Awareness has played a significant role in my on-and-off relationship with social media. So, if you’ve been reading some of my blog posts, like this one, and they resonate with you, you must be yearning for some habit changes like I do.
So how to change one habit to another?
The journal article Psychology of Habit (2016) shows that goals influence habit formation:
Goals energize and direct action by defining a desired end state.
Therefore, it helps to first ask yourself why you want to eliminate habitual social media use. Ask yourself what really matters to you and what your values are.
For example, I want to lessen my time scrolling on my social media account. Usually, I do it first thing in the morning, which spills over to the following hours when I am supposed to do work or spend quality time with family. And because I don’t see the habit as helpful or aligned with my values anymore, such as quality work and quality relationships with the people I deeply care about, I am encouraged to shift away from my habitual use of social media to something else.
Once you have identified your goal, the next step is finding an alternative to the habit you want to replace.
To put it this way, my goals now are to spend my time (which is a limited resource) doing valuable work and fostering relationships with my family and closest friends.
Now that I have my goal, I decided that my alternative habit would be watching the morning news. So, every time I wake up, instead of reaching for my phone to check what’s up with everyone in the public square, I turn on the news to get updates on what’s happening in my community and country. The alternative habit attains the same desired result: to be updated with what’s happening around me.
The key difference is that tuning to the national television news in the morning keeps me from being trapped in a social media bubble and allows me to set a time limit for my morning ritual. While there’s no definite end to social media scrolling, the news has a specific time slot, compelling me to move on to my next task once the program ends.
And because I want to foster relationships with my family and closest friends, instead of posting online life updates for the general public (who doesn’t necessarily care about how I am doing because they are also too concerned with their lives), I choose to communicate with my family and closest friends directly about my whereabouts and asking them how they are. I find that having these intimate conversations strengthens our bond more than merely communicating with each other in comment sections of our online posts.
What alternative habits do you want to do to replace your old ones?
jessa 