defetter

A young species' primer.

“Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by

compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli,
despite adverse consequences.” - Wikipedia

Introduction
What is information addiction?
Information addiction (IA) is a condition caused by
the irresponsible consumption of information,
especially compulsively.

It's continuing to scroll through Facebook even

though you've definitely seen everything. It's your
fingers typing "reddit.com" by themselves when you
open a new tab. It's closing Instagram and opening
it again right away. It's picking up your phone every
five minutes to check for notifications, the
constant distraction of anticipating them, and the
anxiety you feel when it's not with you. It's the
urgency and elation with which you whip it to your
face when you hear it chime. It's the "just-one-
more" which glues you to YouTube or a bad series
for three hours longer than the one video you
planned. It's the obsessive need to
be finished which kept you playing that Facebook
game or shiny app until you'd found every plant,
puppy or Pokémon. It's the dark narcissism or
insecurity which keeps you checking the gradually-
climbing likes on your latest post. It's the
impossible-to-ignore itch to look at something
interesting and shiny right now which thwarted
your last few attempts to read a book. It's that
month of soul-numbing grinding you took on
"voluntarily" because you "wanted" the
shoulderpads with eyeballs on them and 6 more ilvls.
It's your twinned abject despair and morbid
curiosity as you learn about the day's horrors -
political, genocidal, whatever. It's your angst about
the state of the world. It's frustration and anxiety
and discontent and expectation and fear and just
one more and it might be the reason you're so
unsatisfied.
It's your magnificent, broad-shouldered soul
weeping at its lot, chained to a rat running in circles.

It's kinda like food

The food-drug metaphor helps here. Eating is a
reality of life, as is processing information. You
can't avoid either, but they can wreck you if your
relationship with them is bad.

Information is, in many ways, more dangerous than

food. Choosing to eat requires effort - you have to
walk to the kitchen, order food, or go shopping.
Information's effortless. There's always a screen
nearby.

Food also has an obvious, physical consequence: you

feel immediately gross, and in the long run you
become obese. Information leaves your mind a
wreck, but that goes unnoticed more easily, or is
even accepted in a society where it's the norm.

Food is difficult in that it's a physical requirement,

which means you must face that demon several
times a day. But we rely on information more and
more, and we interact with information sources
which are increasingly addictive and dangerous.
The ability to recognize when you're being dragged
around by your baser instincts by weapons-grade
behavioural conditioning is an increasingly
important survival skill.

You don't devour another two cakes when you're

full. Your diet goes beyond junk food. You can learn
to consume information responsibly too.

The effects of information addiction

• It saps your time and energy, redirecting
productive and creative potential.
• It fragments your attention, making you
permanently distracted, robbing you of focus
and making it harder to pursue the complex and
the deep.
• It numbs your experience of life, making you
care and feel less about your worldly
interactions.
• It moulds you to behave on base impulse and to
let go of measure, reflection and breadth of
vision in your actions.
• Depending on the flavour you consume, it
strengthens your cognitive flaws and biases.
This might mean making you more convinced
that brown or conservative or poor or Christian
 or cis-sexual people are monsters, or more of
an impulse buyer, or more afraid to leave your
comfort zones, or more convinced that the
world is doomed and that everyone's out to get
you, and so on.
• It contributes substantially to pessimism,
depression, misanthropy, fatalism and nihilism.

Am I addicted to information?
Does what you've read so far strike close to home?
If it does, you might. Keep reading. IA's deep
experiential sensitivity cost can numb you to the
point where you can't feel the impact of having it,
because the ability to feel withers.

If this all sounds melodramatic, you could be in

denial. Or you could be fine. It's not a black and
white thing. Some people aren't hooked on
information yet. Some maintain a healthy
relationship with it. Some have fertile enough minds
that they can use it a lot without too many costs.
Think about what I've sketched here and spend
some time reflecting quietly. Look for it in yourself.

Cause and effect

Most of the things which make you vulnerable to IA
are made worse by an active addiction, so it's hard
to separate cause and effect. This section
discusses effects and situations which are co-
morbid with IA.

Practical
Poor prospects, feeling trapped or helpless
If your life looks grim - if you're in a terrible
financial situation, struggling to find employment,
feeling generally bowed and incapable, or if
something in your life is confining you - the
escapism of IA is hugely appealing.

Trying to escape IA under the weight of life's lot

will be harder than usual. But it's even more
important to do. It will give you the clarity and
agency to make and pursue plans to improve your
situation.

Personal neglect
A neglect of personal well-being (hygiene, sleep,
food, exercise), housekeeping (cleaning, tidying,
shopping) and healthy money-seeking can creep up
as the tendrils of IA sink in. Why take care of
things in the real world? The small, delayed positive
payoff doesn't look very good next to one more
razor-honed hit, right now, over and over.

Your mind is given over to a hundred little voices,

clamouring for their favourite drug, and you lose
your investment in yourself and your world. This is
unfortunately a very cosy spiral.

Screens, everywhere
It's like trying to give up smoking in a house with
lighters and cigarettes scattered all over. It's an
insane ask. Luckily, there are some practical
interventions for this one which I discuss later. The
main goal from this perspective is to make screens
a smaller part of your life.

Exhaustion
Sometimes you just want to veg. If your normal
work-day is killer (or even "just" tiring), you're
more likely to turn to IA when you get some
downtime. It's just how it is. It's almost unfair to
ask your brain to tackle an existential question as
big as IA if it's already exhausted.

You need to be in a reasonable state of mind to deal

with this stuff. This means carving out calm,
rested you-time. Do what you can.
You also don't need to be absolutist about this
stuff. While I encourage the pursuit of a good
informational diet, an awareness of the nature of
IA could inspire you to choose higher-quality TV, or
a little less TV, or to mix in reading with TV
occasionally.

Work obligations
If your job requires you to use sources of IA,
things can get tricky. You can use it as an
opportunity to learn to recognise its exploitative
facets, but ongoing use will normalise it in your life.

You could try to find a different job, or a different

role within the company, which minimises your
exposure. You can also make an effort to
compartmentalise - to make it clear to yourself
that work-based IA is simply work, and to avoid
bringing those habits home. Making your work-
based IA interactions "methodical" (using
Facebook's post scheduler to automate postings in
advance, for example) can help to cement this
division.

Interpersonal
Social expectation
A lot of your friends are doing it, probably. It's
difficult to abandon something such a huge chunk
of society is pouring their cunning, art, dreams,
hopes and feelings into.

This is honestly a hard one to tackle. You have to

look practically at the pros and cons, remember
that entirely-physical relationships are still a thing,
and consider the fundamental breadth-depth
trade-off in how we spend our time.

Tapering your use lets you benefit from less IA

while gracefully winding down your connected
presence, but there's a huge spike in effective
benefit from quitting altogether.

Poor or absent human connection

Spending time with other human beings is incredibly
core to our makeup. IA habits are likely to draw you
away from time spent with friends, and a lack of
people to spend time with is likely to push you
towards IA.

