The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Creativity Is To Delete Your Social Media ‘Time-Suck’

Deep work and un-stoppable motivation, here we come (again)!

I recently wrote an article on the science of how TikTok and similar apps, such as Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook are quite literally re-wiring your brain.

Then, in complete hypocrisy, I proceeded to ignore my own advice, turning to Instagram time and time again for mindless distraction.

A distraction for or from what? I tried to assess.

Well, a distraction from trying to be creative, clever, and reasonably productive.

You see, even the thought of a couple hours of dedicated time spent writing a simple blog post had began to feel like it would require an insurmountable degree of self-motivation.

I felt drained of my creative energy that had burned so brightly for the past few years, and even more tired of the feelings of inadequacy and laziness that subsequent followed my desire to do absolutely nothing but scroll endlessly through my endless feed.

Even writing the article on how shit these social media apps and algorithms are for our brain made me feel absolutely nothing. Meh, I thought, everyone is using them, and I’ll be bored if I quit.

Well, surprise, surprise, in order to be creative, you kind of first have to be bored. It’s annoying but it’s very true; creativity stems from an unstimulated brain. It’s just part of how we’ve evolved.

So, what did I do? I didn’t even delete my Instagram — I simply moved in one swipe left of where it had originally existed in my phone. In fact, it was such a minute change that I really wondered whether or not I would even feel a difference.

But I did.

Oh boy, I did.

You know all those moments you blink and somehow you’re already 5 scrolls deep on Instagram? Well, via simple rearrangement of the apps on my phone I could not longer “auto-pilot” my way into social media self-sabotage.

Where my Instagram app used to remain, was now my app for Zoom . I’m sure you can imagine that Zoom is not quite as entertaining to accidentally open 5–10…