How I stopped my Internet Addiction. + Pleasures Calendar template in Notion

Autumn 2021 was a tough one for me. I was lost after all the events of the previous 1.5 years. I had been living in Krakow for 3 months back then. A new country, far from my home friends, and family. My focus was poor and I was very much into news and social media scrolling. I felt overwhelmed and burned out. I needed something to start getting out of that state and bring back the sense of control.

I decided to start limiting my internet time in the evenings. I considered it to be the main reason for my poor focus and anxiety.

I realized that I can’t just cancel this habit

Easier said than done. I put my phone away at 8 pm but within half an hour or so I could easily find myself scrolling social media without any particular purpose. I realized that I can’t just cancel this habit. I needed to offer myself something better instead. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating a list of pleasures.

Pleasures List

To be honest it was hard for me to create this list in the first place. It was like I had my natural skill of “having a pleasant time” broken. I could come up with a lot of ideas of how I can improve myself or which projects I could try to work on. But it was so unusual for me to list things that I potentially could enjoy in my evening time. I needed some inspiration which I found in other people’s lists.

Eventually, my own list of pleasures was done. What was included? Simple things like listening to music with an aroma lamp or reading “Harry Potter” (somehow I missed the boom in my teens). There were some unexpected things like learning to juggle or ninja stand-up (I haven’t tried this one though).

Pick and Prepare

After I had my list done I still struggled to enjoy my evenings. Instead of having fun, I could get stuck in choosing the best song to learn or the best dancing tutorial to try. It was kind of frustrating. Instead of having a pleasant evening, I could find myself scrolling the options on youtube and then easily jumping to news and social media — the stuff that I actually wanted to have a rest from.

Once I started to consider this preparation work as a separate task things got better. I picked “pleasures” that I was going to try and then wrote down the things to be done before I could do my “pleasures”. It was either buying stuff or creating playlists or researching necessary tutorials.

As a Notion geek, I couldn’t help making a separate page around this “Pleasures List” idea. I created a board where I could see the “pleasures” I picked for every day of the week together with the actions to be done beforehand.

And I added color coding to my Notion page to see if I have everything I need for the evening. It made preparation to be more fun.

Then I spent some time doing the preparation tasks. It was much easier with all the data structured this way. I bought an aroma lamp, and the oils, cool teapot and papered “Harry Potter”. I also bought my tennis balls set for juggling lessons. Doing all these things helped me to take seriously this idea of having internet-free evenings. After buying all that stuff I did not have excuses to procrastinate testing this idea any longer.

Some of my “pleasures” involved screens — video tutorials or playlists. I decided to use my tablet for such things and I set it up to automatically disable wi-fi from 8 pm to 7 am. Thus I knew that I had to have all the necessary content downloaded beforehand (luckily Youtube with its Premium, Netflix, Spotify, Podcasts allow users to download the content for accessing it in offline mode).

Time for a pleasure

After I was all set for doing the “pleasures” assigned to the first week I actually started to do them. I realized that I do not want to follow the assignments strictly. They were more like advice, not the rule for me.

And after all the previous failures of sustainably getting away from the internet in the evenings, it finally worked. I managed to put away my cell phone at 8 pm. And I have been doing it for many weeks.

And I had a lot of fun actually. I learned to juggle, read all 7 books of “Harry Potter”, played board games with my husband, and returned to my guitar hobby.

I think it worked not only because of this pleasure list but also because of all the preparation work that I have done. My brain got a signal that I’m serious about my intention to have internet-free evenings and stopped sabotaging this idea.

It became my natural aspiration to spend some time on reflecting the information that I get instead of just consuming it endlessly.

How it helped me

I started to understand myself better. I found out that board games are not relaxing for me at all as I often take the game too seriously. I mean I love them but not when I want to get calm and relaxed. Same with movies where I get involved emotionally too much. But those activities helped me to switch from work thoughts pretty well.

Juggling, reading, listening to music with an aroma lamp, and watching cartoons were much more relaxing.

After several days of practicing my internet-free evenings, I noticed one amazing thing: I started to feel uncomfortable after getting too much “useful” information if I would not give myself time to reflect on it. It became my natural aspiration to spend some time on reflecting the information that I get instead of just consuming it endlessly.

This experiment became the starting point for getting out of being lost for me. There were other chapters of coming to a better place where I am today. Probably, I will write about them later in this blog.

After my focus moved to other things in my life, my internet-free evenings began to be increasingly random. And I am going to start this experiment once again as I want to refresh this experience and its effect on me. And there are still some “pleasures” undone yet:)

Here I share the “Pleasures Calendar” in Notion if you want to try it. Thank you for reading, I hope my story will help more people to start enjoying their “pleasure” and experience more internet-free time.

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