Scrolling Meditation
How I overcame social media addiction beyond mere avoidance
This essay was featured in the Late Winter 2020 Monadnock Underground print quarterly.
For ten years I was a successful university and public school physics teacher. I was recognized with three teaching awards for excellence in urban education, granted a department chair, and served as a member of several school and district based leadership committees. Then a car accident changed the life I knew.
In the weeks that followed the accident, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t complete assignments by deadlines. I became irritable and stopped caring about the things that gave my life meaning. I became homeless. By year’s end, my career dissolved. Since I had made my career and my life the same thing, losing one meant losing both.
I did not recognize the signs and symptoms of a traumatic head injury. My friends and colleagues simply thought I had gone crazy, and silently walked away.
Later, to reconnect with those who walked away, I found them on social media. Eventually the number of followers and friends linked to my Facebook page surpassed one thousand — more people than names I knew.
Instead of creating meaningful, honest, connections with people who cared about and supported me, I created superficial ones with strangers. And it was fun, for a while.
The point-based system of gathering new friends like they were gold coins in a video game mission made me feel like I was leveling up. I felt important. My place in the real world seemed to matter less than my place in the artificial world I had created.
Each new follower felt like a new script for opioids. Every “like” felt like another pill. The physical pain caused by social isolation taken away every time someone reacted to something I posted. And I couldn’t get enough of the pain relieving drug.
I checked into social media before going to sleep at night, and just after waking up in the morning. During the night, every time I woke, I checked for responses and to see if my social media score went up. I was addicted.
Convinced that artificial popularity would deliver me from the pain homelessness caused me, I crafted hyperbolic posts to make others hyper react. I wrote things I would never say in a room of people who knew me because real friends bring us back to the course from which we lost our way: they don’t simply push us forward, to see how far we will go.
As an educator I understood how the point-based system encouraged and discouraged behavior. When I used social media, I was not in control: the gaming system social media developers created was in control of me. After realizing how much power I had given away, I decided I needed to unlearn the attention seeking behavior that I had learned while video gaming in disguise.
While homeless, I sat in different meditation practices to get temporary relief from the subzero Massachusetts winter, including studying under a Zen Master from the Kwan Um School of Zen. There I learned sitting and walking meditation. Then I applied those lessons to my social media life.
Getting Set Up
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
~ Confucius
Turn off all apps and all mobile notifications. Don’t just silence or mute them: turn them off completely. Mute means without noise, not without interruptions.
Nothing natural requires an alarm to keep you engaged or to keep you from engaging in something else. Instead of seeing app notifications as “reminders,” see them as dealers telling you to continue to abuse the drugs they sell.
Then create a goal. Make one that is specific, measurable, achievable, results-based, and time-bound. In education we call them SMART goals, and use them to create daily lesson plans. In practice, it is equivalent to saying, “Today I will summit that mountain” while pointing at the mountain you wish to climb.
Summiting a peak is an abstract concept when the trail up hides the mountain, whereas the struggle to reach the next step is as tangible as the stone in front of you. Breaking one large goal into smaller achievable goals, or steps, is how mountains get climbed.
My overarching goal, the mountain I wanted to summit, was to end the compulsion I felt to always be on, checking, or connecting to, social media. Trying to achieve this through abstinence or going cold turkey is as achievable as summiting a mountain in a single stride.
Start small. Make each step 2 minutes long.
Small steps can easily be incorporated into the daily in-betweens where we find ourselves idle and reaching for our phones for entertainment and/or distraction — like when we are waiting for coffee to brew, a meeting to begin, or sitting on a toilet.
Getting Started
“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”
~ Lao Tzu
Begin scrolling through your news feed. Read every post and advertisement in the order each appears. Look at every photo and meme. Identify the maker of each. Look at every recommendation. Do not skip anything you see. Develop simple words to articulate what you observe. When ready, stop looking with words and what was hidden will be revealed.
Do not react to, or comment on, any post or news story you see. Do not analyze what others say, write, or share. Observe without judgement — no matter how outraged you may become. Outrage is a sign of engagement, and the goal of meditation is to learn to let go of the strings that pull at your heart.
Do not use scrolling meditation time as time to think of a way to outwit, defeat, or destroy what someone has said or shared. Do not dwell. Observe and move on.
Do not race to the end of your news feed.
Learning to meditate while scrolling through media will help eliminate the conditioned impulse to react to everything the outrage machine shows you. And it is difficult to unlearn our conditioned reactions because we teach the machine learning algorithms what content addicts us the most.
Intermediate
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
~ Lao Tzu
Increase the length of time you practice scrolling meditation. The more I practiced scrolling meditation, the less I engaged with content engineered to make my heart beat faster and my head explode. As I practiced, the amount of time I lost using social media decreased. Instead of the machine pulling me in for hours, it became easier to separate myself from it.
Then I began unfriending strangers. Calling strangers “friends” is delusional thinking that makes it easier to regard them as objects to be collected.
When I collected followers like they were gold coins in a video game, I performed like a circus animal for an audience of strangers. I crafted and posted content designed to get the most responses. Instead of unabashedly sharing authentic thoughts and experiences with the people who cared about me, I shared “content” — which is just another name for a filler: material used to fill empty space. This is what keeps other users engaged and creates a feedback community difficult to escape. Changing the world requires us to first change ourselves.
After practicing scrolling meditation for one month, I began to unfriend and unfollow the people on social media who I had never had a conversation with. No one private messaged me to ask why: no one noticed. One unknown follower in a long list of unknown people goes unnoticed when people only collect you so that their score goes up. Social media is clever because they use more than one score: number of friends and number of people interacting with each post.
Begin unfriending strangers when you are ready to let go of the perceived status a number, displayed prominently below your name and beside the word “friends” — like points in a video game — is designed to instill. See who, if anyone, notices.
Eventually I winnowed away all the strangers and all that remained were unconditional friends. Now my profile page more closely reflects the person I am, not the person I pretended to be, while begging for gold coins from strangers.
Once in control of my social media use, I started cutting the strings connecting me to it. It isn’t enough to keep the pill bottle in the medicine cabinet, the bottle needs to be thrown away. So I began to incorporate other meditation practices into my scrolling practice.
I set another goal: meditate quietly for two minutes before checking social media. Alternatively, I would go for long walks without my phone or any means of electronic distraction. Pairing other forms of meditation with previously established rituals helps extinguish the conditioned behaviors we are trying to control. The urge to check social media diminished within a few weeks.
The more posts I made, the more I would want to check the score counter on every post. So I started to post less. Instead of recording every thought electronically, making each easy to share impulsively, I wrote with liquid pen on real paper in a journal. Then, if I wanted to, I could share what I wrote, but only after waiting one full day.
In this way, short repartees became reflections. One-liners became developed thoughts. Impulses to share every thought disappeared into the ether. And I felt more complete.
Going Pro
“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
~ Lao Tsu
After two years away from heavy social media use, I challenged my scrolling meditation practices by reading content created by individual users and ideological groups with different beliefs and values than my own.
When I first started to read content created by different tribes, the urge to reply bubbled up. But instead of replying, I returned to my scrolling meditation practices and observed without judgement.
The heavy users, the ones fully addicted, became obvious as were the reasons they were addicted. Instead of outrage I felt the same sadness I feel when I see homeless people. Not because they are the same, but when you cannot see the bars of your own cage you do not have the power to escape.