Hello again everyone, this is my follow up report to my previous post on this sub. It's a bit long but I invite you to read it for better context. This is a long post once again so I tried to organize it a bit so you can skip to what you're more interested in :

1 : TLDR of my previous post 2 : Intro and general feeling 3 : What did I do ?

4 : Mental Health 5 : Attention Span 6 : How I feel now

7 : Conclusion

1 -- TLDR OF MY previous post :

About 1 month ago on April 1st I started a 32 day challenge of no YouTube, no Video Games, no Social Media and no Porn. The goal was to see how my brain would react to a sudden void of instant gratification style media for a significant portion of time. What made this challenge interesting is mainly 2 things :

1 - I have been using these forms of entertainment pretty much daily since about 2014 often for many, many hours and rarely with intent.

2 - I had a lot of free time. For basically that entire month of April I had no professional or personal obligations, no trips planed or anything that would take up a lot of my time doing something else, the perfect cocktail for boredom.

I didn't really have a "goal" with this since I just didn't know what would happen, if anything. My main motivation was curiosity and a hope that I would see some benefits to things like my attention span and mental health

2 -- INTRO AND GENERAL FEELING

So then, here we are, 32 days later and the challenge is complete and it's a bit hard to put this all into words if I'm honest. Overall, this was a positive experience and I'm so happy I did it. It was hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be and I wouldn't say this was a crazy eye opening experience and my life is never gonna be the same, but I do feel like this has potentially laid a good foundation for a more positive relationship with YT, video games and social media. Which could very much overtime escalate to big positive changes to my life in the future. Overall this challenge wasn't exactly "hard", which is very surprising and very weird given my history and habits with these things. Sure I had some urges here and there and it was very annoying not to be able to use YT, specially for when it would have actually been useful. But in general there was no strong urge to fight, nothing I couldn't ignore, specially since it was all "temporary" and the positive results came in rather fast.

3 -- WHAT DID I DO ?

So, what did I do with all this free time ? Tbh, there was a lot of boredom, a lot of pacing around and looking at the ceiling, I watched 1 movie about every other day (that's a lot for me), I don't see movies in the same way as YT/Video games/Social Media so I allowed myself to watch some because I actually want to watch more movies. I went outside a lot, cause walking outside was hella more interesting than walking inside. I spent time with friends just hanging out. I did random things I had been putting off for ages like sorting out my computer files or doing some research for future jobs/courses.

4 -- MENTAL HEALTH

I did some other things here and there but that's pretty much most of it. I don't think what I did is that interesting. What was interesting is how I felt. Cause I felt genuinely good and peaceful. I normally worry a lot, usually about the future, but here no, I was exited about the future. I was also very contempt and happy with my life where usually I'm always very uncertain about where I want to be and what I want to do. Didn't feel that at all here.

Sounds pretty great so far right ? Well it is, but here's what I want y'all to understand, I didn't just suddenly become happy, or suddenly realize I have a good life. What happened was I no longer felt doubt or worry about my life. And I guess being away from all social media, news etc... is the reason for that. Nothing was blasting ideas in my head, or trying to sell me something, I wasn't drowning in posts about "The end of the world", "Things you didn't know you needed", "Why you feel behind in life" etc etc... All I had was silence, what I had and the people I knew, and it was great. I always knew deep down I had a good life. But thanks to this challenge I actually felt it every day and it only took about a week for this to happen. This surprised me somewhat cause I had already made so much effort to reduce my consumption of social media and had not seen any such benefit, maybe when it comes to these things even a little is too much.

5 -- MY ATTENTION SPAN

So it's safe to say this has been good for mental health, but what about my attention span ? Well, this is less straight forward and a bit more interesting. Coming into this challenge, I knew my ability to focus was an issue. My thought was that I can't focus on anything because I'm surrounded by more entertaining things like video games that give me instant gratification, and if I remove those then I'll be able to focus better. Well brother, would you be surprised if I told you this challenge actually made it worse ? Well, maybe not worse exactly, what I think it did was actually shine a light on just how cooked I am. Here's what happened :

In my previous post I said that there were skills I wanted to learn, well one of these skills is drawing. I used to draw a lot as a young lad and could spend hours at a table drawing whatever and I was pretty good for my age. I stopped when I got my first computer, sure that's just a coincidence. Anyway, I took my old pencils and a paper and sat down to draw and holy shit this was so bad it was almost funny. It took me the WHOLE DAY to make 1 shitty drawing that I would have scribbled in 10/20 minutes 12 years ago. I'm not talking about the loss of skill here, that's to be expected. No I'm talking about my sheer inability to sit at my desk and actually just draw for more that 5 minutes. It was so difficult it was painful, I was looking aimlessly at nothing more than actually drawing, I would sit for 5 minutes then have to stand up and walk around for like 1 hour before trying again, after finally finishing half of the drawing around midday I went for a walk, cause I couldn't do anything else anymore. Then I came home like 2 hours later and finally finished the drawing in the evening after more of the same BS I went through in the morning. This is insane, it almost felt like physical pain to force myself to sit down and make lines on a piece of paper. Ffs this is something I would look forward to before, something I could spend hours doing, now it feels like I have to fight just to get started and even once I start I can't keep it up for more than 5 minutes. Thing is I've tried to draw before and had the same problem but when I would stop I'd just watch YT or smt for a bit then go back to drawing. But this time all I could do was draw and it was quite revealing.

So yeah, the attention span is gonna take A LOT more work, but I can see it slowly getting better, as I write this post for example.

6 -- HOW I FEEL NOW

So how do I feel now ? Have I booted up YT and binged all the content I missed ? No, and I don't even feel like it. Social media ? No real desire to go there either. Video games ? I'd like to play a little. But now I've had time to actually crave to play something specific and I feel more confident in being able to set up limits to myself. Porn ? Well, as someone who has been battling with porn addiction for years, this challenge has only made my fight easier, since I'm not on the internet so much I'm basically never blasted with hyper sexual content that would feed into my urges. My internet FOMO is practically gone and I've somehow gotten used to boredom, I mean real boredom, not that burned out boredom you feel when your brain is fried from watching 10 video essays you wont remember, played 6 games of league of legends you hated and scrolled insta for 2 hours while telling yourself you should be more productive and be making more money. No, actual real old fashioned boredom, that makes me do things, and the things I actually do feel more exiting. It gives me time to think, dream and organize my thoughts and one of the best things about boredom. It slows down time, I feel like I actually get the "slow living" everyone is talking about.

7 -- CONCLUSION

All in all I'm grateful to have had this opportunity and I wholeheartedly recommend anyone struggling with the same things to try this. I think I learned about myself and made some interesting discoveries about my habits and relationship with entertainment and made a new best friend, boredom. Now my goal is to resume using these tools but with intent and not habit, not go back to watch a video because "Eh, I guess this seems interesting" or play a game cause "I guess I kinda feel like it". But rather "I want to learn more about drawing faces, maybe there is a video that could explain something new to me" or "Hey Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out soon, maybe I should finally try out SkyRim this weekend" (kinda cliche but hopefully you get waht I mean).

Thanks to all of you who commented on my previous post, y'all were very encouraging and kind

Edit, mistakes

u/Dyce_Rikki

Need some help about buying old car

Hello again everyone, this is my follow up report to my previous post on this sub. It's a bit long but I invite you to read it for better context. This is a long post once again so I tried to organize it a bit so you can skip to what you're more interested in :