A Quieter Rhythm
Digital Minimalism, Dopamine Nation, and Life After Instagram
This June marks three months since I’ve officially deleted my Instagram account. When I last wrote about this matter back in February, I was still weighing my options and trying to solve the conundrum of Social Media. In the end, it was much easier than I expected.
It felt like the best decision I ever made, and in fact, the question I kept asking myself was: why didn't I do it sooner? There hasn’t been a single moment of second-guessing this decision or regretting it—if anything, the more time it passes, the more I am grounded in it and deeply relish it. I have become closer to the people who matter, making active efforts to have conversations and interactions with them, which leave me more fulfilled than I could ever get from shallow Instagram interactions. I have also never felt more creatively inspired and motivated. I have been writing so much, and getting so many ideas and topics I want to talk about. It’s the most inspired I’ve felt in years—maybe ever.
Deleting Instagram felt like diving beneath the noise—into still, crystalline waters where my mind could breathe again.
It was only after deciding to quit that I read two books that have been fundamental in my new journey through the social media landscape: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke.
While reading Digital Minimalism, I found the reaffirmation and “validation” I needed for the decisions I was making. I discovered myself a Digital Minimalist, because many of the practices suggested in the book were things I was already doing and proud of. I just didn’t realize there was a name for the behaviors I practiced.
Things like removing notifications from distracting apps, or even deleting apps from your phone altogether and just using them on the computer, are things that Digital Minimalists do to benefit more from the overall focused time they have to do things, things that help protect your focus by reducing interruptions—so you don’t end up scrolling when you meant to be reading a book, for example.
The first thing Newport introduces to readers is the 30-day digital detox. In order to regain your clarity and to be able to reassess what you want for your digital future, you must step away from these platforms for a while. I am a firm believer in the digital detox, even if you are not planning to permanently delete your accounts. It is impressive how much time we gain simply by not using some of these apps/websites. And you also get to reclaim your focus. I believe that I will be forever adept at doing these detoxes—however long they last, it can be a weekend, ten days, a full month—because the benefits are undeniable.
The next step is the three questions every Digital Minimalist should ask themselves when considering using an optional technology.
“With this in mind, for each optional technology that you’re considering reintroducing into your life, you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life. The fact that it offers some value is irrelevant— the digital minimalist deploys technology to serve the things they find most important in their life, and is happy missing out on everything else. Once a technology passes this first screening question, it must then face a more difficult standard: Is this technology the best way to support this value? We justify many of the technologies that tyrannize our time and attention with some tangential connection to something we care about. If a technology makes it through both of these screening questions, there’s one last question you must ask yourself before it’s allowed back into your life: How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?”
Once we ask ourselves these questions, it also becomes staggeringly clear how many of these technologies we don’t actually need. And for the ones we do keep, we can use them with intention—rather than letting them control our time and attention. I feel like this sense of empowerment was one of the driving factors for me in not just pursuing this path, but also sticking to it, and in fact, this is something Newport comments on as well. He says:
Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid. The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.
I couldn’t agree more. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to give this philosophy of life a try, or who is even remotely curious about it, or even those who just want to spend some time off their screens and enjoy the offline world more. It is written straightforwardly and no-nonsensically, and it is extremely effective.
Moving on to Dopamine Nation, this was a book I had had for three years on my to-be-read shelf, and it was satisfying to finally sit down and read it. I mentioned before how the sense of accomplishment from reading things you’ve wanted to for a long time is a great feeling, and this was the case with this book.
Even though dopamine addiction can apply to anything, from drugs, to alcohol, to videogames, to pornography, you know anything that gives us dopamine can become an addiction, I was immediately struck in my mind by the connection with the topic of social media because, yes you guessed it, we are getting constant dopamine hits from our social media apps usage. They were designed to do so.1 Like a gambler who can’t help but pull the lever of the slot machine one more time, we are always hungry for more when using social media apps, and can easily lose track of time when we are using it; minutes become hours, and we waste all our time on it.
Dopamine and pain are like two opposite sides of a balance. If you push to one side, the other is going to compensate for it.
Another way to say this is that pleasure and pain work like a balance. (…) But here’s the important thing about the balance: It wants to remain level, that is, in equilibrium. It does not want to be tipped for very long to one side or another. Hence, every time the balance tips toward pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will. They just happen, like a reflex.
What Lembke advises is dopamine fasting, as a tool for resetting the balance to a level position. What did that remind me of? Yes, the 30 days of detoxing that Newport suggested. Different language, same principle: a deliberate step back to regain control.
As I mentioned earlier, in the case of dopamine, it can apply to a myriad of things. Lembke herself tells the story of her addiction to erotic literature, how she spent countless hours reading, way into the night, affecting her sleep schedule, and how nothing she read could give her the satisfaction anymore, and how she searched on and on for the next dopamine rush. That one hit me like a punch, because I knew the feeling well. During the pandemic, reading became my main coping mechanism. By 2021, I was burned out. Nothing satisfied. I was only able to achieve a true balance when I effectively stopped reading in 2024, then I could finally reach a state of equilibrium and process my feelings about it.2
To me, it felt pivotal to read these two books so close to one another, because they both spoke a lot to me about things I was going through, or trying to learn from. It felt extremely important to know about the effects of dopamine in my brain, as I was trying to adapt to a reality where I was getting so much less of it from the social media usage—and retrospectively to recognize that in the past I had a reading addiction as well.
Reading Digital Minimalism and Dopamine Nation back to back was like looking at the same truth from two different angles. One taught me how to consciously structure my digital life; the other showed me what was happening beneath the surface of my brain. Together, they helped me understand why letting go of social media wasn’t just a productivity choice—it was a healing one. I don’t think I’m “done” with this process, because balance, by nature, is something we constantly recalibrate. But for now, I’ve found a quieter, clearer rhythm. And I plan to keep listening to it.
