When you’re building a house you always start with a solid foundation. The same is true for building good habits to keep one’s mood on an even keel. Over the previous five weeks, I looked at some components to this foundation. For me it’s sleep, diet and exercise. How everything else in my life goes is dependent upon where I stand with those three things. Not only that, they’re interlinked. Sleep poorly and I’ll make bad food choices or skip exercise because I’m tired and crabby. Skip exercise and my sleep won’t be as good. Miss any of those three consistently and it will rapidly become evident in my overall mood.
But just like building a house, the methods change as you go up. You might pour a boring concrete rectangle with no windows for a foundation because its whole job is to just hold the rest of the building up. Build a house made of nothing but concrete walls and roof and a door and you’ll have a workable shelter, but you may not have the quality of life you’re hoping for.
So let’s move on to the above-ground level of building. This one came to me yesterday when I was feeling my worst with Covid (I improved drastically over the past day!) and was scrolling TikTok like crazy. By the end of the day I was feeling pretty hopeless about so many different aspects of the world.
One of the things I like about TikTok is its algorithm. It is very responsive and tends to give you the things you tell it you like. But as I’ve said before, you have to be careful about how you use it as it interprets a lot of different things as “liking” videos. At its best it gives me motivational posts, POV cycling videos, interesting places to go eat in Toronto, updates from people walking or cycling around the world, or even very niche things like a person who is obsessed with dandelion coloured crayons. But every once in a while it tosses in other things to see if you might like it. This includes upsetting US and Canadian political news, theories, and commentaries. And depending on the story, I might stick around to find out what actually is happening. This culminated yesterday in my feed turning horrible again. I turned it on today for a minute and got literally nothing good even after marking about 8 different upsetting videos as “not interested”.
As I’ve said before when talking about why I sometimes repeatedly visit news sites, in great part it’s due to a naive hope of “Yay! Maybe this whole weird nightmare that’s been going on to varying degrees for almost 10 years now is over. But while some may offer a little hope, two things happen.
The first is internal. It wears down a path in my brain that worries about things I literally have no control over, sparking all sorts of hypothetical outcomes that wait for a day I eat too much for dinner, have an acidic stomach and wake up worrying about nonsense that will seem much less worrisome at 8:00 AM the next day.
The second is on the algorithm side. Watch a few videos, even good ones showing hopeful news or successful resistance, and the algorithm turns up the dial. Let’s bring in some more upsetting stuff. If he liked (read: watched) this one, he’ll really love this other one. This one is insidious as it sets up a feedback loop.
As many times as I’ve said, in the past, “Having more than two cups of coffee in a day is a bad idea – it won’t just motivate me, it will make me hungry and anxious later”, “I need to exercise nearly every day to be happy” or “If I eat too much dinner even if it is delicious and home cooked, I will not sleep well” and then gone ahead and done those things, I’ve done the same with Internet consumption – and particularly algorithmic Internet.
I’ll continue to track my sleep, stress, eating, meditation, and exercise but only share outliers. This means that you don’t have to hear about how I slept every single day or how much I biked in a week. You’ll just hear if something is different or unexpected.
Instead we’ll be tracking time spent on news sites and social media (specifically TikTok and Bluesky) and adding mood rating to the mix. I’ll include some app limits through my iPhone and on my computer through the Leechblock NG extension. Later when I’m feeling better I’ll add in some more sophisticated data gathering but right now I’ve had just about enough effortful time on the computer.
And as for cycling. I realize the cycling videos were pretty niche so those will be separate entries in case people enjoy them – and for sure because they keep me motivated just watching them. Meanwhile to improve their quality and have less time on TikTok I’ll be strictly posting them on YouTube and embedding them here. Less temptation to go down the rabbit hole.
