Comment by murat124 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by murat124 | Hacker News Reader

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With the nicotine addiction the best method fighting it was Alan Carr's in which you don't rely on your willpower but on your perception. There's a monster in you that feeds on nicotine and it wants more nicotine. With each cigarette you make it happy and you depend on it more. Or you're just a fly falling down the tube of a carnivorous plant and with each cigarette you keep saying it's fine. Such analogies change your perception on how you look at nicotine addiction and helps you overcome it. Of course brain's rewarding mechanism and all the other related neurological/psychological concepts are important too but basically when you try to stop yourself from doing something (like, not smoking) then willpower kicks in and the success rate drops significantly whereas with perception you'll have a better chance.

I see a similar problem with Twitter/TikTok/etc addiction. Only with them the issue is, the more you give from yourself to the platform the more you are addicted to it. I'm not addicted to Twitter, for instance. I follow 70-80 folks and am followed as similar but every time I post something I feel the need/urgency (such as nicotine withdrawal) to follow up, either to check the likes or the replies or whatever. Our brains are so dumb and our egos are so fragile keeping the distance becomes a challenge of its own.

I don't recommend anything. Just keep your minds free.

Agreed. Beating bad habits/addictions is a change in mindset and identity. OP's system will work for a bit, and then it just takes one lapse of judgement for OP to inevitably turn the shortcut off for the last time, never to turn it on again. If OP told himself that "I am not a Twitter user" rather than "I have a mild Twitter addiction" it would be much easier to stop, just like the book tells people to think of themselves as "not smokers" rather than "trying to quit." Remember there is no value in Twitter or TikTok; if you think there is, your brain is lying to you.

> Remember there is no value in Twitter or TikTok; if you think there is, your brain is lying to you.

I used to use Twitter a lot. I "took a break" last February that's still going strong, so I don't think my brain is "lying" too powerfully. There was real value in Twitter for a long time in my case, and I learned a lot there. I object to this framing.

This is also detailed really nicely in Atomic Habits

Alan Carr also has a new book on digital addiction(written by his co-author since he's dead). It's addresses some of the things that make digital addiction different from nicotine addiction(you get nothing from nicotine, whereas there are legitimate uses of tech).

It's good stuff and is a great tool.

> you get nothing from nicotine

Nicotine is involved in neurochemical circuits. Intake (it doesn’t have to be smoking) boosts focus and learning rate.

Solutions similar to the one mentioned in the article never worked for me. No matter how hard/inconvenient I make it to be (put phone outside of bedroom, delete app, etc.), when the addiction hits I will try my absolute best to circumvent the inconveniences. It's not even funny.

I think the best is to fully recognize and understand the addiction, and then try to eradicate the root cause.

For anybody wanting to explore this concept further, Oscar Wilde already did that long ago in The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Essentially, [Spoilers] the more the hedonistic protagonist gives into his desires, the more a physical image of him becomes grotesque. I always imagine this when trying to beat my own bad habits.

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