Avoiding Internet-Induced Brain Rot

(Part One)

I had a different topic in mind for today, but yesterday it was a voting day for the local elections. As such, results have been coming in today.

What this means in real life is not a lot. Going about the day outside in the sunshine, you’d never have known.

However… on the internet it’s a different story, as you can imagine.

People are very upset.

Politics brings out the muppet in people at the best of times, and it’s all somewhat understandable. But there’s a lot of upset caused by what can only be described as a complete and utter disconnect from reality.

We’ve entered the age of social media-induced lowered cognitive functioning.

As part of this new streak I’m building, I want to focus on the positives, so I won’t explain. You all know what I’m talking about. Let’s how to avoid and repair ourselves.

Doom Scrolls Aren’t A Forbidden Artifact In A Fantasy Novel

The average person apparently scrolls their phone for over three hours a day.

Before we get into what that entails, let’s just address this.

If you spend three hours a day scrolling on your phone, this is the easiest, most applicable entryway into reclaiming your brain that there is. It’s the low-hanging fruit.

I say this with no judgement; as long time readers will know, I suffer with migraines. I’ve overhauled a lot of stuff in the personal life so I can limit the days where I’m effectively a useless potato of a human.

As such, at the start of 2025, instead of doing New Year’s Resolutions as one big thing, I decided to commit to adding new micro-habits every day (or whenever I thought of one.) That’s maybe a topic for another day, actually.

But to keep on track, one of those micro-habits was seriously limiting phone use. It’s very easy to spend a lot of time on the phone. There’s social media, which is inherently addictive. There’s also social stuff itself; as of covid, people are in group chats with friends both locally and globally. There’s banking, which you can do from your phone. You can watch TV on your phone. Gaming too.

Basically, one of the driving forces of innovation in recent years has been the fact that you can do everything on your phone.

This then leads to the net result of, well, doing everything on your phone.

First Steps, Then…

The simplest first step is to limit your phone time. I’m not going to rattle on because honestly, this whole topic is lame, but here’s my skin-in-the-game, I’m-my-own-test-subject protocol and guidelines.

Firstly, the hard rule is less than an hour. Every day, without fail. I try and do less than thirty minutes, but sometimes that’s not possible. (Which, I imagine will become less true as I refine things.)

Of course, it’s easy to say “Spend less time,” but for those who need it more granularly, here are some things I do:

• No phone before I’ve had breakfast, got dressed and ready to leave the house/start working
• No phone after I’ve had my evening meal
• Hard limit on social media (do this in your phone settings; set yourself a timer of 10 minutes or whatever you feel you need for the necessary coping stuff you need to do)

There are a lot of simple things you can do there. There are also three things I’ll add that require a bit more explaining.

1. Offload tasks to the PC

While replacing the phone with the computer seems counterproductive, you can do a lot of things a ton faster on a PC than you can on a mobile device. For instance, on a phone, you have an email app, a banking app, your neighbour’s cat’s Instagram, and all your favourite Security Service Funded Propaganda Networks sources of accurate and viable news. On a phone, you’re doing one thing at a time. On a PC, you can have a bookmarks folder that pings all of these things open in one go.

2. Automate and write macro scripts – use Telegram

One thing I’ve found useful, which is a bit more nerdy, is to write automation scripts for things. I’m not the only one who has noticed that the notifications you get on your phone, just like everything else on it, are designed to force you back into the phone Matrix.

• “GMAIL: Email from [[X]]”
• “Someone liked your cat photo”
• “Your neighbour’s cat posted a new photo”

For most of these things, you can disable notifications, run a script to pull the stuff onto your PC (or little, unobtrusive Raspberry Pi set up) and then forward it to Telegram. (Other bot services probably available.)

3. Return to using other stuff in lieu of the phone

I’m not going to suggest you start listening to vinyl and smoking from a tobacco pipe whilst reading a broadsheet newspaper by candlelight. From a purely practical perspective though, if you’re like me, you use the phone camera for a lot. There are plenty of point and shoot cameras available. Similarly, I’ve got an old Sony MP3 player in lieu of using the phone for listening to music.

Continued In Part 2

I’m still out of practice with the regular blog updating things, and, related to the topic, I’m still trying to run a publishing business with limited screen time.

And this topic was far wider than I intended it to be.

At some point within the next few days, we’ll continue this.

So I’ll see you in the next one.

In the meantime, remember to try and keep everything practical. What you do, or, in this case, don’t is the important thing rather than the words on the screen.