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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

We live in a strange world when people are intentionally making their devices worse to use to try and discourage themselves from using them

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It started when I had my first kid and he wouldn't sleep and I would lay there awake all night just thinking of all the stressors in my life. I'd use the phone to distract myself. Then that gradually just turned into a crutch for all stress. That was pretty hard to stop.

I've tried a number of different things but nothing stuck. I've had this phone for a few months now and it has really done the trick.

This is a a microcosm of so much addiction, at least in my experience. Friction really matters in giving your mind a moment to pause and consider. I think adding friction by getting a less capable phone is a great technique, similarly to how I'd hide the candy/alcohol/TV remotes if folks in the house are addicted. It doesn't remove the opportunity, but it makes it tougher.

This happened for me as well. It adds insult to injury that lying awake, unable to sleep properly for months straight, doomscrolling (or just being online too much) further saps your mental health in an already drained and depressed state.

It's a pretty messed up negative feedback loop. If you find yourself in this state, audiobooks are a good alternative.

It's like candy - so tasty that you can't stop eating it until you're diabetic and obese. People will absolutely structure their diets to make them "worse" (less tasty) because they want, at a higher level than their taste buds want sugar, to stay healthy.

A trillion dollar industry exists to profit off of gluing eyeballs to screens. Making the device other than what this industry designed it to be is not self-sabotage, it's self-interested!

Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barrett for some other examples of this phenomenon.

Yep, exactly this. If I have anything with sugar in the house, it'll get consumed in 24-48h. The solution is to just not have anything with sugar in the house.

If I want to splurge with a chocolate or ice cream bar, I take a walk to my corner store and buy just one, and eat it right away. It's extremely cost inefficient compared to if I bought a gallon of ice cream from the store, but that's not what I'm optimizing for here.

I've been using an nfc card based thing called brick to add friction and halt doomscrolling.

Essentially I use my normal phone, but lock specific apps. To unlock those apps I must scan the nfc card I keep in my car. That means getting up and going outside.

That tiny bit of added friction has cut my screentime in half and made me more productive, and less stressed.

There are other devices like it now, for example Bloom.

Individuals are going up against corporations spending millions if not billions on R&D to figure out how to make their products “stickier” or habit forming. Can you blame people for pursuing more aggressive approaches to try and reset their habits?

I mean, whatever works man. That bean knitting app is kinda neat too

Adding/reducing friction is a reliable way to change behaviour, and the companies know this too.

I dont save my card details to prefill, I don't use nfc payments and I keep a low balance in the transaction account my debit card, in order to be more intentional about my spending.

Is this common behavior with other addictive substances? e.g. mixing bitterants trying to weaken own addiction?

wait a minute, from behavioral science perspectives, does it work as intended, or does it work against the aim?

Apropos mixing bitterants, it's quite common to apply a bitter nail varnish to help people stop biting their nails. Not an addictive substance, but an addictive behavior.

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