Break the Twitch Articles

I think we can all agree that 2020 was quite the year of change, discomfort, and reflection (to say the least). Reflecting back, one of the more important things I learned from the past year is how our emotions impact our attention.

In March when the pandemic hit, it was accompanied by a cast of uncertainty, confusion, and worry. In a matter of weeks, millions of people went from living their normal lives to being stuck at home. Many of us had to figure out how to work from home and many lost our jobs entirely. Gyms, restaurants, and local shops closed their doors, and life as we knew it became radically different.

We all deal with uncertainty differently; but let’s just say there were a lot of coping cookies, pizzas, and other baking projects going on for Amy and me in 2020.

How Our Emotions Impact Our Attention

While all the baking helped get us through it, things overall might not have been handled completely rationally; and that is often what happens during emotional dysregulation. It looks different for each person, although emotional dysregulation can result in being in a mild or greater state of panic or anxiety. It often results in not being grounded, and therefore, being more susceptible to distractions and more impulsive choices. Sometimes, it can be not knowing what to do to improve a situation but also trying a lot of different things at the same time.

Thinking back, I made connections on why daily things that came easily before became so difficult back in March 2020. Certain productive practices in my life suddenly went off the rails. My thoughts ping-ponged all over the place. I bounced from one thing to the next instead of slowing down and doing one thing at a time. I was, as I imagine many others were, all over the place. It’s only now that I’m able to look back and grasp a deeper understanding of what exactly was going on during those early months of the pandemic.

A key part of emotional dysregulation is not being aware of what you’re feeling and going into a coping mode that can manifest in many ways. This is how emotions can impact our attention and ability to focus—regardless of whether you’re aware of it or not.

The Twitch Can Often Look Like Coping

I’ve realized the ways in which we cope with difficulty can look a lot like the Twitch. More social media time to fight the feelings of isolation. More impulsive purchases. Lots of news scrolling in an attempt to address questions left unanswered.

Checking for new information (what we call the Newsfeed Twitch) was extremely prevalent for us in March and April of last year. One of the ways many of us try to cope is by constantly checking Twitter, Reddit, or the news in our efforts to try to control the uncertainty.

When getting out of hand, these behaviors tend to be rooted in anxiety, fear, and emotional dysregulation. There is a ton of overlap between what I call the Twitch and the coping behaviors we do during emotionally difficult situations. Looking at the overlap helped me understand that the buzzing, distractible, bouncy-ball brain that I’d get during certain times actually had a lot to do with anxiety and emotional dysregulation.

And it was this realization that led to the insight that when we are feeling distracted, when we keep looking at Instagram, or when it’s hard to focus, there’s likely something that we’re afraid of in some way. Perhaps it’s a task or a project that’s personally meaningful. Maybe it’s a task or deliverable that you’re dreading because someone important will be judging it. Or we want to start writing the book we’ve always wanted to write, but we can’t get started. We conveniently get distracted or something comes up that prevents us from working on the thing that’s important to us.

It’s important to remember that not all social media checking or purchases are necessarily coping or a Twitch in general—it’s perfectly fine to do these things! For me, this is about coming to a deeper understanding of what is happening when these particular things get out of hand. More importantly, it’s about how we can address the situation moving forward. There’s no shame in distractions; they can be helpful in getting through things that we might not be ready to deal with otherwise.

Fear Is A Powerful Emotion

Those feelings of resistance and anxiety work together in this elevated state of uncertainty—and so much of it is rooted in fear. It’s not just the pandemic that causes these feelings, either.

Fear of judgment, fear of not knowing what to do, fear of failure, fear of uncertainty. Our automatic and often unconscious response to the fear keeps us distracted, looking for any type of “out” or relief. Often, we will look for anything and everything to do except for that important thing. Our brains are exceptionally clever when it comes to avoiding whatever is scary or unpleasant.

What We Can Do About It

Fortunately for us, when it comes to finding solutions to this, most of the work has already been done. Grounding techniques are a form of behavioral therapy—and we can look to these techniques to help us come back to earth when things are spinning a bit out of control.

These practices help bring us back to feeling more centered, or grounded, and get things back on track.

The purpose of grounding techniques is to disrupt the frenetic thought patterns that tend to cycle through our brains in more anxious moments. Grounding helps us to feel safer and to be more at peace, so we can better focus. This feeling of safety is often important even though there may not be any real physical danger at the moment.

