The Post-Quarantine Consumption Addict Recovery Journal: Introduction
When quarantine hit more than two and a half years ago it flipped our worlds upside down. Having to stay inside took a toll on almost everyone of us, including people such as myself who actually enjoyed staying at home (by choice) and doing mostly indoor, quiet activities.
Almost everyone I know came out of the pandemic with some sort of confinement-related sequel, but there is a particular one that I think It’s one of the most common: The addiction to overstimulation…
It’s s sneaky one. It’s not a physical problem, so you don’t exactly notice it in your body. It’s not an obvious psychological issue either, like stress, anxiety or depression. And yet you live with it, almost every single moment of your day. And of all the side effects of quarantine, this is probably (at least for me, and many others) the one that’s the most difficult to shake off. It’s disguised as something innocent, superfluous. It’s something “we’ve always done anyway, right?” well… yes and no…
We’ve always loved consuming. And I don’t even mean in a transactional way, but in a “content” way. We binged on Netflix and YouTube on weekends or after working hours. But regardless of how much or little we did it, for better or for worse, it was always a way of “compensation” or “resting” from the hectic pace of our weekdays. After going from home to work, then to a friend’s house, then to the grocery store, then to the doctor’s appointment, etc…. finally getting home, sitting on the couch and turning Netflix on was a way to “unplug” from the rest of the day.
Quarantine however flipped the script. Consuming content stopped being our way to “unplug” from the rest of our day. It BECAME the rest of our day. Since we couldn’t go out or do anything outside of our house, we just consumed. It was just idle time, doesn’t matter. Even a lot of us who went from office work to home work, now found ourselves without the professional peer pressure to perform (that’s PPPP, an acronym I just came up with, as I wrote the words…) so we could just jump on youtube without feeling guilty about it.
Content consumption, and in worse cases, also buying stuff online, became the band-aid to quarantine. The pacifier. The “there’s nothing we can do, so we might as well…” There is one big problem tho. As time went on these last two years it went from being the pacifier for quarantine, to being the pacifier for every time we felt idle, unmotivated, bored. To the point where many of us (myself included, this is why I’m doing this) now having the choice to go out, or even staying inside doing more significant and fulfilling stuff, still chose to consume…
This has been a normal mind flow for me over the last couple of years:
“Man, I should really start working on that thing I love doing. It’d feel so good once I accomplish it”
“Sounds like a lot of work tho and It’s not like someone’s paying me to do it. I’ll just get on youtube. Maybe I’ll start tomorrow. Today just doesn’t feel right”.
I’ve gotten so used to consume stuff since quarantine (Youtube, Instagram, always looking for the next home item to buy or upgrade) that it became my food, my source of energy, my plans for the future, and my goals. Needless to say, It’s a terrible choice for ANY of those things, but the problem is that anything else that is not as overstimulating, becomes EXTREMELY difficult to endure. Something as trivial as filling a tax form Going to the bank. Writing an email to an accountant. Don’t even get me started on our actual job… tasks, zoom meetings, priorities, blah, blah. Everything that is not passive consuming is admittedly, almost physically painful to me nowadays.
I realized this almost 3 years after the pandemic hit. You might think It’s a bit too late, but I’m sure there’s lots of us out there who are also suffering this and haven’t realized it yet. I decided to take action before it becomes a bigger issue. Although in my case It’s already quite big, believe me…
I decided to eliminate anything that I know overstimulates me. Not completely. I know and you know that’s just plainly unrealistic. I’ll just remove it from key moments of the day. In my case, especially from early mornings, after lunch, and late nights, since I realized those are the moments I consume the most and when that consumption has the biggest impact on my energy and mood. This will be a 100% realistic journal. I’ll document my successes and my failures too. All the times my will will prevail or be broken. I’m tired to watch videos and read stuff about all the things you “should do” to improve your life, but yet nobody documents the journey from doing the wrong things, to doing the right things, all bumps and bruises included, so I hope that helps anyone who gets to rid this on their journey too.