Some IA sources give you (low-quality) human

interaction on tap, which makes it appealing to try
to plug the gap with them. More broadly, IA numbs
and distracts to the point where a lack of
connection is less painful.
 Psychological
Attention fragmentation
Attention fragmentation is a creature which is born
when you spend too long being interrupted by
things, such as notifications.

Eventually you enter a state of permanent

distraction, wherein big chunks of your mind
constantly anticipate (in excitement or dread) the
next interruption. Your limited reserve of
simultaneous processing capacity is exhausted by
these guests, which is how anxiety costs you your
sanity.

It has a huge cost in happiness, your ability to think

deeply and clearly, and makes you more likely to
make low-quality decisions.

Experiential numbness
Experiential numbness is a little further out there,
but if you've been nodding thus far I suspect you'll
know what I'm talking about.

You have a finite reserve of high-quality mental

energy each day. If you spend a significant
proportion of your time "on" in a damaging, IA kind
of way, you experience numbing as that reserve is
depleted. If you keep over-spending it, you
accretively lose the ability to replenish it well. This
takes a long time to heal.

It's not the same as "brain fog" in which you feel

frustratingly unable to function normally. In fact,
you can probably "function" in the doing-a-menial-
job sense better than usual when you have EN.

The cost is in wonder, joy, sorrow, vividness,

spontaneity, and creativity. The world around you
loses colour through no fault of its own. In the
course of years spent with different compelling
information faucets bleating for attention and
shaping your mind to care about little more than the
next hit, you lose the ability to appreciate the rest
of the world with useful sensitivity.

It's a tricky one to try to describe because the

damage is subtle and incremental - frog, boiling
water. Most sufferers don't realise or care that
they have it. Perhaps things get boring more
quickly. Perhaps your motivation to do things moves
towards "it's good to be doing something" or "more
beans must be better than fewer beans" and
further from the intrinsic awe of the thing. But,
bottom-line, the sparkle goes out of the world
quietly, and you adapt.

So I'll take my best shot: try to remember what

the world was like when you were younger. Around
seven to fourteen. Remember the soaring awe of
learning new ideas or seeing incredible images.
Remember the raw devastation of being upset.
That's experiential sensitivity, and you have that
capacity within you.

There is a decent case to be made that the world-

dimming usually acknowledged as a normal part of
getting older is EN, caused by things like having to
do unsatisfying work, stress, anxiety, guilt, draining
people, and IA.

Feeling overwhelmed
The torrent of information is relentless. This
produces different things in different people.

Some meet it "head-on", giving massive chunks of

their time over to making sure they've consumed as
much as possible, so they aren't left behind. This is
a quick route to attention fragmentation and
experiential numbness.
Some try to weather or deflect the tide, but may
still harbour negative feelings about the stuff
they're missing, or otherwise resent that they're
making tradeoffs between being connected and
remaining sane.

Whichever you are, having this incredible volume of

information, and knowing that hidden in it is a
constellation of tidbits which you care about - while
also knowing that to consume them all would
consume more time than you have available - is not
a healthy experience.

Pessimism
Things are better than ever for the inhabitants of
Spaceship Earth.

Our economies are becoming steadily more carbon-

efficient. Our emissions policies have us on a course
which ultimately stabilizes, even if it might suck
for a while in the middle, and there's no reason we
can't keep improving those policies.

The proportion of people living in absolute poverty

continues to dramatically decline. While inequality
continues to be a problem, things are improving.
PPP-adjusted income is increasing across the
board (animated) (see also).
Life expectancy has skyrocketed in the past 200
years (alternate vis). The equality of the
distribution of that improved lifespan is
also getting better. Child mortality is falling
fast across the board. Healthcare intervention
prevalence is improving dramatically.

The proportion of people who are

undernourished continues to decline, even in the
developing world. This is also true as an absolute
value, despite our population growth.

The "great powers" are spending less time than

ever at war. Deaths in recent conflicts are too high,
but they're still way better than in recent history.

Absolute global homicide rate is seeing a small,

recent increase after 12 years of decline - and
remember, this is in the context of global
population growth.

Human rights protections continue to steadily

improve across the board.

People are more literate than ever, and the ratio

continues to improve. Fewer people get no
education than ever, and primary school
enrolment continues to improve. The years-of-
schooling gender inequality gap has almost been
closed. As a population, our projected levels of
education look extremely positive. Learning
outcomes have improved dramatically almost
everywhere between 1985 and 2015.

(Charts via ourworldindata.org; sources are on the

images.)

And yet we're gloomier than ever. Maybe reality

doesn't match what we know we're capable of.
Maybe our lives are beset with horrible stuff that
we'd rather not deal with. Maybe there are still
several massive systemic problems and fixing them
is a really daunting task. I think all of these are
true, but I don't buy them as sufficient to explain
all the gloominess.

Humans have a calamity bias. We perk up when we

hear stories of disaster. We're also more efficient
at disseminating information than we've ever been.
And so it has come to pass that when any
atrocity anywhere in the world
happens, most humans hear about it, and bear the
psychological toll.

You can see how this scales. In a community of a

few thousand, serious anti-social acts will be
carried out by one or two individuals (and news of
them will be shared) every few weeks or months,
perhaps. In a community of billions, we get to hear
about the tiny proportion of people doing really
horrible stuff constantly, because in a population
of billions, the anti-social contingent grows
to thousands - and we forget how tiny they remain
in the big picture.

There is an argument to be made for being

informed. Human rights violations need light in
order to be fixed, right? But a carousel of gore and
horror and outrage has a cost, too. We're
convincing our entire species that humanity is
terrible, cruel and destructive. Misanthropy has
never been cooler, or more prevalent. And we're
sharing the kinds of psychic scars usually reserved
for medical professionals and soldiers with every
human being.

It's dishonest because it's a monstrously lopsided

view of our species. We've done, and continue to do,
utterly mind-boggling amounts of good. It
outweighs the bad by so many orders of magnitude
that I don't know how you'd go about visualising it.
We just have this mad tendency to ignore the good
and stare bleakly at the bad.
The real kicker is that pessimism leads to apathy
and despair. Learning about how "doomed" the
world is is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the
ultimate effect of knowing about all that horrific
stuff is that you feel like it's ubiquitous and
inevitable, which makes you less likely to lend your
hand to making things better.

Choosing not to consume news media which is

presenting a biased view of the world (more doomed
than it is) to your brain which parses information in
a biased way (preferring doom) is not irresponsible.
Contributing to the dystopian potential future of a
planet full of apathetic, despairing
humans is irresponsible.

I think there is a really important discussion to be

had here about how to learn about the state of the
world in a way which doesn't crush your spirit - and
how to translate that awareness into useful action,
instead of letting it fester as frustration or
despair. I don't have the answers, but I think it's
an important question to ask.

I did make a tool called White Mirror which lets

you use the Internet without the doom, though.

Depression
Most of what I said about pessimism applies here.
The million tiny cuts on your psyche take their toll.

When depression and IA occur together they are

incredibly hard to dismantle. The grey apathy of
depression makes the earnest soul-searching and
self-reflection of IA recovery look like an
incredible amount of work, and the industrial
distractive power of modern IA is a welcome escape
from the worst depression serves up.

