How to Stop Yourself From Constantly Checking Your Notifications
On getting away from the need for external validation.
No matter what your poison is, whether Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, if you’re on social media it’s likely you’ve experienced addiction to notifications.
This is not accidental. These notifications are billed to us as analytical, logical numbers which we can and should use to improve our content. So we think there’s no harm — or that it’s even beneficial — when we obsess over these numbers. More notifications equals moe likes, shares, comments, which means our content is good. Less equals bad, which shows room for improvement. That’s how it works in theory, of course.
In practice, of course, we don’t use them like that. Time and time again we refresh the page to see how many likes our tweet got, to see how widely it spread, to watch it flow across the internet. We persist in using notifications as a way to validate ourselves. They let us see that other people like our stuff, which triggers an instant dopamine rush it’s all too easy to become addicted to. Your moods become inextricably intwined with the spikes and dips in your numbers.
That’s not a rational feeling. Despite being numeric in nature, notifications are designed to appeal to our emotions. Look at their…
