Digital Nicotine Patches

People who try to stop smoking will sometimes use nicotine patches or lozenges to slowly taper the addictive substance while stopping the harmful habit, i.e. smoking cigarettes, instantly. Some try finding another habit like chewing (non-nicotine) gum every time they crave a cigarette.

I'm currently taking a break from Twitter after frittering away an ungodly amount of time on the site recently. My brain is still wired for my Twitter habit. About twenty times a day, I see or read something or get a thought and get the urge to tweet it out.

I decided to try a weird substitution approach: I just started an empty Google Doc. I literally called it "instead of Twitter". Every time I get the urge to Tweet something, I just put a new bullet point in the doc and move on. I still get to act on the urge a little, but I don't get sucked into a feed of interesting content and people I want to talk to each time I do so. And my brain doesn't quite as compulsively search for things that would be fun to put in a google doc all day.

After a few days I'm up to a little over two pages. But it seems to be working as intended.