In a series of six posts, I explain, using teachings from early Buddhist scriptures, how we can free ourselves from our addiction to social media. These teachings are found in the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, which outlines five strategies for overcoming compelling trains of thought and the urges that accompany them.
“Vitakkasanthana Sutta” literally means “the Discourse on Quieting Thinking,” but I’m going to call it “the Social Media Sutra.” This name is more convenient and catchy, and it reminds us that these teachings can be directly applied to our lives.
So now for the fifth and final tool. This one may surprise you. The last resort tool that the Buddha offers us is sheer willpower. With teeth clenched and tongue pressed against the roof of the mouth, the practitioner should squeeze, squash, and torture the mind with the mind. As they do so, those bad thoughts are given up and come to an end. It sounds harsh and the image is rather violent. It’s like a strong man who grabs a weaker man by the head or throat or shoulder and squeezes, squashes, and tortures him.
You might be surprised at the Buddha teaching such a forceful method, but sometimes we need to be strict with ourselves. It’s made very clear, though, that using willpower is a last resort, to be employed only when other methods have failed.
Sometimes I’ve found this useful. I can find myself, late at night, surfing the internet. It’s all good stuff—articles about science and psychology and Dharma—but it’s depriving me of sleep. And I’ll suddenly find myself experiencing a kind of disgust with what I’m doing and almost slam down the lid of my laptop. That sudden surge of a kind of healthy distaste overpowers my craving, which then loses all of its power over me.
But the whole concept of willpower is suspect. When I’m suddenly overcome with disgust and close my laptop, that’s not really something that happens because of willpower. It just happens. I’m surfing away (un)happily, and then suddenly I’m disgusted and the period of compulsive surfing is over.
Fortunately, there are much better ways to overcome your urges. You might even call them sneakier ways. The sneaky aspect is that you use your willpower when you’re not actively caught up in craving. That’s when using force, for want of a better mind, is most effective. What we do is make decisions that limit the ability of our active tendencies to control us.
For example, if you delete your social media apps from your phone, that’s pretty forceful. It becomes much harder to access those services. Sure, you could use your phone’s internet browser instead, but that’s a bit clunkier. If you want to go further, you can use your phone’s parental safety settings to designate Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media site you’re addicted to as an adult site and block it entirely. That way you can’t access those sites even in a browser. On a computer, there are browser plugins you can use that limit the amount of time you can spend on social media.
Going a bit further, you can delete your social media accounts altogether. That’s a very effective use of “force.” It actually does take a lot of willpower to do this. Very few people can do this.
I did this with my Instagram account. Instagram is one of the more benign social media sites, but I found myself feeling disappointed when I shared an image and didn’t get many likes or comments. I craved validation and wasn’t getting it. I didn’t like being that way, so I just deleted my account.
I also deleted my Facebook account. I have to say I loathed Facebook. Yes, it was a way I could keep up with my far-flung tribe of relatives. But it turned out that some of those relatives weren’t much fun to follow. Even on the Buddhist Facebook groups I followed, the conversations tended to degenerate into arguments. Plus, there’s the whole thing about Facebook and privacy, and Facebook being a conduit for political propaganda, and so on. So I no longer have a personal Facebook account.
Research shows that quitting social media makes us happier. Why don’t more of us do that? It’s because of addiction, and the ways our minds lie to us. Your addiction will find ways to talk you out of deleting your accounts, telling you how essential social media is to your happiness. It’s all lies, of course. These things didn’t even used to exist, and somehow we all got by.
So I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts, and then the only social media service I had left was Twitter. I spent less time on Twitter than I had on the other services, but it still became a bit of a problem. For one thing, Twitter is a bit of an outrage factory. It’s full of people who like to get attention by showing how outraged they are about various things. They enjoy getting other people outraged as well.
That had a bad effect on my sense of well-being, either because I’d get outraged or because I’d find myself exhausted just witnessing it. For another thing, Twitter was very time-consuming. Sometimes I’d check Twitter on my phone first thing in the morning and be sucked in for forty minutes or an hour. You can scroll endlessly on Twitter (that’s one of the features designed to keep us addicted) and there were always links to articles and videos, some of them very interesting.
So there is one final “willpower” trick that I’d like to offer you. This is the one that got me off Twitter, made me happier by keeping me away from sources of outrage, and also freed up enormous amounts of time. I’m pleased to say that as a result of this one trick, I have no problem staying away from Twitter. Here it is.
This is a more forceful version of the third tool, “ignoring and forgetting” social media by putting it out of sight and out of mind—for example by not having your phone by the side of your bed when you sleep. The third tool is, in effect, reducing temptation. This is similar, but what you’re doing is creating a barrier that makes it hard for you to get into your account. You’re not deleting your account, which has advantages (for example you still have all your history there, no one can “name squat” by taking your name, and you can access your account in an emergency).
The barrier works like this: Now you’re locked out of your social media account. It still exists, so no one can name squat it. You can, in theory, get back into your account. There’s a “forgot password” link that you can use to send yourself a link to get back in again. But it’s an extra barrier. For me, at least, that’s enough to have kept me out of my Twitter account for months.
So my current social media status is happier and more productive. Locking myself out of my account is like the strong man grabbing the weaker one and restraining him. But, and this is important, it’s more like the weaker man waiting until the strong man has walked into a room, and then locking the door so that he’s trapped inside.
The sneaky part of the sneaky willpower approach is that you’re not confronting your addictive urges when they’re active. When you’re in the throes of addictively using social media or the internet, it’s very hard to do anything about it. Those urges are strong. So at some other time, you take control. You stage a coup. You delete your apps, you block social media sites on your phone or computer, you lock yourself out. None of these things is foolproof, but you’re creating strong barriers to acting out on your addictive urges, and those barriers can be enough. They have been for me.
To summarize this series, what we’ve been doing is exploring the five tools that the Vitakkasanthana Sutta offers us to help us free our minds from obsessive thinking and compulsive urges. Thank you for joining me in this series on using the Dharma to overcome social media addiction. There’s truly nothing I enjoy more than exploring and sharing the Dharma, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to explore our practice together. May we all continue to make progress in overcoming the obstacles that hold us back from living with mindfulness, compassion, and joy.