The big fetters produce depression almost reliably

in combination. If you suspect they might be the
source of yours, it is worth your time to try to
tackle your IA. Do it experimentally for a day, a
week, or a month, and see how it affects your state
of mind.

But I'm not going to pretend depression has a magic

bullet. I hope you find your way out of the tangle.
Be mindful about the information you consume, try
to keep busy, talk to someone, get professional
help, and explore the drugs available.

The using loop

If you're using, you keep using. It sounds simple but
it's really worth thinking about.
After even a few minutes, but especially after half
an hour or more, you often find yourself in a
strange kind of fugue, happy to get completely lost
in whatever IA you're consuming. It seems that,
more than the faucet becoming more compelling,
the world outside quietly ceases to exist and you
follow the small loops of your new reality, perhaps
soothed by its ease and simplicity in contrast to all
the travails of the real world.

This is how "just one video" engulfs an entire

afternoon.

This is the rat in the cage self-administering

morphine while it starves.

Your flaws and biases

The flaws listed here exist in us all. Many of them
are mutually co-morbid: they often occur with a
similar or complementary flaw.

To claim that they are an inevitable and substantial

part of being human is irrational pessimism. The
potential for each flaw exists in all of us, but you
get to choose the extent to which they express
themselves in you, by curating your information diet
and monitoring your state of mind.
Learn them and try to recognise where they affect
your behaviour.

• Calamity bias. Danger makes us perk up. This

bias alone explains the pessimism epidemic in a
world where, by the numbers, things are better
than ever: the media is involved in a race to the
bottom for our attention span, and leaning on
"everything is terrible" is one of their best
weapons.
• Othering bias. In defining our affiliation by
our similarity with others of our group, we also
define those who exist outside it. Feeling
irrational fear or contempt for these others is
very easy to do. Power-hungry politicians and
view-hungry media lean on this to make us
compliant.
• +1 bias. Whether it's a like, retweet,
favourite, upvote, 100 gold or 20 gems, a
strange part of the mind likes to see good
numbers go up. If you've ever played a clicker
game, you know how deeply exploitable this
rabbit-hole is. The social flavour leans on vanity
and they all celebrate greed.
• Connection fondness. We're social creatures.
It's a need. Disconnection sucks. This lust for
 connection is exploited by most social media
platforms, and you could argue that they do
provide something of value - but it's a pale,
watered-down kind of connection, and it's a
hook often used unethically.
• Fear of missing out. This is the angst that is
felt when you miss out on being included in
something social. It's related to connection
fondness but hits a slightly sourer note. In
sociophobes it can cause cyclical feelings of
inadequacy, and in the image-obsessed it
exacerbates their condition, compelling them
to spend more energy on the social credit from
being seen at the right places, as opposed to
enjoying human connection.
• Validation bias. Sibling to the +1 bias and the
connection bias, we like being told we're doing
well. Social "like" mechanics strike at the heart
of this, but congratulatory language of any kind
hits it too. This is probably one of the major
factors driving social media growth. It becomes
costly as it transforms into an end unto itself,
making us do precisely what nets us the most
validation - creating the unrealistic personas
 which we inhabit, and which feed back into
feelings of inadequacy.
• Familiarity bias. In some important ways, the
world doesn't exist beyond the boundaries of
the parts of it you inhabit. It's very easy to
unknowingly build strange walled gardens.
Habit, routine and familiarity represent a
gradually increasing investment in the ways you
interact with the world - and the cost of change
rises with them. The people shaping your mind
through apps and sites know this.
• Repetition & hyperexposure bias. Sibling to
familiarity bias, this is a reminder that your
conceptual homunculus takes on the shape of
the information it's exposed to. Understanding
this is a key refutation to the argument that
good citizenship is consuming lots of news
media: it does less to inform and inspire critical
analysis, and more to condition and control. And
since unpleasant events and people take up
most of the airtime, unpleasantness will grow in
you, too.
• Novelty bias. Something deep in the mind gets
excited when it encounters difference,
whether it's a bizarre image, a strange bit of
 news, a person who looks unusual or an idea
which is particularly alien. Most bottomless
bowls rely on this to keep you scrolling.
• Instancy bias. Self-destructive time-wasting
tends to put you in a pissy, impatient state of
mind. Having to wait for your IA fix raises the
heckles. IA faucets which are very snappy hook
you better, since this pain point is relieved.
• Recency bias. We have an impulse to prioritize
how recently an event happened or an idea was
formed, even over its relevance, quality,
substance, or eventual social impact. Sources
which promise up-to-the-second information
exploit this.
• Relevance bias. Something you know you
already care about is more likely to pique your
interest. This might sound harmless, but
systems built to "maximize relevance" will
produce filter bubbles, which allows us to only
hear about things from a tight circle of fields,
people, and especially cultural values.
• Brevity bias. If something is bite-sized, the
investment required to absorb it is lower. This
is especially relevant in a bustling information
economy with a lot of stuff. You can avoid the
 risk of investing a lot of time in something
substantial but ultimately not worthwhile by
preferring smaller bits.
The cost here is in depth and substance. A fair
argument can be constructed for pursuing both
breadth and depth in learning about the world,
but breadth-only exploration harms you. It's
hard to weave complex or subtle perspectives
with only small chunks of disconnected
information. Long-form idea-weaving, as found
in books, in showing you its carefully-
constructed cathedrals of coherent thought,
itself teaches you tools with which to think
more intricately.
• Ease & convenience bias. Sibling to the
instancy and brevity biases, this is where the
inability to get deep and intricate stems from.
IA is often co-morbid with a strange kind of
frenzied laziness which balks at things which
require even minimal effort, as if effort
minimization will improve one's quality of life.
As a result, if something is a simple click or
three it's going to be a more appealing choice.
This ease often comes at a cost, like missing
out on the understanding you'd develop doing it
 the hard way, agreeing to exploitative terms,
or handing control of your world to the
companies which run web services and clouds.
• Variable reward scheme bias. The research is
worth a read. This one's in there deep.
Mammalian minds really get excited if there is
minimal predictability or consistency in the
rewards we get, maybe because it keeps our
pattern-seeking engaged. This works whether
those rewards are interesting articles, Zynga
gems or dollars. It keeps us on-edge, keen, and
invested.
• Anticipation bias. This is part of what makes
the variable reward scheme work. This is the
tingle after pushing the button or pulling the
lever, knowing that you might get something
out. This applies very broadly - for example,
texting someone and waiting to see if they
respond, or a right-swipe on Tinder and waiting
to see if they match back.
• Completionist compulsion. Ever gotten two or
three of a series of fifty figurines and
experienced the bizarre desire to complete the
set? Video game achievements, Japanese gacha
machines and collectible card games all hook
 this to get you to keep spending, or at least
clicking and scrolling. Just look at how
exhaustive this list is.
• Endless idea nursing, AKA Brain crack. The
scourge of creative people everywhere, this is
that unpleasant conceptual purgatory from
which creative impetus is eternally
haemorrhaged. It's obsessing over the idea of
how cool something would be while leaning on
the safety net of never trying to actually do or
make it, since it can only be perfect while it's
not being manifested.
The time spent on the thoughts gives you a
slight feeling of progress, while also making you
feel bad about your inertia. This applies
extremely broadly - for example, the eternal
merry-go-round of getting excited about trying
Pinterest or Instagram ideas but rarely doing
so. Coined by Ze Frank.
• Vividness bias. Sharp, punchy language, sharp
peaks in the soundscape, dense and arresting
music, highly contrasting colours, elaborate
setpieces, emotionally wrought dialogue, and
manic action sequences all have their place in
creative works. Contrast is key to imbuing
 richness, and these things are on the strong
end of the spectrum.
Unfortunately, the vivid parts are the most
naïvely compelling parts. What happens at the
end of the race to the bottom of the brain-
stem, as they are leaned on more and more?
Media chases itself towards the edges of
cognitive apprehension as it transitions from
interesting patterns to seething noise, and you
walk out of a modern blockbuster dazed at how
little of the 15 minutes of plot you can
remember through the 120 minutes of eye-
watering quad-HD CGI action.