While I’m not a therapist or counselor, I’d like to share some grounding techniques I’ve personally found to be helpful during moments of higher distractibility. These techniques have helped me reduce the noise in my brain over the past year. I hope you find these simple practices to be helpful in getting focused when you need it most.

What To Do When Our Emotions Impact Our Attention

1 / Cold Therapy 

Cold Therapy is an incredibly effective grounding technique that can stop a panic attack or a high anxiety state in the moment. Really, this one blew my mind.

During this practice, an intense cold sensation is used to startle the body and to bring an individual’s focus to the present moment. The coldness will immediately stop you from spiraling down further and bring everything in your mind to a still. This could look like jumping into a cold shower, squeezing a few ice cubes in your hand, or holding a super cold compress to your face.

From the perspective of someone who has experienced panic to the point of becoming physically sick, a cold shower results in immediate relief. For me, taking a cold shower is the most effective in instantly quelling a panic attack or washing off an anxious state.

2 / Meditation

Although meditation may be the last thing you want to do when you’re having trouble focusing, it’s incredibly helpful in calming the body and mind, so you can better direct your attention.

I’ve found meditation to be the second most effective technique for me. It can be hard to make the choice to meditate when you’re already anxious—unless you train yourself to do it. Starting out small and building out a pattern of knowing meditation can help with focus is the way to go. You need to be willing to sit through the initial discomfort and feel what you’re feeling so it can pass.

Sometimes, it’s best and necessary to do something more immediate, like cold therapy (mentioned above) first. However, with continued practice, meditation is a wonderful way to become more aware of your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and the Twitch. With the greater awareness, you’re then able to be more intentional with your attention, focus, and actions.

3 / Activating All Five Senses

The final grounding technique I’ve found to be helpful for me is activating all five of your senses to bring yourself into the present moment. Smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing.

You could find something that has a strong scent (ideally a pleasant one), like coffee or essential oils. Another option to activate multiple senses is cooking and then eating something you like. Finding an object to touch that is tactile or textured such as your pet, a beaded bracelet, or rock is another great option. Zoning into observing a colorful pattern or things that visually stand out is yet another way to ground yourself. I’ve found singing or humming to work particularly well; truly hearing and feeling the resonance of my own voice helps to quiet the mind.

There are ample resources available for more grounding techniques similar to the ones mentioned above. Experimenting and discovering what works for you is key.

Whenever you’re experiencing greater distraction, a lack of focus, or feeling more susceptible to the Twitch, remember to have self-compassion. Don’t beat yourself up! Becoming aware of how our emotions impact our attention will help you to learn how to “Break the Twitch” and begin living more intentionally. 

Try a few of these or other grounding techniques and after a while, it won’t feel like work. You’ll shift into maintenance without thinking too much about it. Eventually, you’ll get better and better at staying grounded during times of turbulence so you can get back to the things that truly matter to you. 

Most of us have been on social media for well over a decade (or even longer). It also seems that more and more of us are considering quitting social media—myself included, especially in recent years. I was a freshman when I signed up for Facebook on the first day it was available to my university. That puts my Facebook account age right around seventeen years old; if said social media account were a child, he would be getting ready to head off to college himself.

What started as a fun way to connect with your college classmates became an all-encompassing web of data collection and psychological manipulation. There are many reasons why life can be better with limited to no social media use, but that’s not the point of this article.

To Quit Or Not To Quit?

This article isn’t here to convince you why you should consider quitting social media. Perhaps you’ve already read Deep Work or Digital Minimalism, watched The Social Dilemma, or are simply feeling that a more fulfilling life awaits you outside the reach of social media’s grasp.

This is about several things I’d recommend doing before you decide to quit social media—that I’d recommend doing even if you don’t end up deleting social media.

I personally decided to take a break from all of my social media accounts this year, to focus on creating longer-form content here on the blog, in the newsletter, and on YouTube. I’ll reassess every three months to reflect on the results. Sign up for the newsletter if you’re interested in those observations.

Especially when so much of your life has involved events, connections, and updates that come directly from Facebook or other networks, the prospect of quitting everything can be intimidating. And by quitting social media, I mean hitting the big “delete” button and walking away indefinitely. Poof.

It’s perfectly fine if you’re not ready to do that. There are still things you can do to start unwinding the grip that social media has on your life.

