Breaking the Internet Addiction

Thankfully I’ve never become addicted to anything serious like drugs, alcohol or street racing. But I have been addicted to more boring things like television, radio, email… and now RSS feeds have rekindled my Internet addiction.

So as I’m interesting in where my addiction will be displaced to next, I’ve decided to deal with my Internet addiction.

So how does one do that?

Usually with an addiction I would just give it up cold turkey. By completely giving something up for a month, you break the habits and false yourself to find other ways of behaving.

But I need the Internet. I don’t mean that in some kind of addicts I ‘need’ one last hit, kinda way. I actually do need it for work. Eventually I’d like to try giving it up for a month, to force me to communicate in other ways, but it’s really not a good idea at the moment.

So instead I’m giving it up in the mornings.

Except on very odd occasions where I have something urgent to complete, the Internet is not needed in the mornings. I can do research, check email, publish what I’ve written and so on, all in the afternoon. That leaves me to concentrate on writing in the morning.

So I’ve been experimenting with this. I’m still sitting at the computer, with the connection to the Internet still live, and only a click away from opening up the Firefox browser. But I’m being really good and resisting the urge to go hit the Internet waves.

And there certainly is an urge. In fact I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. There are moments lasting 10/15 minutes where I’m not getting any work done because I’m convincing myself not to surf the Internet!

In these early days I’m full of excuses for why I ‘need’ to use the Internet (and now I do mean an addict’s need). A couple of situations are legitimate, but I have to be really careful about what I convince myself is important enough to bend the ‘no morning’ rule and what is not. Therefore if I decide that I need to use the Internet, I make sure I spend ten minutes trying to convince myself otherwise.

For the few hours this probably slowed me down quite considerably, but it’s already starting to pay back in productivity. I’m getting much more work done in the morning. In fact I’m generally finishing more in the morning than I used to in a whole day!

So far a big success then!