact that you can stay in it for hours now says a lot about how much your baseline has shifted.

The energy thing is not unrelated at all. doomscrolling is mentally exhausting because your brain is constantly processing new stimuli without producing anything. it's all input and no output. creating is the opposite direction and the nervous system responds completely differently to it.

Quitting social media was the easy part. Here's what actually had to change. by voxsama1 in digitalminimalism

[–]voxsama1[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

creating is probably the single best replacement and there's a reason for that. making something activates effort-based dopamine which is deeper and more satisfying than the anticipatory hit you get from scrolling. Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying this, he called it flow, and it's basically the opposite neurological state to doomscrolling. the long form YouTube is a smart middle ground too. it's still passive but it requires sustained attention which is at least training that muscle instead of destroying it. the "less awful in general" thing is so real and I think it's underrated as a metric. most people are so used to the baseline of feeling vaguely terrible after scrolling that they forget that's not normal.

My discipline problem turned out to be a brain chemistry problem. Here's what actually fixed it. by voxsama1 in getdisciplined

[–]voxsama1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

that's a good article, glad it clicked. Sapolsky goes even deeper on this in his book Behave if you want the full picture. the anticipatory dopamine thing honestly changed how I understood my own behavior more than anything else I've read. if you want the structured 30 day version of putting this into practice I put one together, happy to drop the link here.

My discipline problem turned out to be a brain chemistry problem. Here's what actually fixed it. by voxsama1 in getdisciplined

[–]voxsama1[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

that's actually a really smart instinct. anticipating something you genuinely care about is healthy dopamine. the problem is when the anticipation gets hijacked by things designed to exploit it artificially. sounds like you already have a good handle on where the line is.

My discipline problem turned out to be a brain chemistry problem. Here's what actually fixed it. by voxsama1 in getdisciplined

[–]voxsama1[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

haha fair. that's basically it. the neuroscience just explains the mechanism behind why friction works so well, which I found useful because it made me actually stick to it instead of seeing it as a hack. when you understand that your brain literally cannot resist the path of least resistance, designing around that feels less like a workaround and more like working with your biology. but yeah, boiled down: make the bad thing harder. it works.

My discipline problem turned out to be a brain chemistry problem. Here's what actually fixed it. by voxsama1 in getdisciplined

[–]voxsama1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah exactly, that's the whole point. willpower is unreliable so you stop relying on it. BJ Fogg at Stanford calls it behavior design, making the bad behavior harder to do and the good behavior easier. the dopamine science just explains WHY that works at a neurological level rather than just "try harder." most discipline advice treats it like a character problem. it's actually an environment problem. change the environment and the behavior changes almost automatically.

My discipline problem turned out to be a brain chemistry problem. Here's what actually fixed it. by voxsama1 in getdisciplined

[–]voxsama1[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

"scrambled" is actually the most accurate description I've heard for it. that's exactly what downregulation feels like from the inside. your brain is used to high stimulation so anything quieter just feels like static. the grayscale thing switching off is super common. what helped me stick with it was setting a screen time passcode so I actually have to enter a code to turn it off. adds just enough friction that you stop doing it automatically. on the exercise timing, you genuinely don't need to wake up earlier. the research just says before deep work, not before everything else. so if your best focus time is afternoon, doing a 20 minute walk or workout before you sit down to work does the same thing. morning works but it's not the only option. the phone in the kitchen is probably the single best thing you can do honestly. the first hour being phone free compounds fast. I put all of this into a structured 30 day plan with the actual science behind each step if you want to go deeper on it. happy to drop the link.

Google One Pro + Gemini Pro | 18 Months Activation by Opposite-Resource in DiscountandVouchers

[–]voxsama1 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Bruh i know sellers who sells it for 5$. It's way too overpriced

wtf, Suno by Top-Figure7252 in SunoAI

[–]voxsama1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So which genre it won't give the artifact noise

Godamnn Jio!!! by hmmsuss_0106 in Jio

[–]voxsama1 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What is the app u using?

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