I started writing it in another place but decided to dedicate a separate post to description of my technique of quitting social-media sites, smoking, obsessive interest to ‘news’… maybe other bad habbits can be ended this way too, I didn’t try. It is a useful technique for self-control at your workplace or at an exam (I remember doing that at the time when I had to pass a dosen oral exams every four moths). It helped me in business too. Many times. So, here’s the task: you need to…

Learn how to always remember what you are doing.

    It’s a paradoxical task, I know. Your head should be busy with doing what you are deeply focused on and at the same time some part of it should remember where you are, what exactly is happening around you and what will this situation be like in a foreseable future. Notice that you have all the mechanics of this ‘background monitoring’ process in your brain, it is there, you only need to discover it and program or re-program it for your needs. Yes, re-program. This ‘self-monitor’ may be occupied by another task that you learned (or were taught) to execute periodically, for instance by the task of looking at your mobile phone / social media / newsfeed kinda’ thing.

What are you fighting with?

    Don’t be surprised, there are lots of good and bad people in this world, they taught humans to routinely do all sorts of things, starting from the good, like sying ‘hi’ and smiling to people who come your way and ending with launching their hands in a salute and saying ‘sieg heil’ which is, as you sure have been taught too, not good at all. Now it is this ‘new big thing’ - the obsessive-compulsive looking at your ‘mobile-phone’. First of all: it is not ‘mobile’, because it is ‘with you’ at all times so in your ‘coordinate system’ it is ‘at rest’ :) ; also, it is not a ‘phone’ per se, it’s a device for monitoring your position (under the satellite and between the cell-towers) and your behavior in its entirety.
    So, you live this ‘life in the virtual crowd’ of your ‘social media friends’. Remember how it feels? Every now and then you feel… like a growing sense of uncertainty bounding with a little bit of confusion… Something is happening in the Universe but you don’t know what… Here you are! You reach into your pocket and take out it - the source of infinite ‘knowledge’ about ‘what is happening’. Caught’ya!
    This is the beast that we are going to conquer - the obsessive-compulsive craving for ‘knowing what is happening’.

Come back to your senses!

    First of all you need to analyse the experience and understand that you are doing this thing in a semi-concious state, or ‘mechanically’ without much thought or feeling. That’s a very important understanding. We are built in a way that unloads our brain from the tasks that we’ve done many times and they have a completely predictable result. After a number of repetition the brain ‘programs in’ the action and you don’t even need to think what foot goes to the floor first when you get up. Same thing here. You’ve been programmed by your own brain to perform ‘required’ actions automatically, without thinking. You were thinking when you did it the first time and then, over time, you ceased thinking. So, in order to re-program yourself you need to start thinking again. But what do you need to think about? I used this idiom “come to one’s senses” for a reason, the best way is to sense what is happening around you: listen to the sounds, smell what it smells like where you are, look around. But how do you ‘invoke’ all these actions? There’s a trick for that that can be explained in ‘programmer terms’ and that’s why I am writing this post. :)

“Override” the existing routine with another one.

    Don’t try to disconnect this routine right away! As in any other program, the ‘method call’ led you to this point once which means that it will lead you to this very point over and over again with the same periodicity as your obsessive habbit has. It’s a useful call! Hook up another routine in its place. How to do it? Simple! On top of the old one! Just decide that every time you feel that you need to look at your phone or feel an urge to ‘see the news’ you will start the routine of doing that by looking around as I described before, then asking yourself a question:”Where am I and what am I doing right now?” and answering it in at least a couple of words or phrases. This will not only ‘get you back to your senses’ but will initiate (through the use of words) the process of reasoning (with yourself).
    It’s basically a ‘manual restart’ of your ‘operating system’ executing sequences of logically connected thoughts. It will work beautifully, believe me, you will see. I call this a “Method Override” as in the Object Oriented Programming that many of us studied, because you are replacing the execution of a ‘method call’ that had been programmed into your subconscious program (consider it to be a BIOS :) ) - the pulling your phone out of your pocket - with a ‘wrapper’ - first looking around, hearing the sounds, smelling the smells, then asking and answering reasonable questions.

Now what?

    You can even pull out your phone afterwards (if you really need to, ask yourself about that before doing it)! If you did your new routine first it means that you’ve succeeded with ‘overriding the method’ of your subconscious ‘program’. You came back to your senses and you know what you are doing! It may require some excerise, but in a few days you will become a different human, yourself, not a remotely controlled by a crowd of strangers ‘user’ of some ‘shminder’, ‘shmbook’ or ‘shmitter’. You will be reminded by your own brain who and where you are and what you are doing right now.
    And of course just keep repeating this action until it ‘sinks’ into your subconscious program in the same way as the venomous obscession did before. Over time you will learn how to replace any habbit that bothers you by reprogramming yourself. Just remember, our reason is the main tool for programming, the language of our operating system, then the program ‘sinks’ into the routine BIOS of our brain. Do some excercises in reasoning about things, just for fun.

Later.