[AE.Personal] Lessons from a Twitter Lockdown
So, I'm on my second day of being locked on Twitter, and it's been nice, and interesting, and relaxing, and instructive.
I mentioned this on Twitter, but I've found that while I still have the same impulses as far as the desire to leave a reply in the moment, I don't miss being able to snark off on strangers. That is, I'm not frustrated and don't feel like I'm missing anything when I realize that I can't engage with them. But when I see someone sharing cool art or something funny, I do miss being able to leave positive feedback. On that level alone, I feel like staying locked for a while might help me re-train my impulses towards positive, thoughtful engagement and away from negative, reactive engagement.
Having made one big change in my Twitter use helped me motivate myself towards another change I've been contemplating, which is to leave my phone in the office to charge overnight instead of having it near me in bed. I don't need to be told that keeping electronic devices away from the sleeping area is Sleep Hygiene 101. As a lifelong insomniac, you can trust that any advice I haven't already heard is something that I've found in my own research. But for the last several years of my mother's life, I kept my phone on and near me as much as possible, against the event of any urgent or time-sensitive messages or calls.
Granted, I was already taking my phone to bed with me before that. My mother's illness didn't create my habit of keeping the whole world at my fingertips. It just added more psychological weight and urgency to it.
And I realized at some point yesterday that when she died, that feeling of urgency didn't dissipate into the void but became displaced.
Now, I have never used my phone much as a phone. I've never liked talking on the phone. I don't enjoy texting or instant messaging on a device without a physical keyboard. I have plentiful workarounds for that during the day, but I'm not likely to sit up in bed texting in the odd hours of the night.
So, if I'm going to use my phone in bed, I'm probably reading. It might be a webpage like TVTropes or another wiki. It might be an ebook in an app. Or Twitter, with its allure of endless scrolling.
Of those things, Twitter is the one most engineered to keep the user engaged, and also the one that offers the most possibilities for me to be drawn into interaction and engagement. I don't like tweeting using my phone's on-screen keyboard any more than I like texting with it, but Twitter is designed to draw one in, and my brain is effectively designed to be drawn into things like Twitter.
So as Twitter is the main medium through which I use my phone to communicate, it's perhaps inevitable that any free-floating anxiety I might feel about keeping my communication device on and keeping myself available to it at all hours of the day and night would find themselves displaced onto Twitter.
"You know you can take Twitter off your phone, right?"
Sure! I know it just as much as I know I can put Twitter back on my phone, is the problem. It's the Frog and Toad Cookie Problem: you can put the cookies in a box to stop yourself from eating them, but you have the same power to open the box.
"What about parental controls or nanny programs to stop yourself from doing that?"
Putting the cookies in a different box doesn't change the nature of the problem.
"But you could hand the control off to someone else."
There are people in my life like that, but I do their tech support, so: different box, same cookies.
And even if there were someone I could trust to outfox me in terms of managing my Twitter addiction for me, I'm not actually interested in having a battle of wits with my friends and family.
"What if I think up a solution to your problem that you didn't hypothetically pose in your newsletter?"
Well, see, I'm not putting these hypothetical questions in here to signify "these are the objections I have considered, please let me know if you have any ideas I haven't thought of" so much as to say "This is not your problem to solve, and any solution that occurs to you based on your life and perspective will likely disintegrate on contact with my reality."
I have my solution, which is to leave my phone away from my bed.
Aside from being psychologically fraught, there were some logistical hurdles here in terms of things I use my phone for that aren't being a phone. Sensitive hearing and a very old house that is equally great at letting sounds in from outside and creating strange noises of its own means I can't sleep without earphones playing something in my ears. For about as long as I've had a smartphone, that meant using it as a music player as it charges beside me each night. The current trend in smartphone designs means that I got a dedicated music player to take over this function earlier in the pandemic.
I do sometimes find it helpful to read a bit to quiet my mind in order to fall asleep. I haven't owned an actual ereader in years, as I wasn't able to keep track of my first Kindle well enough to keep it in good working order, so I have just used my phone most of the time. But the newer Kindles are a bit more robust, and so is my brain on ADHD meds, so I got one of those recently, too.
The last remaining practical hurdle for ditching the phone at night is that it's also a light switch for the lights in my room; the sole concession I've made to "Internet of Things" type smart devices is replacing the bulbs in my bedroom and adjoining office with smart bulbs.
This is super convenient in a vareity of situations, but it's mostly a disability accommodation. My disability leaves me with very poor night vision and eyes that are unusually slow to adjust to changes in lighting conditions, so it's much safer if I can get into bed and then turn off the lights, or turn them on before getting out of bed in the middle of the night. As a side note: the ability to adjust the brightness and warmth/color balance on the lighting in my personal space has also been helpful in relieving insomnia. Don't know how much of it is an actual circadian response versus me just conditioning myself to feel sleepy when the lamps turn a dim red, but as the saying goes, the placebo effect is still an effect.
Anyway, getting the smart light app on my music player was as easy as getting it on a phone, but I have not had any need to sign into the account since I set it up and did not recall my login information. Fixing that... well, it was so easy it barely slowed me down, once I actually did it. But decades of untreated ADHD have left me prepared to believe that any looming problem will be a huge problem, and while that doesn't happen with every looming problem, this task has been pending since months before I started taking medication. I didn't even really remember why I had been putting it off, but the residual feeling that there was some insurmountable obstacle I would need to deal with was still there.
In any case, as I said, once I actually did the thing, it was easy and I was done and that was it.
-Alexandra