How is IA exploited?
This section covers patterns and flavours. Patterns
are systemic templates for exploiting flaws.
Flavours are thematic banners under which groups
of complementary patterns, techniques and
targeted weaknesses are used to induce compulsive
behaviour.

These lists are not exhaustive. Please e-mail me if

something's missing!
 Patterns
Bottomless bowls
A Tristan Harris coining, this is possibly the most
important pattern to understand. A bottomless
bowl is something which keeps serving up stuff as
you consume it. Think of Facebook's news feed: you
can keep scrolling for as long as you like.

This is a brutal trap. Bowls generally serve up

portions of varying satisfaction to you, so your
variable reward bias is kept hot (in other words,
you're kept constantly hunting for the most
interesting, funny or horrific stuff.) The IA zombie
state is utterly facilitated, since a gentle sweep
down on your scroll wheel or a swipe or tap
effortlessly waves in the next morsel.

The intersection of these two effects means that

you can absently scroll or swipe for alarmingly long
periods of time.

Progression systems
These feature most prominently in computer
games. They promise you Cool Stuff based more or
less on the single fact of how long you've been
playing for. Progression usually comes in the flavour
of power - more guns, bigger guns, abilities - or
accolade, but it can vary.

This leans mostly on the +1 bias and the

completionist compulsion. The cost is in making the
experience of the game one of chasing an extrinsic
reward. The enjoyability of the core gameplay loop
is overshadowed by bean collection, which
fundamentally colours the experience.

Instead of playing to creatively manipulate

systems, achieve mastery or flow-state, or explore
strange worlds, the player ends up invested in the
size and completeness of their collection.

Relentless notifications
Free access to your notification tray is a goldmine.
The most insidious apps will notify you constantly -
not frequently enough to annoy you, but not
infrequently enough for you to kill the app's
brainworm. If it's really effective the notifications
will hook you each time. This reinforces familiarity
with a new app or program, and encourages
investment.

These have a deep cost in attention fragmentation.

Variable reward schemes

This one is almost ubiquitous, and it boils down to
taking an action and being shown or given something
of uncertain value to you. You can find it in:

• Card game booster packs

• Gacha and slot machines
• Loot when killing monsters in games
• Any "feed" whose content changes, which
includes Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and news
sites

...and many places besides. Learning the pattern

here is really important. Try to think broadly and
generally about what forms this could take. The
"taking an action" at the start is important too, as
it hooks you into the push-button-receive-treat
addiction loop.

"Share" for in-app cash

Prevalent in mobile games, this pattern asks you to
trade your social capital with your friends for in-
app currency.

Slowly refilling action points

Also big in mobile games, and often called "energy".
This both limits how much you can do at once
(compelling the impatient to spend money) while
making doing well in the game reliant on opening the
game every few hours (establishing familiarity and
investment).

Flavours
These are my reflections on the flavours of
information out there. Your experience may be
substantially different. It's really important that
you do a lot of slow reflecting of your own,
especially with the flavours which hook you the
strongest.

Social media
You know what it is; you're probably familiar with
it. The idea that spending lots of time on social
media makes you feel like crap is pretty widely
accepted at this point.

It exaggerates the calamity bias, because its

content-surfacing algorithms mean that you only
see the top one percent of "reaction-worthy"
content. In this it does the same for several other
biases, including othering, recency, brevity, and
ease.
It's entirely built around a variable reward scheme,
because you never know how good the next thing
you scroll to is going to be.

It ruthlessly exploits our fondness for connection

and validation, feeding us a pale imitation of time
with people we care about, and in the same stroke
it draws us to spend less time together in real life.

I found quitting a lot easier after I made a point of

switching to phone calls for as many people as
possible. At that point, you're looking at losing
touch with a couple of stragglers, instead of most
of your community.

News
The line between social media and news is pretty
much gone at this point. I speak about human-
curated news here.

News thrives on views. It's the only way for a news-

sharing organisation to survive. Journalists and
editors are well aware of our biases, and they know
what to do to get clicks and views.

News leans really, really hard on the calamity bias,

and presents us a skewed view of the world as a
result (see my Pessimism rant above).
It's also increasingly involved in othering, as
marketers discover that they can, for example,
show the right stories about the left being terrible,
and show the left stories about the right being
terrible, and profit from both. Fight it. We're all
human and we're all in this together.

The really powerful perspective shift here is

getting an honest answer out of yourself to the
question "do I really need to hear (and adopt) this
person's version of what's going on in the world?"
Connection is valid and valuable and important, but
why hand away the lens?

Try learning about the lives of the people who live

near you directly, by talking to them. Also try to
avoid bias when you learn about distant parts of the
world, through good stats, science, and
encyclopaedic writing.

Games
I think games are far and away the most addictive
screen-based experience we've developed. They're
deeply interactive, and they are portals into
strange, vivid worlds. Escapism was never so
interesting.
I spent a long time addicted to computer games. It
was a difficult road. Gaming is only getting bigger,
and I empathise deeply with parents trying to guide
their brood through the jungle.

There is a trend towards games building their

systems around continuously extracting money
from the player (as opposed to providing enjoyable
worlds and systems). There is also a trend toward
extrinsic motivation (such as achievements) instead
of intrinsic motivations (such as genuine
satisfaction). These trends are diluting the
valuable aspect of games, but they might be helpful
in that they make games more obvious Skinner
boxes, which makes escaping easier.
Desktop

It's hard to generalise, but broadly, desktop

gaming risks a "heavier" kind of addiction. The
improved input scheme, the sitting upright on a
seat, and the power of modern desktop PCs means
that you can have experiences and visit worlds
which are really immersive and high-fidelity.

When it comes to divesting of the real and

inhabiting other worlds, the vividness and
compulsion of desktop gaming can get close to that
of books for a book-worm. And it has multiplayer.
Heady stuff.
Console

Consoles are much "lighter" than PCs. The

experience is casual and relaxed; you're usually on
a couch, the control device is small, and you can pick
up or drop games very easily. This mitigates the risk
of "heavy" addiction, but adds risk in the scrolling-
through-feeds vein. Low-friction entry means you
can fall into the hole all the more easily.

