The unexpected insights I gained from a content consumption detox

Attempting to execute and create instead of consuming information

Hello, I’m Philippine and to be honest, I feel like a beginner at life – I am forever trying to make sense of it. You can find my attempts at this, plus reflections, musings and experiences right here, in my newsletter. Subscribing is free! For everyone who feels like a beginner at life, and wants to connect in some way.

I’m not on most social media platforms, and yet I spend a lot of my time consuming content: books, articles, podcasts, videos, etc. Hours every day. For a long time this made sense, as I wasn’t able to do much else due to burnout and long Covid, but now that I’ve largely recovered, I haven’t quite turned that pattern around. And yes, it’s nice and relaxing and fun, sometimes even exciting, but a lot of the time it doesn’t feel that meaningful, especially not to use so much of my time on it. Plus there are other things I want to do – things that I hope will make me feel alive and fulfilled – yet I hardly get to them. This is why I wanted to experiment with a kind of information fast.

I was incredibly curious about how I’d find it and what the effects would be. I wanted to know how I’d feel when I didn’t feed my brain new information and input from other brains all the time. What if I didn’t listen to an informative podcast whilst getting dressed, no comfort show during meals, and I didn’t watch videos that gave me ideas for projects, life changes and products I wanted to buy? Consuming content was easy and satisfying. There was next to no friction in doing it and it gave me new ideas, which felt exciting.

In contrast, executing my ideas felt hard, like there was a big threshold of friction to make a start and a whole lot less excitement to keep me going. Instead of the instant gratification that a new idea gave me, executing an ‘old’ idea only cost me discipline, it seemed. However, I suspected that if I got myself to do more, I would actually enjoy it. And so I wanted to see how I’d use my time if I removed the temptation to consume, and how I’d feel if instead I started to create.

I wanted to go for it fully, yet to keep things practical. So my rules were as follows. No reading, except things like emails and texts. No watching videos, films or telly. No listening to podcasts. Just for a week, although I liked the idea so much that I anticipated extending the experiment to two weeks, a month, forever? But oh my goodness, did I get that wrong. That one week felt so very long. Already on the first day I very seriously considered giving up. I thought surely I’ve already learnt my lesson, I don’t need to torture myself any longer with this strict and horrible deprivation. And I almost gave up several more times. It didn’t really become easier, instead I kept counting down the days longingly.

In the end I mostly succeeded. However, in two – I think small – ways, I failed. On the first day, when it was about time to get in bed and I’d already resisted quitting many times, I couldn’t bear the idea that I wasn’t allowed to read in bed before sleep. I had painstakingly kept myself occupied otherwise all day, but this felt like too much to give up. It sounds so dramatic, but that is indeed how it felt. My boyfriend reassured me that this didn’t count as it was part of my bedtime routine to help me sleep. I still felt a little bad about it, but my willpower for that day had come to an end, so I gave in and read that night and all of the following ones too. Fortunately I was able to limit it to bedtime reading only, as the distinction with the rest of the day was so clear. And in the end I don’t think it interfered with the experiment too much.

The second way in which you could say I failed, was stopping slightly earlier than I had planned. I started the challenge on a Monday morning, so I had planned for my next moment of content consumption to be the next Monday morning at the earliest. On Sunday evening however, already feeling my victory, I couldn’t hold it any longer and I rewarded myself, as it were, a little early with some telly that evening.

What I found hard was breaking the habit: eating without telly, no tv series after dinner, etc. But what I found even harder was not having it to look forward to. I realised that just like with food, content consumption was something I looked forward to everyday, multiple times a day. It’s like a miniature version of being able to push through at work or school because you know a holiday is coming. Basically, I missed my reward and life became less fun because of it.

This was quite a different insight than I had expected. As I said, I had thought that I’d want to extend the experiment, continuing to deprive myself of information, because I’d be so productive in executing ideas and creating things of my own, which would be making me feel vibrant and alive. Unfortunately, not quite so.

