A Dopamine Detox Rewired My Brain (And Helped Me Build a 100k Audience)

Why I quit social media (well mostly)

I vividly remember the moment I realized social media was impacting my well-being.

I was scrolling and a girl I went to school with popped up. She’d just bought a car worth $50k and here I was, living in a part-renovated house, lying on a tattered sofa gifted (stolen) from my dad and I was miserable.

Envy flooded my body, texts flew back and forth, I was frustrated, how had I let my life get so bad?

The tint of social media

Pictures lack nuance, a car looks like a car but it says nothing about where it came from, what it took to get it, and if it’s a lease or bought outright.

It leaves most things to the imagination and your imagination can be a really bad friend.

Imagine a world where photos of extravagance came with a disclaimer at the bottom, a small text that said ‘Car was bought with inheritance’ or ‘This car took 201 60-hour weeks to buy’.

At the very least it would give people an insight of what it takes to obtain items that swallow cash. And that would make them feel less bad about why they don’t have them.

But to be honest, that isn’t the real problem.

Materialism mind

I’ve never really been materialistic.

Sure I buy the odd branded thing, but in my mind, I don’t care for big expensive things. My favorite watch is a $8 job that has far surpassed my Apple iWatch. My car is 14 years old. My house is nothing fancy.

I like modest stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good warm coat or a reliable pair of boots but would I spend $40k+ on a car or buy a watch that I don’t know the name of? Nope. Never have, never will.

But social media, Instagram in particular, was making me care about these materialistic things or maybe it wasn’t making me care so much as it was sucking away my ability to think and question my beliefs.

It’s not Instagram’s fault.

It’s human nature to compare and contrast but constant comparison with materialism starts to make you care about the things you actually don’t.

It was a weird realization.

Time audit

When I looked back at how much time I was spending on Instagram I felt sick. Here I was moaning about my lack of progress, and staring right in the face was the fact I’d been spending 4 hours a day scrolling.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out where I was going wrong.

I had time, I was spending in the wrong place and it was making me miserable.

The thing is, when I thought back to what was going on in those 4 hours a day, I couldn’t tell you a single thing I learned. I couldn’t tell you a single thing I even watched in that time.

All of it was just sort of a blur.

It’s one thing to spending time relaxing and enjoying life, sure that’s great. But it’s another thing altogether wasting time, to give you time away and get nothing back for it.

Kicking the habit

So I deleted Instagram.

It was a painful decision — I had friends on there I’d known from all over the world, but I’d tried the whole blocking myself from the platform and it never worked.

I deleted it and got my life back.

Shortly after I started writing on the internet, I needed something to fill my time with and I thought I’d be better off creating than I would be consuming, at least I’d learn something.

Three years later, I’m still writing on the internet and I’ve built an audience of over 100,000 incredible people (across platforms). Pretty cool right?

Unhooking myself from the constant dopamine of Instagram allowed me to look up and see that I was wasting my life. And it meant I could do something about it before I ended up wasting all of it.

I went from zero to 100,000+ followers across platforms (while working 9-to-5). Join 17,500+ others in the Part-Time Creator Club and learn how to build your personal brand alongside your day job.