Apply the same principles as with any IA. Monitor

your overall usage, and learn whether the games you
choose exploit biases unhealthily.
Mobile

Most people will never own a desktop or console;

most people will own a cellphone. Ubiquity is
mobile's superpower, and it's a pretty potent one.

Mobile games mostly land on the simple and light

end of the spectrum. This lightness is somehow
retained when it comes to spending money on them,
so they're really good at wheedling you out of cash
in little bits.
Their ubiquity also contributes to near-immortal
brain-worms. If you are vaguely invested in a mobile
game, even if it isn't satisfying at all - just a little
compelling - it's easy to get into a loop of whipping
out that game whenever you have "time to kill". This
is the lowest-friction entry possible, and it makes
extremely chronic use likely.

Video
Videos may not be interactive, but this lets them
tell more complex, author-directed stories, which
can be more compelling. Not requiring input also
means that their barrier to entry is lower. Once
you've started watching, you can commit as much
mental energy as you like - all the way down to
"almost none" - and let the experience wash over
you.

There's an astonishing variety of video content, and

since it's generally imbued with a message you can
be sure to find something that reinforces your
views, beliefs or feelings, or is delivered in a tone
which suits your frame of mind. This means that it
has the potential to hit several biases.

Uniquely, video can show people doing stuff - loving,

fighting, working, relaxing. Experiencing the lives
of other people (real or fictional) vicariously can be
really addictive, especially if you lack connection in
your life, and there's no imagination-translation
layer required (as with books).
On-demand

Vendors like Netflix and YouTube work very hard

on algorithms to show you exactly what you want.
The danger is that they get good at this, so you
trust their recommendations more and more, and
you find your identity shifting towards whatever
subtle systemic biases are built into those
algorithms.

The aspect of choice in the on-demand format plus

the lack of a per-unit-consumed cost also means
that you have easy access to everything you find
interesting in their archives, which is "bottomless"
on an unprecedented scale. There's a little
variable-reward here, and a whole lot of appealing,
passively consumable crack.
TV

TV looks strange and clunky in the age of streaming,

but tools like DVR have brought it almost to parity.
The main difference here is that there is still some
human curation involved in what is shown in which
time-slots, and that most sport broadcasting is still
done through broadcast TV.

TV really encourages a very unintentional kind of

investment, where your choice is reduced to "which
of the things which are on right now do I want to
watch?" For people who don't have alternatives, or
who are inured to the veg-state of soaking in TV,
this can lead to consuming un-nourishing or outright
damaging stuff "because it's there".

It also includes quite a bit of...

Streaming

Live video is appealing in a very specific way. This is

the recency bias serviced as well as it is possible
to. The thing you're watching happened just
moments ago!

Sites like Twitch have added a tight viewer

feedback loop to the experience, which serves a
different set of biases and can also be really
compelling.

Virtual Reality
VR is coming. No, really. The sensation of
"presence" - of actually being there - which VR
produces is completely impossible to communicate
to someone who hasn't experienced it. Going from
weird abstracted interfaces (remote, mouse,
keyboard, controller) to gesturing around normally
with your hands and looking around naturally with
your eyes and head is a complete game-changer.

What this means is that if a screen is a pill, VR

goggles are a needle. We are going to have screen-
based experiences delivered more vividly, more
convincingly, and more overwhelmingly. PC game
addiction is going to look like a joke once VR game
addiction gets established.

Right now it's awkward, technical, and clunky. We

have until it gets slick to get good at managing
information addiction.

Porn
I'm not going to poke the morality bear. I do want
to make the point that porn provides an acute
endorphin hit, on demand. This is completely
analogous to a cigarette or a game of Candy Crush.
Strip away any socially-derived guilt and a high-
volume porn user is still damaging themselves,
because you can only flood those receptors for so
long until they lose sensitivity.

Chat
Modern messaging apps offer a new way of speaking
to people: ongoing low-bandwidth, low-commitment
discussions with 5, 10 or 50 people at the same
time. This has an important effect.

You're switching your attention between these

contexts quickly, and if you leave notifications on
you're constantly dropping out of whatever real-
life context you're in to enter them. This has the
potential to induce massive, massive attention
fragmentation because of the demands it places on
our limited daily processing capacity.

Apart from that risk, I think one-on-one

interactions with people you care about are valid
and worthwhile. It's pretty easy to integrate chat
into your life in a healthy way: moderation. And
make sure your notifications are off!

Spending money
Buying stuff can be really, really addictive.
Remember how marketing works. They're out to
convince you that you're missing out on something,
or that you are in some way inadequate, and that
their product will give you what you "need".

If you have disposable income and your impulse

purchasing is only occasional, you're probably OK.
But if money is tight, or if you buy stuff frequently
(especially if it's to try to feel better), you need to
tackle it.

• Never buy anything if there's time pressure

attached. Always decline the pressure-
attached offer, and give yourself time to
reflect on whether it's something which would
truly enrich your life. Cultivate "sorry, no" as
your default answer.
• You probably don't need it. Get outside the
excitement bubble and try to figure out how
it'll impact your life on a realistic, practical,
day-to-day basis.
• Spend a lot of time trying to understand your
motivations. Why do you want the thing? Social
approval? Completionism? If it's an insecurity
of some kind, ask if feeding it is really what you
want for yourself.
• If you're in the habit of browsing catalogues of
any kind, consider getting out of it. You don't
lust after stuff you don't have. Don't put
yourself in the position of knowing it's out
there in the first place.
• Understand value pegging. If something's sold
at $100, 80% off, you might feel that you're
 saving $80 by spending $20 on it... but all
you're doing is spending $20. Ignore the
"original price" and the "markdown", and judge
it based on what it is and its asking price.

Other sources
I've highlighted the big ones here, but "screen-
delivered information" is impossibly broad. The big
picture is that you should try to think clearly about
any extended screen time, and try to figure out
whether it's good for you.

Drugs are social

It is a truism in drug circles that you have to lose
your "drug friends" if you want to get clean.
Unfortunately, there are some parallels with
information. Do you have certain friends who you
only (or mostly) play games with, or write on each
other's Facebook walls, or watch series with, or
text?

If you answered yes, it might be worth trying to

find ways to steer those relationships towards
interactions which lean less on information. In
extreme cases, you might need to ask yourself
whether the relationship is worth more than
freedom from IA.
Screen-free information

Books

I'm hugely pro-book, but books are still information

and it's still possible to have an unhealthy
relationship with them. I think the big ones are:

• All the risks associated with racing to the

bottom of the brain-stem apply, but to a milder
degree. Some books are getting simpler,
punchier, and shallower. You'll miss out if you
don't read more widely than that puddle.
• Spending too much time in the dark,
metaphorically speaking. Books are uniquely
free as a medium to explore very, very dark
corners of the human condition, and you will
damage yourself if you don't moderate.
• Divesting of the real. If you're the kind of
person who books really speak to, you can find
yourself utterly absorbed by them on an
existential scale. There's a lot more to the
human experience and I think missing out on it
is a shame.
Audio books

The book caveats apply, but audio books are great.