I realised that I don’t merely use content consumption (remember I'm not just talking social media here) to distract myself from uncomfortable feelings or to avoid uncomfortable tasks. It’s not merely entertaining either, for me it’s a big source of joy. The excitement I feel listening to a podcast that’s giving me insight after insight, plus what I gain from applying such an insight to my life (although I must stress here that I often don’t get to that part or try but fail – yet the 1% or less that I do implement in some way is often invaluable); the pang of recognition in reading a memoir of a fellow autistic woman; the delicious hyperfocus of watching video after video on my current special interest, regardless of whether that’s colour theory or long Covid recovery: this is worth so much more than a distraction or a fun way of wasting time.

So in a way, by depriving myself of something, instead of learning how little it’s worth to me, I discovered how much it is worth. It’s not what I expected, but an equally valuable lesson.

Nevertheless, part of my hypothesis, as it were, did turn out to be true. I did gain something from having not much else to do but execute and create. On one of the first days I felt very tired, making it even harder, because that’s usually when I go to the sofa and telly. However, because that wasn’t an option and I’d planned to make granola, I made granola. I almost didn’t, considering that it would be too much for me at the time, but then went ahead anyway as I hardly had another choice. I know for a fact I wouldn’t have done so, if I hadn’t been doing this challenge. But in that case too I should have done, as it wasn’t too much at all. In fact, it probably did me more good than a sofa session would have, with the added bonus of now having enough homemade granola for my breakfast the next few weeks.

This kind of situation repeated itself several more times that week. Of course there are things that would have been too much in a moment of such exhaustion, however, this experiment has given me tangible insight that, even when it feels like it, sofa plus telly is almost never the only option that stays within my limits. This is not only valuable to know in general, but specifically with regards to my recovery from chronic fatigue (burnout and long Covid). I think that a gradual increase in activity can really help me recover, as the fatigue is often misplaced. Therefore, having experienced that doing more (or at least something less passive) doesn’t necessarily make me feel worse, is incredible.

This experience and the insights I gained from it, made me consider how I want to go about content consumption in the future. That it had to stay in, or rather return to, my life was a given. I needed that joy and relaxation back. Yet it was also very clear that I needed some guidelines as to when and how much. Some of those guidelines were obvious to me: during meals and after dinner was okay, a podcast whilst doing another task (such as cooking or getting dressed) was too, and reading was alright no matter the time. These ‘rules’, however, didn’t suffice, as I wanted to allow myself to, for example, watch a video in the afternoon, either just for fun, or because I truly was very tired or in need of a pick me up. But it wasn’t so simple, because I didn’t want to fall back into my old habit of doing this a lot, at the cost of executing and creating.

With regards to feeling too tired for anything other than sofa plus telly, I came up with the following if-then rule: first try something else; if that turns out to be too much, rest; then go ahead and consume content. The ‘just for fun’ reason to consume at a moment that’s not covered by any of the guidelines I’ve mentioned so far, is harder to accommodate. When is that okay and when is it too much, when is it granting myself some joy and when is it just the easiest thing to do, avoiding something more valuable or necessary? I am not entirely sure.

I’ve come up with two options: on top of what I consume in accordance with the other guidelines, half an hour a day maximum; and/or on the weekend I can consume for fun as much as I want, whilst on weekdays the other guidelines apply. I haven’t made a decision on this yet. I’ll see how it goes.

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Or so I thought. But then something happened in my personal life (I’ll write about it when I’m ready), and everything I learnt, all of the guidelines I came up with, it all went out of the window. I consumed boundlessly for a few days, then went back to normal. And I suppose that that’s okay for now. Yet even though this experiment turned out to be quite different from what I had expected, and even though I’ve already abandoned its lessons, I’m glad I did it, glad that I’ve gained a new appreciation for the joy and relaxation that content consumption often brings me, and for the value of doing and creating that not consuming content often leads to. And I’m sure that at some point I’ll write another post in which I’ll share my experiences and experiments with content consumption at the time, when I’ll perhaps have revisited the challenge, the lessons, and guidelines.

Do you get true joy from consuming information? And how do you balance it with other meaningful ways of spending your time?

In this post you can find out a little bit more about me and my journey.