4 Things to Consider Before Quitting Social Media

1 / Use Signal instead of WhatsApp

Facebook recently released new privacy terms that all WhatsApp users must agree to by February 8th, 2021 (and have since postponed it until May 15, 2021). The update, which WhatsApp clarified only impacts businesses who use WhatsApp for customer service, caused an uproar in early January. While the recent update doesn’t impact regular WhatsApp users, there’s still Facebook’s disingenuous track record on privacy for the end-user. Unless you opted out of data sharing with Facebook back in 2016, the data sharing has already been happening since then. Even with “end-to-end encryption,” it’s likely that some WhatsApp data have been shared with Facebook for ad targeting and other purposes starting several years ago.

…data set to be shared with WhatsApp’s parent company includes “battery level, signal strength, app version, browser information, mobile network, connection information (including phone number, mobile operator or ISP), language and time zone, IP address, device operations information, and identifiers (including identifiers unique to Facebook Company Products associated with the same device or account).”

Forbes.com

Your response might be, “Who cares if Facebook knows what my battery level is?” Well, Facebook is using all of that information to bolster the existing database of information they have about you. The more they know, the better they can predict and influence your future behavior.

I highly recommend switching over to Signal for your personal messaging needs. The functionally is the same as WhatsApp and available on all major platforms. Signal is free and owned by a non-profit organization (which you can donate to support if you choose). Most importantly, Signal is privacy-focused and open-sourced. That means anyone that is interested can investigate the software code to see if anything sketchy is going on (there isn’t).

I’ve already started reaching out to friends on WhatsApp and moving our conversations over to Signal. If you’d like additional help in transitioning, check out what my friend Amrit wrote in this guide!

2 / Update Sites Where You Use Facebook To Log In

This feature—called “Single Sign On”—allows you the ease of using your Facebook account details to log in to other participating websites. Early on, it seemed like a fantastic way to conveniently sign up for new services and websites. Fewer usernames and passwords to remember! But there’s a major problem with this. If you ever lose access to your Facebook account, you’re going to lose access to all of those sites, too.

Facebook can ban any account, at any time, for any reason. I’m not saying it’s likely to happen to you, but it’d be really inconvenient if it did. Even if you never get banned, you might eventually choose to delete your Facebook account on your own.

Start the process of switching over any sites that you use Facebook, Instagram, or whatever other social media platform account details as a login, to using your email address. You’ll need to go to each site individually and change your account login details to your email and new password.

If you can’t remember which sites you’ve used a Facebook login for, go to your “Settings”, and then select “Apps and Websites” to see a list of sites are authorized through your Facebook account.

I recommend using a secure password manager like LastPass. I’ve been using LastPass for more than five years at this point and highly recommend it. This will help you generate secure passwords for all new accounts and store them under one secure master password.

3 / Start Compiling A Contact List

For many of us, there are many people who you are only connected to through various social media platforms. You’re not going to have an immediate way to contact that person if you delete your account on the platform.

Start compiling names, email addresses, and phone numbers so you don’t lose touch with certain people you want to remain connected with. It doesn’t matter if you build a spreadsheet in Excel or on Google Sheets (yeah, I know… we’ll tackle Google another day, maybe). You’ll likely find you really don’t need to keep in contact with the majority of these connections on the platforms.

There are some very helpful tools like the Fabriq app. To get full features, Fabriq is a paid service, but I’d recommend paying for it if you use it. It helps remind you to stay in touch with people you care about and fills in the gaps left by the lack of updates in your timeline/newsfeed if you decide to quit social media. I know you might be resistant to paying for services like this but remember—if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. There’s no other way.

4 / Deactivate Before Quitting Social Media For Good

It’s as simple as that. Try deactivating your account for a month or so and see how it goes. You’ll inevitably run into any issues you may have if you were to delete your account entirely. That way, you can go back in, adjust, or fix any issues before deleting your account entirely.

Expect the first two to five days to be more frustrating or uncomfortable, just like any other kind of detox. But doing so will help give you a sense of the freedom you’ll likely find by quitting social media altogether.

There is a greater intersection between the things we do and social media and tech companies than we realize. There is tracking happening of our every move across the web—from our search queries to even what our grocery shopping habits are. While there are conveniences and features these companies provide, it’s up to us to determine if those benefits outweigh the cons: the massive data pile they’re collecting on us that will eventually allow them to predict nearly anything we do, think, or need.

The appropriate balance will likely differ for each person. But for now, taking a few steps to give yourself a little space from their data collection matrix is probably a good idea.

Welp, here we are again. Another pass around the sun, another year here on planet Earth—and what a year it was. While I’m not here to dwell on the past, I can’t help but think how absurd the idea of planning out an entire year is, given what happened in 2020 (and what happened in just the first week of 2021).