They are a calmer, more reflective kind of stimulus,
and you get to rest your eyes. I suppose it's worth
mentioning that I think a healthily calm mind values
periods of silence (which one could lean on audio
books to avoid).
Podcasts

Podcasts are interesting. Since they're designed

for longer consumption sessions, the hosts
generally get to tackle topics a little more
substantially, but since they're often ad-hoc
discussions, they can lack the depth of researched
articles.

The choice of who you listen to is really important,

because you will be closely exposed to their value
system, and it will rub off on you.
Music

I suppose listening with headphones in certain

situations is a little anti-social, but that's
something us introverts need sometimes.

Music is great.

How to fix IA
It's all you
It's tempting to throw experts at problems. This
works for a lot of things, and I empathise with the
desire to believe that a professional can solve every
problem. Someone who has spent a lot of time
practising empathy is probably good at it. Talking
to a psychologist might be really valuable. They're
trained to understand how addiction works. I also
recommend talking to a close friend - they know you
better and they're invested.

But ultimately, IA is difficult to solve and deeply

personal. If you have it, you need to fix it. You're
the only one with good enough access to how you
think. You are very good at deceiving yourself but
you're also the real authority in your head. Don't
be afraid. You can do this.

Take it seriously
Using information is light, effortless, and casual.
It's almost a nothing-action. The cost of entry into
the rabbit hole is a gentle swipe or tap. What's five
minutes on a news-feed, really?

So if you think your information habits are

problematic, you need to figure out how to take
seriously the cost of continuing with those habits
in their current form. You need to attach this
weight to every time you open that app or website.

What are you missing out on because you're pouring

all your time into these holes? Time with your child
or family? Learning to make the music or art which
really touches your fellow humans? Time for your
side hustle which will get you some real freedom
from the daily grind? Time spent learning a skill,
discipline, profession, or domain, for fun or profit
or both?

Because it's not five minutes. It's five minutes,

plus five minutes, plus five minutes, plus five
minutes... you get the idea.

Find what IA is stealing from you, and take using

information that seriously.

Consume thoughtfully
Your task is difficult, but simple. Become aware of
your informational diet, develop and assert control
over your consumptive habits, and hold yourself to
a high standard.

Examine both quality and quantity. Reject

information which exploits your biases, and control
how much information you consume overall.
Quality matters
If your relationship with food is good, treat
information which exploits your flaws the same as
cheap takeaways. (If it's not, pick something else!)
It's fun and easy and pleasant, but the only way to
include it in a healthy diet is in moderation.

The really key step to take here is to start

evaluating the quality of each information-chunk
you engage with.

Quantity matters
Taking in way too much overall is really what
damages experiential sensitivity and causes
attention fragmentation. Treat each day as if you
have a finite budget of "brain on time", and then
make intentional choices each time you interact
with information. When you choose to engage, do it
with your full and undivided attention.

In each interaction, ask: "Is this worth what it asks

of my limited budget?"

Know your flaws; know their tools

You've done a lot of the work by reading the
previous sections. Being aware of the mechanisms
equips you psychologically to reject manipulation.
Constant vigilance
Your ongoing task is to look for those patterns, and
appeals to those flaws, in every information faucet
you interact with, and to avoid interacting with
destructive faucets.

You also need to practice internal vigilance, as the

best way to recognise IA is often by noticing
irrationally emotional or impulsive behaviour in
yourself and looking for its source.

It might be helpful to review the list of biases.

Anything appealing to one or more of your biases is
unhealthy. Obviously, this property exists on a
continuum, and you're still allowed to have fun.

Be intentional
One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal,
which is indispensable when you need to interact
with an IA source, is intentionality. This is simply
going in with a clear and specific objective. Tell
yourself what it is - out loud, even - before you open
the app or website.

Examples:

• I need to find out when Moira's birthday party

is.
 • I want to see if there are any events planned in
the next two months.
• I want to see what Sibu has posted in the last
week.
• I want to look up a simple dress pattern.
• I want to find a gouache shading tutorial.

Make sure you keep your objective in mind the

entire time you use the IA source. Once you've
achieved it, put down the needle phone
immediately.

This completely reframes the interaction from

"lead me down a rabbit-hole" to "do something
specific for me". It gives the power back to you. It
will, over time, improve your sense of agency,
making you less of a passive consumer and more of
an active agent.

In general, if you open the app or site to have things

shown to you (scroll through a feed), it's bad.
Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Pinterest are all
guilty. If however you open the app with the clear
intention to do something specific (calculate a sum,
translate a phrase, learn a language, draw a picture)
it's probably fine. This browse vs. search
intentionality distinction is very useful. Try to
examine your own motivations with each IA faucet
you visit.

Develop impulse control

Impulse control is a strange skill. I know people who
have no trouble dieting but are far-gone
information addicts, and vice-versa. I think a lot of
it comes down to how strongly the drug affects you.

Some people will be able to improve their usage

from the perspective offered here. Others need
something more direct.

The Addictive Voice model

My favourite tool in asserting impulse control is
something called AVRT, or Addictive Voice
Recognition Technique. I urge you to visit their
website and complete the free course. It has zero
woo.

Here are the main points:

• The part of you which wants to keep using

(consuming information irresponsibly) is in
some way separate from the "real" you - it's
called the Addictive Voice, or AV
 • You are the ultimate authority in your mind, and
you have complete control over this destructive
aspect of yourself
• To help understand what it is, explore thought
experiments: listen to how it reacts to the
internal assertion "I will never use again",
compared to something like "I will use again as
soon as I'm done reading this"
• Make a clear, conscious decision to never use
again
• Listen for any internal monologue which would
lead to using ever again, recognize it as the AV,
and deny it

You are now immune to your addiction of choice.

AVRT was designed for simpler drugs, so fitting it

to IA is tricky. You will probably need to consume
information from dangerous faucets again.

You might need to learn to draw a subtler line in the

sand, and to understand yourself well enough to
notice when your information consumption moves
from healthy to damaging.

If you do use IA sources which you can afford to

stop using completely (that is to say, your income or
social well-being doesn't rely on them), consider
using AVRT to stop using them, one by one.

Decide what's OK
Before you can try to exercise impulse control, you
need to decide specifically what that means. Vague
feelings of guilt or anxiety are a complete waste of
energy.

You need an exhaustive, specific plan.

Maybe you want to stop using unhealthy information

right now. Maybe cold-turkey sounds a little harsh
and you want to allow yourself two Insta binges
each day, and to catch up with Facebook twice a
week. Maybe you're mostly fine with how you use
information, but you want to max out your social
media time at one hour a day. Sounds good! Pick
something that works for you, and then write it
down.

I have found in my own IA treatment that hard

time-blocks work really well for me. I pick short,
specific periods during which I can use any IA
source as much as I like, which helps me avoid the
missing-out aspect. Outside those periods I don't
touch them.
You may struggle at first to recognise certain
behaviours as addiction-driven. Make sure that you
remain alert, and add constraints to your plan as you
discover the need for them.

A great way to discover whether something is good

for you is how it makes you feel. It's a lot simpler
and more direct than analysing it against the list of
flaws, and it usually comes to the same conclusion.
The essential point here is to reflect on how it
makes you feel both while you're using it and after
you've stopped using it. Is the rush worth the
regret?

