Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Understandable English Podcast. My name is Oliver and today we will be talking about digital addiction. So what digital addiction is, and maybe some of the impacts of it and how we can overcome it, so how we can stop being addicted to our phones, our computers, etc. So the reason I made this topic or picked this topic is that recently, probably about two or three months ago, I took the decision to delete Instagram from my phone.
Like a lot of you, I'm sure I use social media too much. I found myself when I had a quiet moment or a gap in my day browsing Instagram reels or posts and just watching a load of random videos or useless posts and it really wasn't helping me at all in my life. I didn't feel like it was giving me any value. So I took the decision to delete Instagram for about two months and I recently re downloaded it. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about that.
So my experiences as well with, with and without social media. So to start with, what is digital addiction? So an addiction is when we feel we have lost control of something. So for example, smoking, smoking cigarettes is an addiction you feel you have to. It is a physical addiction. So the nicotine in the cigarettes produces a reaction in our body which makes us want to smoke more. So that is an addiction, but
there's also mental addiction. So for example, even with cigarettes, you feel at certain times, like when you go outside or you get in the car like you want a cigarette. This is mental addiction from habits. Another good example of mental addiction is gambling. So spending money on gambling, this is not a physical addiction, it is in our brain, in our mind. Likewise, when we deal with these addictive technologies, so digital technologies, they are also designed to be addictive.
So when we use Instagram, it has an algorithm which gives us posts or videos that we are likely to enjoy watching and as a result they want us to spend as much time as possible on Instagram or Facebook or any other social media. And there is a problem with this because they are using our time as their main income. The more time they take from us, the more money they make from advertising. And there isn't anything exactly bad about this.
But for us, we can find ourselves losing time for nothing of value, so we don't learn or gain anything. And it's when we lose that control, so when we start opening our phones and using these apps without thinking about it, that I think it becomes quite scary. There are many studies online about the negative effects of excessive screen time. So excessive means too much. So more than we need and excessive screen time and digital addiction have been connected or linked to various
mental health problems. So for example anxiety or depression, loneliness and even low self esteem. So when we feel bad about ourselves, and I think a lot of this comes from when we spend lots of time on social media, we don't do the things that we really want to do. So that language learning, for example, or a chore or home task which needs done instead, we lose time to these things and then maybe we feel bad about that. And it also could reduce the amount of socializing that we do
in real life. So when we do it online, it's not the same as meeting someone or meeting a friend in person. So that brings me to the point about stopping these feelings of addiction with Instagram or any other social media. So when I deleted Instagram, the first thing I noticed was that for about two weeks after I deleted it, I found myself opening my phone at random times in the day to check Instagram or to start watching videos and it wasn't there.
So it made me realize after I deleted it, how much I actually used it and how much I wanted to open the app. And this was quite scary to me, how much my body was on autopilot. So automatically going to do these things, I allowed myself to once per week, on the weekend download the app to check if I had any messages or I missed any important messages from people. And what I found was when I downloaded it, I hadn't really missed anything important.
So all those stories or posts that people post, I realized I can live without them. I don't need to actually see what other people are doing all the time, and I definitely don't need to watch a million memes every day. After a while, I find myself doing other things instead. For example, working on this podcast or reading a book. And I actually read way more books in those two months than I had done for the last year or the last six months on average,
which was crazy. But you might be wondering, why did I redownload Instagram? In the end, after about two months, I decided to redownload Instagram, but simply to control how much I used it. Deleting it for two months allowed me to realize how much I didn't need it, and also how much I used it before. When I redownloaded it, I found
that my habits had changed. I didn't want to open it as much as I used to, and although I still occasionally open it to watch some videos or relax, I don't use it anywhere near as much as I did in the past. So do you use Instagram or Twitter X or any other social media too much? Let me know in the comments or if it's on Spotify in the
question. And I would encourage you, if you do use it too much, to try deleting it for a period of time at least so you can see how much your body wants to open it and how much you might actually be addicted to it, which could surprise you. And I think it's a beneficial activity. Think of all the things you would rather do instead and do them instead of using social
media. Of course, social media can be incredibly useful so for keeping in touch with long distance friends and family for learning, For example, listening to this podcast or other lingu English learning material. But set boundaries, so limit with yourself. Don't spend too much time wasting time, and always recognize when it isn't actually fun or useful anymore. So that ends today's episode. I hope it was useful for you and
that you enjoyed listening. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have an amazing day.