There is a wide spectrum of how 2020 affected everyone across the world. Wherever you personally fall on the spectrum, I sincerely hope 2021 is a better year for you and the people you care about. As I thought about the new year, I decided to take a slightly different approach this time around with some mindset goals.

While it can be hard to see while you’re going through it, it really is the uncomfortable things that lead to the most growth in our lives. Especially if we face those discomforts along the way. This work is incredibly taxing, which is why it’s often easier to distract ourselves (The Twitch gets super intense during these times) so we don’t have to deal with the discomfort. Sometimes, we just need a distraction to get through it though, and that’s okay.

Facing My Own Discomfort

One of the bigger things I did last year on the topic of uncomfortable growth is I finally started sharing that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Not the hyperactive variety, but Type-2, which is what used to be called just “ADD.”

I was diagnosed formally when I was eleven years old, when I literally failed all of my classes in 6th grade and my life dove into a tailspin. When I received the diagnosis, I thought something was horribly wrong with me. I thought I was broken, that my brain was bad, and that I wouldn’t be able to operate in the same way my friends did at school and elsewhere. And so, I effectively left that part out. It’s really the only way that I’ve lied to almost everyone in my life, including you. I simply omitted it.

The years passed, and now at 35, here we are. I wish I’d been ready earlier, as I’m sure it would have been helpful to many—but better now than never.

It was long overdue, but after a lot of personal work through 2020 (aka therapy) I decided it was important to start sharing this. It’s a big piece of what makes me, well, me—both good and bad. Omitting that (along with the clearly very personal reason of why the topic of “attention” is so incredibly important to me) would do us all a disservice. The encouragement from some good friends also helped immeasurably.

2020 brought a level of self-awareness that I never imagined, and did not expect. The pandemic and seemingly constant disasters forced me to turn inward and better understand the connection between what was going on in my mind and what unconscious actions I was taking (hello, Twitch). This internal work is central to what Break the Twitch is all about, so I’m grateful to be in a position to share more of that here.

After all this time of exploring minimalism, habits, and creative flow here on Break the Twitch, it’s wild to me how it was really about attention all along. While the three topics are effective tools for the process of owning your attention, I didn’t fully realize the underlying connection until now.

Our Collective Attention Is At Stake

In a lot of ways, I’m uniquely qualified for the work I’m doing here at Break the Twitch. With my neuro-atypicality, I’m not actually all that out of place in the world at this point. Everything’s getting faster, more distracting, and more demanding of our attention. Our collective attention is more scattered than ever, and is being threatened in the environment we’re in now (thanks to Bridget, one of our awesome Attention Collective members, for bringing the linked article to our attention!).

Economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon, spoke to how “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The real kicker is that he was talking about this, and the attention economy in 1971—nearly fifty years ago. Imagine how much has changed for better and worse since then. We’ve never had access to more information than we do now. Maybe we weren’t built to know everything in the world all at once.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Just kidding. What a year it was, huh. Now that we have that context out of the way, here are the three mindset goals I’m focusing on for the new year.

3 Mindset Goals For The New Year

1 / One Thing At A Time Reduces Stress and Anxiety

This was a big realization after I heard Naval talk about how stress happens when something wants to be in two places at one time. 

I thought it was a great analogy of what happens when our attention is split between multiple things and how that resulting stress can increase our feelings of anxiety. When we’re thinking about something else while working on a task, it only contributes to the painful feeling that we have too much to do. That we must do more than one thing at a time because there’s so much to do. This is an example of our brain and our body wanting to be in different places at one time. And multi-tasking, as we know, isn’t really effective.

So, first of the mindset goals for the new year is: one thing at a time—no matter what. 

2 / When You Accept First, Change Comes Later

This next one was partly inspired by Kyle Cease, who I’ve been following on and off for a while, on something he shared on acceptance. 

It struck me that to get where we want to go, we must accept where we are now. It’s embracing self-compassion for who we are and where we are in this moment. Learning to accept where you are doesn’t mean that you love where you are. It also doesn’t mean that you want to be where you are forever. It’s more about accepting where you are now and knowing you can grow from there.

When we accept where we are now, there’s an energy shift that’s more abundant and open. It enables you to see opportunities and have more energy to change things up. When we feel like we’re not okay, it contributes to the feeling that we’re not enough. Instead, we feel the need to be somewhere else rather than where we actually are. Operating from that place of lack and the feeling of “I’m not enough as I am” creates fear, anxiety, and low energy. It ironically also makes it harder to get the change we’re wanting.