Constantly self-evaluate
How are you doing? Consider keeping a log of every
time you use a dangerous IA source so that you have
a good idea of your own usage patterns. Be honest.
Include your intentions going in (were you looking up
a specific event, or just browsing?), how long you
used it for, and how you felt before and after using
it.

Is your behaviour in line with the plan you set

out? Don't beat yourself up if you lapse, but figure
out how to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
You may need to tweak your plan if you keep lapsing:
you may have curtailed your habits too aggressively.
Gently tapering usage can be more effective than
quitting altogether. Figure out what works best for
you.

Keep tracking your behaviour, changing your

behaviour and checking on your behaviour until
you are where you want to be.

Be patient with yourself

Understand your position
You might be deep in the addiction at the moment.
If the idea of only thirty minutes of screen time in
a day sounds scary, alien or naïve, remember that
your perspective is that of the using junkie: wildly
skewed. Each day spent dismantling your IA will
change that perspective.

Time is your ally

Changing a habit takes time. There's very little way
around this. If you can understand the shape of
your addiction and move away from it a little each
day, your victory is already secure. It's just in the
future.
Also, re-read resources (like this one) about IA
occasionally until you're free. Our minds are
really vulnerable to fond of repetition.

Don't give up
Be relentless.

The basic human state is incompetence. If you've

never done something before, you're more than
likely to be terrible at it.

This is completely fine. Your superpower is the

ability to adapt and grow. Greet failure with
reflection - it's an opportunity to grow - and
satisfaction that you're making progress.

Fail enough and you must succeed.

Forgive yourself
It's really tempting to lose yourself in a spiral of
self-pity or self-loathing if you do badly, especially
if you've had a bad run recently. Try to avoid the
temptation. It'll just make you feel worse a month
later when you haven't made any progress.

If you are struggling, please talk to a friend or a

professional. There is no shame in it.

Phases of information health

These don't apply to everyone; they describe a
broad, common arc. Don't panic if you don't follow
it.

• The first phase is spent dragging yourself away

from specific addictions, relapsing often, and
dealing with guilt, shame, and so on.
• The second phase is spent moving between
phases of calm, IA-free clarity and seemingly
catastrophic relapse.
• The third phase involves reliable, strong
aversion to IA sources.
• The fourth phase is when the disgust peters
out into calm disinterest. You're free. :)

Make your tech human-friendly

This is easier to do if you're a techie. My aim is to
develop simple, visual guides to using these.

The goal here is to make it hard for your addictions

to get at your flaws via your tech, making quitting
easier. None of these aids will solve IA for you. The
idea is to allow your higher brain time to kick in
before diving down a rabbit-hole.

• You can avoid the Internet making you scared,

angry, upset or depressed by using White
 Mirror, which is a tool that helps counteract
the disproportionate negativity and hate found
on the Internet (especially on news sites and
social media). It lets you hide stuff by keyword.
It works on Firefox's mobile app, too.
• After you understand which sites exploit your
IA, use tools like LeechBlock for
Firefox or StayFocusd for Chrome to remove
or limit your access to them. LeechBlock works
on Firefox's mobile app, too.
• Experiment with browser and operating system
profiles. A complete IA lockdown on a "work" or
"creativity" user account and a less limited
"play" profile is still a better setup than not
locking anything down, because you must admit
to yourself that you want to use by switching
to the "play" profile, giving your brain a chance
to kick in.
• Uninstall all phone apps which are sources of IA
- especially bottomless bowls - or limit access
to them using an app like Freedom or Offtime.
• Try Siempo on your Android phone. It allows
you to batch notifications (group them
together at intervals you choose), flag specific
apps as damaging (it'll nudge you out of them
 after a few minutes), and access useful apps
using branding-free "tool" icons. It is
specifically designed to mitigate IA.
• Try the following. Install Firefox on your
phone, and uninstall or hide the icons of every
other browser. Then install LeechBlock for
Firefox, and set it up so that you only have 5
minutes' access each 30 minutes. This lets you
use your phone to look stuff up, retaining all the
practical utility, but neuters its ability to lead
you down an Internet hole.
• Permanently grayscale your phone. This hugely
mitigates any exploitation of your vividness
bias. You can do the same thing with your
desktop computer if you're feeling brave.
• Become comfortable with message filtering.
The e-mail and SMS filtering tools available to
us are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
o It's more effective to filter a spammy
newsletter than to click its unsubscribe
link.
o Filtering can also handle semi-important
messages, putting them into folders to deal
with later. It's not just your inbox or the
trash bin.
 o You can add numbers to an auto-reject list
on many modern phones.
• Disable as many desktop and phone
notifications as possible - sounds, notification
lights, and popups, and disable count badges on
app icons. Check it manually, once or twice a
day.
o If you have FOMO as a result, sit with it
and try to unpack it. Try to convince
yourself that your phone should serve you,
and not the other way around.
• Make sure screens aren't prominent in spaces
that you spend a lot of time in. A big TV in front
of the couch and a giant PC monitor on your
workdesk both invite information bingeing. Use
a smaller screen off to the side or do away with
it entirely if you can.
• If you read on your phone, switch to an e-Ink
reader.
• When you must use a screen, be health-aware.
o Take frequent and substantial breaks
spent moving around and looking at distant
things.
o Use good lighting indoors. Natural light is
best, if it's available. Pro-tip: halogen bulbs
 are both non-flickery and emissively similar
to the Sun.
o Make sure you have decent ergonomics.
o Use a blue light screen filter after sunset
(Flux, Twilight, or built-in on modern
operating systems). Read about blue light,
melatonin and the human circadian rhythm
to understand why.
o It's still niche, but e-Ink is much, much
easier on the eyes and mind than light-
emitting screens. If you can afford them,
DASUNG and ONYX sell e-Ink computer
monitors, and the YotaPhone, Hisense A2,
Light Phone 2, and DoCoMo Card Keitai
phones incorporate e-Ink screens.
• The heroin peddlars themselves are beginning
to recognise the impact of what they're doing.
Some of these first-party tools might offer
functionality which helps you reach your goals.
Check them out and see if you find them useful,
but remember that these are made by
corporations with strong investor obligations.
Your obligation is to yourself. Google would
probably like you to keep using YouTube every
day, even if you cut down your usage, whereas a
 healthier goal might be to only use it on
weekends.

o Google is rolling out Digital Wellbeing,

which includes functionality across
Android, Gmail, YouTube, and more.
o Apple is rolling out Screen Time for iOS.
o Facebook (and Instagram) is rolling out
"activity dashboards", which help you track
your usage.
o If you decide to use reddit, consider
setting up a multi-reddit with a very small
scope (5-10 subs at most), avoiding drama,
hostility, factionalism, and news. This
removes the "bottomless" property, as the
amount of new stuff being added is limited.

Avoid bad habits

These will appeal to you in varying degrees. They're
all invaluable.

