let me tell you about how i recently ruined my morning routine there's this fun little game that everyone's playing right now called wordle if you haven't heard about it you have to guess a five letter word you get six tries to guess it and with each guess the game tells you if you got the letters correct and if you got their positions correct it's a great game and every morning since i discovered it i have been grabbing my phone off my nightstand playing the wordle solve the word and then i get up and start my
day perfect little routine but then something slowly started to change i'd finish the wordle then i'd open up twitter and i would check my notifications and then i slowly started checking instagram as well and then tick tock and before i knew it my morning ritual had completely changed i wasn't just taking five minutes to play the wordle and then getting up and actually starting my day i was waking up and losing half an hour just scrolling before i'd finally snap out of my social media induced stupor it was a huge waste of my time and
i'm not alone in wasting that time in fact there was a study that was recently done that found that people are currently using social media around two hours a day meaning conversely we are spending a lot less time doing the things that if we're very honest with ourselves we want to do a lot more of like reading books or practicing our hobbies or even just finding simpler ways to cure our boredom one little interesting tidbit along these lines i found is that since the original iphone was introduced chewing gum sales have absolutely plummeted because in
checkout lines people are now just staring at their phones instead of impulse purchasing packs of big red simply put social media has become a huge time sink and for a lot of us that time we spend scrolling the feeds is largely unconscious it's non-deliberate and it creates this fundamental disconnect in our minds because we know there are other things we would rather be doing which better align with our goals and our aspirations so what can we do about this problem well the funny thing is that technology is the thing that created this problem and yet
it is technology that seems to come riding to the rescue claiming that it is also the solution now we've got apps and browser extensions that will block social media and for the iphone at least there's even this focus mode that will limit how much time you spend on certain apps per day but there's also a much simpler solution in fact it is so stupidly simple that when i thought of it i thought it would be way too simple to make an entire video about it that is until i tried it for myself and i had
some surprising results so here it is if you want to stop mindlessly scrolling social media if you want to break your addiction to your phone and use it more deliberately then you don't need some app you don't need some david goggins video all you need is to log out [Music] seriously that's it use social media when you intend to use it and then log out if you need to use it again log back in want to check your dms log in that's totally cool wanna scroll tick tock during your lunch break and watch weird videos
of people biting emojis out of thin air cool that's your prerogative i won't even judge you honestly hank green's take on that trend is pretty creative but let the default state of your phone be logged out now you might be thinking there are actually even better solutions to this problem like yeeting your phone across the room or deleting social media apps off your phone altogether or quitting social media cal newport style yes these methods are more effective but if you've already used them or that's how you think then this video isn't for you this video
is for the much larger group of people who either don't want to or can't get themselves to get these apps off their phone who can't get themselves to stop mindlessly scrolling and if that is you and sometimes that's me to be honest then logging out is a much easier solution it's just as effective because it throws up a roadblock but you're not really losing out on anything because you're still 30 seconds for being able to log in and do anything you would normally do on a social media app and your phone's still with you so
if you get an important call or a message or a notification you can still look at it but it's that introduction of a little bit of inconvenience a little bit of friction that makes all the difference you're going from three seconds and no effort to just open twitter to 30 seconds and a little bit of effort to grab your password grab your two factor off code which i hope you are using and actually log in and that is what makes all the difference because that unconscious impulse we have to mindlessly scroll it only survives an
environment of zero friction and this is an environment that smartphone manufacturers and social media companies have successfully built for us and a lot of us live in this world but you can also destroy that environment simply by logging out simply by adding a little bit of friction into the process this is a very similar idea to one that michael pollan actually shared in his netflix documentary cooked when he talked about weight loss and dieting he said eat all the junk food that you want as long as you cook it yourself there's a longer explanation of
this idea from one of the people he interviewed for that documentary specifically in the second episode if you are curious but it's getting at the same idea that we're getting at here with this idea of logging out so many of the bad habits that we just can't seem to shake are only a problem because they don't involve any work they're bad habits born out of convenience and if we can add in just a little bit of inconvenience then we can break them naturally without the need for any fancy apps or the aforementioned david goggins videos
in the book atomic habits author james clare generalizes this idea with his inversion to the third law of behavior change where he says sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard so as i mentioned earlier i originally thought that this idea was too stupidly simple for its own video maybe it's good for a tweet but a whole video come on but i changed my tune when i actually observed my own results and my own behavior with this because after i had the idea ironically i didn't log out
i had the idea while i was reading a book and i immediately realized it would be a good idea but then my brain started throwing up these little objections like what if i get an important dm or isn't it gonna be a waste of time to be constantly logging in and logging out or what am i gonna do when i'm in line at the grocery store buy chewing gum no no the funny thing is that none of these objections really stand up to scrutiny they wouldn't actually hold any water and i don't really think they
were supposed to instead it was the dopamine craving side of my brain just trying to delay just trying to kick the can down the road and this is the ultimate argumentative tactic of anything that is representing the status quo whether it be another person or an organization or that side of your brain that just really wants to check twitter whenever it feels like it and that side of me won out for about a full week before i finally sat down opened up all my social media apps and actually logged out but once i did that
the change was kind of drastic i remember about a day after i did this i was standing in line at the coffee shop i pulled out my phone and i felt my hand go through that very familiar routine of swiping over and opening twitter only to see a logged out screen immediately i just didn't care anymore because i wasn't deliberately trying to check twitter i was just looking for that quick dope mean hit and there was a roadblock there and quickly after that those little cravings to pull up my phone in the first place also
started to fade quite quickly as well so i think that this is an incredibly helpful method and i think that a lot of you are going to agree with me this is a very good idea but you're also going to have those same objections popping up back in your head the same little delaying tactics from that dopamine craving side of your brain so here's my challenge to you ignore those little objections open up twitter open up tech talk open up any app that you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through in a non-deliberate way and log out
give it a try because again you're not really giving anything up now earlier i mentioned james claire's third law of behavior change which you can find in his book atomic habits and a great way to get the rest of the insights from that frankly fantastic book even if you are short on time is with audible who have kindly sponsored this video on audible you're going to find atomic habits alongside an unmatched library of titles that includes audiobooks across pretty much any genre as well as podcasts workout programs and original programs and all these give you
a great way to learn new things while you're out walking or you're driving to work or you're just taking care of stuff around the house and you can't sit down to actually read a book each month your membership gets you credit for one title across their entire catalog that is yours to keep forever and along with that you get access to an on-demand and growing library of included audiobooks workout programs and lots more and the best part is that you can actually try it out for free because if you go over to audible.com thomas or
text thomas to 500 500 on your phone you can sign up and get a 30 day free trial that comes with a free credit for any title that you want now if you haven't already listened to atomic habits i'm going to highly recommend you start with that book it is absolutely fantastic and if you have i will recommend kevin mitnick's ghost in the wires because that is one of my personal favorite audio books i actually fall asleep to it every single night so check that one out as well once again head over to audible.com thomas
text thomas to 500 500 on your phone or simply click right there to get started with that free 30-day trial thanks as always for watching hopefully you enjoyed this video and if you did hit that like button for the algorithm and if you're looking for something else to watch i've been doing a lot of personal finance content recently and i've got more in the works so right there i've got a video on three habits i think everyone should use for managing their money check that out and i'll see you in the next video