So wildly butter on that self-compassion in moments of difficulty. Don’t tell me that self-compassion is for other people who actually deserve it (I’ve been there). Everyone needs and deserves self-compassion, yourself included. From my experience, embracing self-compassion in tough moments doesn’t let you off the hook, but rather, gets you back up and running again faster.

3 / Planning For A World We Do Not Yet Know

The final inspiration for my mindset goals came up when I was doing some morning journaling recently. If 2020 has taught us anything, we are making plans and creating for a world that we don’t yet know.

A lot of people have strong opinions about Elon Musk, who just became the richest man in the world. Ten years ago when he said he was going to Mars, many people thought he was crazy. The world as it existed back then didn’t have the capability to do that. He was starting on a goal that was not yet possible and wasn’t thought to be possible. As of today, he’s still working towards that goal, but the collective thinking around the possibility has shifted.

This illustrates that you can create and work towards goals beyond what your brain is telling you is possible. Because the goal isn’t for today as things stand now; the goal is for a year from now or sometime in the future. The best way to get to a big goal is to have very small, consistent actions that get to the goal over time.

So when it comes to setting goals, allow yourself to dream in a way that doesn’t reflect the limitations that may be currently in your brain. Be flexible in your planning—especially in the path of how and the timing of when the goal is realized. As we learned with the events of 2020, even the best-laid plans can be disrupted. All we can do is focus on what we can do today with what we have and continually adjust in the process of working on our goals.

I hope you find that these three mindset goals help you make 2021 a more peaceful year for you and your family.

Well, this year has certainly started off with a great deal of excitement, hasn’t it? It’s hard to expect differently after the year of ridiculous twists and turns dished out by 2020, but somehow things seem to get crazier and more unbelievable by the day.

This is a time when the Twitch is going to be stronger than ever—during times of uncertainty, unprecedented events, and widespread fear. In this particular moment, I want to offer some perspective that will be helpful in getting through it.

Television news cycle is designed to keep us watching. They’re using every psychological trick in the book to trigger emotional responses that keep us hooked. Remember, capitalism is driven by revenue, and revenue is driven by watch time. The more we watch, the more ads we see, the more they get paid—plain and simple.

With the advent of digital smart TVs that feed viewership analytics back to the cable networks, they know exactly what you’re watching, for how long, and what causes you to drop off. Using that feedback loop, they optimize programming to keep you hooked.

Consuming more will not put our minds at ease. Now and then, we’ll have a relieving piece of information that comes into our social media feeds, but it never lasts long. Just like TV, social media is designed to optimize for time spent on the platform to increase revenue. This is done through malicious, highly suspect psychological tactics that trigger emotional responses in our brains.

Look, we need distractions to get us through difficult things—it’s an effective form of coping, and nothing to be ashamed about. And simultaneously, they’re not going to actually help us function normally in this insane environment. We can solve being hungry by eating marshmallows, too. I’ve tried it. It’s great for the first like, 12 marshmallows or so, and then things go downhill real quick.

It’s hard to pull away, but you’re going to feel better when you do.

Our brains weren’t designed to have this much information. Imagine the fire hose of information currently flying into our sponge domes. Not much has changed about the human brain in the last 100,000 years. Just 330 years ago, the only way you’d know something absolutely crazy was happening in a distant city was if someone got on a horse and pounded 12.5 miles of pavement to come tell you in person that, “The British are coming!”

I’m sure it wasn’t pavement, but it rolls off the tongue much better than “trails”.

It’s weird imagining Paul Revere with four million Twitter followers, isn’t it? Sure would have made his work a lot easier, huh.

It’s okay to turn it off. You can come back later.

You don’t have to escape to a remote cabin in the woods and swear off technology forever. Thoreau’s lake was barely a mile outside of town. Put your phone in the other room, make something to eat, punch a pillow for a while, scream silently from your lockdown window, play a video game, or call a good friend.

Just give yourself time to step away, breathe, and let your brain process through the backlog of information it has. It’s not easy, but it will help us get through this.

It’s okay to not be okay right now—and you deserve space and self-compassion more than ever right now. Set some time limits on getting updates, then turn it off.

A friend just said to me “Are we supposed to be working during the coup?” and honestly it was the most American thing I’ve ever heard.

— Dani/Tober: Actually a Witch (@thequeengeek) January 6, 2021