Many of them are learning crutches - for example,

keeping your phone far away from you isn't strictly
necessary once you've moved past the urge to
check it frequently.
• Avoid screens as much as you are able. Develop
a blanket habit of looking for ways to do things
off-screen before resorting to a screen, and
pursue hobbies and leisure activities which are
screen-free. Be conscious of all screen time
and strive to minimise it. Apps can help here.
• Be careful with time-tracking, planning and
GTD apps. It's easy to get obsessive about
them, which is its own impulsive hole.
Experiment with paper equivalents to screen
tools: if you can make them work for you, that's
a whole bunch less screen time.
• If your job requires a screen, lock down that
computer so that it only does that one thing.
Spend recreation time on something non-
digital.
• Make your phone hard to get at. Travel with it
in a bag. When seated, leave it far enough away
that you must get up to interact with it.
• Don't touch your phone in company. If you have
to, keep it brief. Respect the time and
attention of the people in the room with you.
• Don't let your phone near your bed, ever. If you
need it in your bedroom as an alarm clock, leave
it on the far side of the room. Buy a traditional
alarm clock.
 • Don't look at a screen in the two hours before
you go to bed.

Embrace good habits

I view these seemingly-unrelated-to-IA habits as
non-negotiable in mitigating IA. I am dramatically
less happy and clearheaded when I drop the ball on
any one of them, and I look back on the depths of
my IA, in which I ignored all of them, in mild wonder
that I kept on plodding.

Get them right and your state of mind

will amaze you. Seriously. Even if the benefits look
dubious from where you're standing, consider
simply committing to them for a week (a month is
better) to get a fair impression of what the effects
are.

• Exercise. Daily. It sucks at first, a lot, but it

transforms into pure magic. It shifts the
physical-virtual investment balance in your
mind toward the former, it makes you feel good
about yourself, it gives you energy, and it
massively improves your mood. It's incredible.
Even ten minutes of light cardio will make a
huge difference, but shoot for twenty or thirty
and ultimately mix in resistance training. If
 gyms and equipment put you off, look into
calisthenics. All you need is your body.
• Eat healthily. Cook every day. Reduce starch
and sugar intake, cut out refined sugars, and
eat lots of veggies. This doesn't have to be
expensive or time-consuming. Explore the
relevant communities around the 'net for more
detailed information.
• Get enough quality sleep. For quantity, you need
to be disciplined. Eight hours is a hard minimum,
but nine is better. Quality is important, too.
Sleeping at night is better. Interruptions,
ambient light and sound, and an uncomfortable
mattress all make your sleep poorer. Improve
what you can.
• Dismantle sources of unnecessary or unhealthy
stress. It might be an obligation you're
procrastinating on, a person who really puts you
on edge who you have to see a lot, a cruel boss,
a job which is running you ragged, a decision or
behaviour of your own that's making you feel
uncomfortable, or fear from an unsafe
commute or neighbourhood.
You need to sit down with each source of stress
and think about how to mitigate it, and then
 come up with a clearly defined plan. Be ruthless.
Your state of mind is worth it.

Fill your newly-free time

If you're bored and idle, you will slip back into IA
easily. We humans love doing stuff. Do some cool
stuff. Hell, make a habit of doing cool stuff.

• Choose slow, deep, and difficult over fast,

shallow, and easy. The prime example is reading
a book versus scrolling through Facebook. This
template can be applied to a great diversity of
things. You can gauge your path along the road
to recovery very clearly by how difficult
choosing slow, deep, and difficult is. You're
free when it becomes your effortless
preference.
• Keep lists of interesting project ideas. Return
to them when you need something to do, pick
something out and do it.
• Pursue a creative field. Write words, make
music, learn a skill, draw or paint or develop
your penmanship, learn programming.
• Get communal. Join a book-club, language-
learning group, hiking group, writing group,
theatre group, climbing gym, sports team,
 community volunteer group, local maker-space,
or paper gaming group. Participate in
thoughtful online communities with interesting
people.
• Learn about the shape of your world. Read -
there's so much great stuff, from the classics
to hundreds of modern and near-modern
genres. Learn formal high-school or university-
level stuff to fill gaps - physics, history, maths,
geography, sociology. Online learning resources
are better than ever. Mash random on
Wikipedia. Learn a language. Listen to great
music. Delve into weird niches of specialization.
Appreciate art.
• Go and have wonderful experiences. Dance at
festivals, hike, camp, explore (you don't need
plane tickets - explore locally!) and develop a
sense of engagement with the world around you.

Beware the screen-reliant items I've recommended

here. Make sure to always minimize screen time
where possible. Ultimately, non-screen activities
should make up the majority of your stuff-doing -
moving towards that goal in small increments is how
to get there.
If you participate in communities of any kind, keep
the biases in mind and stay away from nastiness -
online communities are particularly prone to
collapsing into factionalism and hostility. You don't
need it.

Also, I'm a nerd. Maybe your ideal healthy hobby-

list has a lot more sports on it. Please substitute my
suggestions vigorously if they don't look appealing.

Recovery is personal
People are extremely varied, as are the sources of
IA in life. I've tried to cover a wide enough breadth
of examples in this write-up to resonate with a lot
of people, but you are the only one who knows
yourself well enough to think properly about your
situation.

Understand the patterns and use them to think

clearly and broadly about your life - especially the
facets which consume most of your time - and
decide if any of your information-facing behaviour
is unhealthy.

Outlook is everything
I'm straying into woo here. Secure your valuables.
This tangent is included because you need to get
excited about your future and about the things you
can learn, achieve, make, help with, and master. The
most insidious flavour of addiction is recognising it
and accepting it with a shrug. You're worth more
than running in tiny circles until you die. None of us
are getting out of this alive. Stop taking everything
so seriously and go and have fun - the satisfying
kind.

Optimism is the single most potent empowering

agent for the human mind. Nurturing its flame is a
delicate art, but once it gets going it fuels you in
ways which are difficult to explain to non-believers.
The belief that positive outcomes can and do
happen, and are worth striving towards, imbues the
human experience with colour and possibility and
magic. It also creates a positive feedback loop
where those outcomes actually do happen more
often, because you've included them in your
worldview.

The other half of the equation is agency. If you

believe that you can do something, you can. Do you
have the power to influence the shape of your life
and the world around you? If you don't believe you
do, you need to bootstrap yourself into believing
you do. Unless you are an illiterate, mute
subsistence farmer, you have some agency, and it
goes way further than you think. You need to
explore the opportunities that that agency grants
you.

Everything in moderation...
...including moderation.

Going IA cold-turkey will make you a social pariah.

Movies with friends are fantastic social glue. Many
people only announce events on Facebook or
WhatsApp. And a lot of honest human creativity
goes into a lot of the monstrosities keening for our
gaze.

This is a very individual thing, but generally, if you

try to turn into a monk overnight, you will give up on
giving it up quickly. Information is great and it can
enrich your life immensely. I urge you to simply
reflect on the quantity and quality of it you
consume. Don't think in absolutes, and be kind to
yourself.

I present a direction to travel in. You will know when

you need to go further, when you need to pull back,
and when you've found balance. Just make sure
you're listening to you, and not the insatiable
monkey on your back.

Consider supporting my work

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about the author

written November 2017

published November 2018
updated November 2018