Leveling Up: Replacing Social Media Use with More Meaningful Pursuits

Focusing on worthwhile long-term goals can help you combat your addiction to social media

I’d like to do a thought experiment with you.

Think of how many times you mindlessly pick up your phone throughout the day. Not the times when you are purposefully executing a specific task like making a call or sending a text – but rather the unambiguously mindless instances when you casually grab your phone. Maybe you do it out of boredom. Maybe it’s out of a sense you’re missing something. Maybe you’ve become so conditioned to checking it regularly that it has become an automatic reflex.

Now consider how much time you spend on the phone, each instance you reflexively pick it up. Often you do this with the intention of “just checking this one app quickly.” But what you initially intended to take 30 seconds can quickly turn into five or ten minutes.

Next, think about how much cumulative time you spend per day on this senseless scrolling. Hypothetically, let’s say you do this five minutes per hour, every hour – hardly unusual for a typical American. Depending on how much time you are awake, you are spending at least one whole hour of your day on this mindless scrolling – activity that was largely unproductive and quite possibly not all that pleasurable.

When you add up all of this time squandered online, the total figure is sobering. Think of how often you are heading to bed at the end of a busy day, and you say to yourself, “Gosh, if I only had one more hour!”

It turns out you do.

If a genie magically granted you one extra hour of free time per day, imagine what you would do with it. Would you start working on a big project you’ve always been putting off? Immerse yourself in that new hobby you’ve been thinking about? Get yourself into a daily routine with exercise or reading (which you never do because you have “no time” for it)?

Mindless scrolling on your phone – in particular on social media – almost certainly eats up much more time out of your day than you realize. Hopefully, the recognition of all this lost time can catalyze the drive to make long-term behavioral changes.

In my recent piece “Ditch Social Media, Improve Your Attention Span,” I discussed initial steps to take to curb your social media consumption, and to feel less addicted to your phone. While these initial actions can be powerful interventions, additional steps can facilitate making these behavioral changes stick. If you have already made substantial gains in reducing your online activity, the most helpful next step is to find alternative activities that take the place of scrolling through social media.

When we start to reduce use of something that has an addictive or compulsive quality, we often feel a void. Habits often serve a function for us (for example – relieving boredom, or managing anxiety). A void will emerge unless we find alternatives that can also fulfill that function – ideally, activities that are more constructive than the ones we are abandoning.

It is important to recognize that social media has several qualities that make it very addictive, and thus reducing use over a longitudinal period can feel very difficult. Social media use tends to have a habitual, automatic quality, especially when we feel bored or unoccupied. This can make it challenging to tackle, because we are not always conscious of our behaviors.

For many, technology and social media have rewired our brains in profound ways. We have found it much harder to tolerate boredom, and we have become accustomed to reflexively accessing our phones in even brief moments of downtime. The more we do this, the more we ingrain undesirable behaviors. We come to feel that even a few brief moments without stimulation are hard to tolerate. We unwittingly teach ourselves that checking our phone should always be the default option when we have down time. Without stimulation, we may experience cravings go back on the phone.

In this smartphone age, we need to acknowledge that most of us have these challenges with tolerating boredom and resisting these cravings. These are not things that are easily corrected. However with time and practice we can train ourselves to manage that boredom more productively.

Finding pursuits that replace social media use will help to solidify the changes in your habits. Doing so will give you motivation to focus your energies on more meaningful endeavors, and this will direct your attention away from smartphone use.

Consider alternative activities you can do during brief moments of downtime, when you might be tempted to go on your phone. Perhaps always carry a book with you. Listen to music or a non-news-related podcast (yes, you would likely be using your phone for this, but this is okay provided you are not using your phone in any other way in that moment).

Even better, learn how to experience downtime without any external stimulation. You can use these free moments to practice things like meditation, deep breathing exercises, and mindfulness-based interventions. Online tools (popular examples include Calm, Headspace, Breathwrk, and Breethe) can teach you how to do this.

While these are excellent small steps, I encourage you to think even bigger. Consider longer-term goals you have for yourself and link these to your desire to curb your social media use. Reflect on larger endeavors or projects you have contemplated for yourself. These might include things like: reading more books, studying a new language, learning how to play a musical instrument, other creative pursuits (e.g., writing, painting, woodworking). Creating goals to pursue such endeavors will provide additional motivation to spend less time on social media.

When you do this, the key concept of opportunity cost comes into play. In essence, time you spent on one given activity is time you were unable to spend on an alternative endeavor. Thus, the half-hour you just spent doomscrolling on social media is thirty minutes you could have devoted to one of these longer-term goals you have envisioned for yourself. With an important, concrete personal goal in mind, you now have an important decision to make every time you are tempted to pick up your phone: “Do I really want to spend my free time on social media, or would I feel better devoting that time to an important pursuit that will be more meaningful and satisfying?”

All of this is not to say that you can never spend time using social media or doing other things on your phone. Downtime is important and necessary, but the key point is that you plan it mindfully. Proactively carving out breaks for specific times of the day and specific durations of time is a wise practice. Haphazardly interrupting your daily tasks with purposeless scrolling will feel unsatisfying. In essence, activity on your phone should be reserved for a specific break time you have intentionally chosen. Then commit to staying off social media during times you have designated for other activities.

Changing fixed habits is not an easy task, especially when considering how smartphone use has rewired how our brains function. Being very mindful of how you are using your time, and focusing your energies on meaningful goals, will help the behavioral changes stick.

Every time you are about to reach for your phone, think about how you want this day to look, and how you want to feel at the end of the day. Chances are, you do not want to go to bed every night saying to yourself, “I spent an entire hour of this day mindlessly scrolling social media.” Therefore, act accordingly.