[doright]

It's not like TikTok has a 100% chance of hypnotizing you into a zombie that can only spend its waking hours thinking about dancing people and positive vibes. Only a very high chance, depending on how anxious/bored you are, amplified by the hard work of psychology PhDs.

It's so difficult to imagine the mindset of a person who can approach TikTok from a healthy perspective and not need to rely on what used to be called "parental controls" in the past to artificially prevent them from doomscrolling all day. They would just never need to consume advice like this. Surely those people must exist? Who are they?

But when you're slapped with something like C-PTSD from an early age, you aren't afforded the ability to address anxiety effectively. You have to turn to something to soothe your anxiety all the time or it will drive you insane.

If you were to try to go the complete or semi-aesetic route, you have to consider what lies on the other side of doomscrolling when there's just too much anxiety to function correctly: endless hellfire.

I have a hard time believing doomscrolling or needing to restrict screentime at every corner are effective ways to address a completely unrelated inbuilt source of boundless anxiety.

[Wojtkie]

Something minor that I found to greatly impact my screen usage was to remove all the icons from my phone so that I am forced to search for the app. That minor bit of friction was able to reduce my habitual usage by 70~80%

[andai]

I've been doing a lot of mindfulness meditation lately, and also learning about self soothing, emotional processing etc.

I found that now that I can access blissful and peaceful states at will, and deal with difficult emotions without getting overwhelmed, my "need" for compulsive behaviors has dropped massively. There's no longer so much pain to medicate.

It's like you say, we use this stuff because we don't know a better way.

As for social media, there's also the systemic issue of atomization in modern society. People spend so much time alone now, so that's another great pain to cope with.

I wonder why that is. How did we get here?

[MarcelOlsz]

How does one get started? I've been doing 20 minute wim hof breathing sessions that help and I've been looking into TM due to David Lynch but nothing beyond reading.

[andai]

I use Insight Timer. The daily streak feature helped me finally make it a habit, after half assing it for many years.

When starting it can be helpful to use guided meditations. There's a bunch in that app (mostly free), and on YouTube of course.

I like Shinzen Young's videos and audiobooks, he takes a very grounded, "technical" approach to this stuff.

My main "lessons learned":

- Do it every day, even if just a few minutes. Makes a huge difference.

- Make awareness broad. This takes practice, it's like a muscle. I made the mistake of making it narrow like a laser, which is much harder, less stable, and less useful! i.e. learn to hold 2, then 3 objects in mind "at the same time". e.g. the breath, and the birds outside, and the "sense of space" of the room.

The classic meditation object is the breath. In my case, that brought up a lot of emotional pain. It's fine to use other objects in that case (though eventually you can learn to integrate / heal the emotions too), e.g. focus on sounds or anything "grounding".

[wonger_]

Not OP, but seeing a therapist, journaling, breathing exercises, and spending time lingering outside (e.g. walking), helped me regulate emotions and access peaceful states. Anxiety is the source of lots of problems for me, including doomscrolling, and unmanaged thoughts and feelings are a big source of anxiety for me. So once I learned some techniques for tending to those thoughts and feelings (instead of ignoring them), everything got a bit better.

So I guess keep reading, keep breathing, find more techniques that help you, and consider finding a professional if you need more help.

[brainzap]

I found that a 2 minute forced pause is enough to kick me out of the hypnose. I need an app for this.

[f_allwein]

I don’t use TikTok at all. AMA.

[dopidopHN]

HN and signal groups are my only social media.

I’m very social. I don’t think I miss much notification of “stuff to do”

( signal groups : large groups hitting the 1000 member limit. With drastic moderations. Example : only music flyer. Anything else is deleted under minutes )

[grigri907]

I think the challenge is to use TikTok, but to use it in moderation.

[RadiozRadioz]

I don't think that's a worthwhile challenge. Either you fail and get addicted, or you succeed and... what? Spend some of your free time watching low quality micro videos and being advertised to by teenagers? I don't see the upside here.

[doright]

It's less a challenge and more that there are people who are consumers/creators on TikTok and can limit their usage to under an hour a day without needing to use time restrictions. The question is what aspect of their personality/mindset/upbringing enables this relative to someone unable to inhibit their urge to compulsively use social media.