Mental Health/Social Media

I Got Addicted To Twitter, And Here’s What Happened

A cautionary tale of self-exploration.

Erin King is the author of the book “How To Be Wise AF: 30-Day Guided Journal For Women” and other health, wellness, and well-being resources.

Twitter has always been a bit of a mystery to me.

I get that it’s social media, and you can communicate with thousands (or more) of people at once if you have enough followers, but other than that, I’ve always thought, “what’s the point?”

You can’t say very much. Can’t delve deep or give proper explanations unless you create a thread, in which case it’s just a paragraph broken up into a bunch of boxes that someone has to read in snippets.

I’m connected to many writers, which, again, is nice to see what people are doing, but it’s hard to see its actual benefit.

So even though I’ve been on the platform for a while and have what feels like a decent amount of followers (for me), I still don’t really “get” it.

Because of this, I never really got into it.

I’d go on now and then to check in, but it was just too toxic for my liking. Too much politics, too much angst, and bating. Too many bots and too many people with opinions I wish they’d keep to themselves.

So I’d go on, do a little skimming, get bored and move on.

And that’s how it stayed for me, for a very long time.

Until somehow, one day, something changed.

One day, I started really reading the tweets.

Of course, it was mainly about the day’s politics, and as I pulled up one trending hashtag after another to explore, I found myself getting sucked in.

I’d sit down at my computer fully intending to work on one project or another (I always have a few things on the go), but as soon as I’d sit down, I’d feel compelled just to “check in” and then an hour later I’d still be refreshing the “25 new tweets” that showed up every few minutes on my feed.

I’ve never been one for FOMO, but for some reason, once I saw the notification for those new tweets, I felt like I’d be missing something important if I didn’t check them.

As someone who had addiction issues in my younger life, I know what that pull feels like.

I avoided seriously addictive substances when I lived a lifestyle that made them readily available (read: the Vancouver music scene in the 1990s, where heroin was everywhere). I will always be thankful that I managed to avoid a road many of my peers chose.

I think I knew if I took even one step into that forest, I’d never come back.

But I also have a weird built-in defense mechanism.

Even though I had trauma in my childhood and a family history of addiction on both sides, I don’t really have the physical makeup for addiction.

For some reason, I’m like two different people when it comes to consumption, whether it’s alcohol, cigarettes, or pills, and I’ve always been this way. (Thank god there was no oxycontin back then, or this quirky defense mechanism probably wouldn’t have saved me.)

I was, and still am, like Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to my body.

I know it’s weird, and it’s hard to explain.

Back then, even though one part of me needed to self-medicate and consumed heavily, another part of me couldn’t tolerate abusing my body for any length of time.

Even though I couldn’t wait to get home and have a few drinks at the end of the day, if I tied one on (which was usually the case), I had to take the next day to recover.

I couldn’t just drink the hangover away and keep going.

I also loved smoking and craved it (there’s nothing quite like that first drag of the day with coffee or your end of the workday smoke with that first drink, then there’s work break and late night smokes…I could go on. I LOVED smoking) but I could never fully commit because after a day or two of smoking, I’d feel so sick I’d have to take a break.

In that way, I never considered myself a “regular” smoker.

Thank goodness my husband is so anti-smoking that I knew when we met that he’d dump me if he found out I even occasionally smoked, so I just stopped. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

So for me, addiction meant abusing my body heartily until it took a toll and then waiting a day or so to recover so I could start back up.

I’ll always be thankful for this weird physical quirk because I think it’s the only thing that stood between me and full-blown addiction.

I think this is why I was always able to function and manage myself. That and the fact that I never felt the need to drink while working or during my professional day. It was just something that I did to excess in my off time.

So, I’m familiar with the feeling of addiction’s slippery slope, and getting sucked into Twitter felt uncomfortably familiar.

But unfortunately, with Twitter, you ingest it mentally, not physically, so there’s no need for a physical recovery time. For me, it made this mental addiction even trickier because it took me by surprise. Another surprising thing was the emotional price tag.

As a child and young adult, I was chronically depressed. When I was 30 and having a nasty bout, my GP put me on antidepressants which changed my life.

For the first time ever, I understood what it was to feel “normal.”

I stayed on them for about a year and then decided to go off, and I learned to cope on my own and identify the onset of depression.

Now I closely monitor my emotions to keep myself on track.

I have emotional cycles that ebb and flow, but I’m generally on an even keel these days.

So I found it interesting that the more Twitter I consumed, the worse I felt.

Emotionally, it created a vacuum.

It created a desire that felt like a sucking need to check in and see what was going on.

Even though I blocked the most toxic entities and the content I was consuming was positively slanted (I thought), I became more anxious and even a little depressed.

To me, it felt like standing in a crowd of people where everyone is screaming at you.

This is probably because Twitter is a concentrated form of communication with people expressing themselves in the most economical way possible.

So it’s like everybody distills each thought into its most potent form to gain the most power from the least words.

And then, the consumer injects it directly into our brains.

With books and even with a Facebook post, there are more words. Thoughts are watered down and lengthened out. It’s like adding the mix to your drink.

We get more time to process and understand what’s being fed to us. But on Twitter, it’s a direct injection and so fast.

It goes in, gets instantly digested, and then seconds later, we’re back for more.

There’s so much we can’t possibly make sense of it accurately, but what we can do is have an emotional response.

When used in bad faith, this can be toxic.

But even when used for good, it’s still exhausting and debilitating.

At least, that’s what I found.

I became depleted little by little, hour by hour, day by day.

My brain craved the information Twitter offered — we all do because our brains are built for it. Unfortunately, most of that “information” is an illusion, conjecture at best. But even though some of it was real, the second-by-second reiteration of breaking news was overwhelming and unsatisfying.

Too much and never enough.

Because no matter how many updates I received, I wanted more.

And I wanted to read more of what I already believed, and I craved reinforcement for what I already thought.

I became insatiable.

And then I started to feel depressed.

I found that when I was doing other things, there was always a slight background of depression and craving hanging over me.

I became preoccupied.

It was weird.

It felt oddly familiar.

It reminded me of how I used to feel when I got off work and headed to the liquor store.

I’d get that excited feeling just thinking about drinking.

I’d get euphoric walking down the aisles deciding what to choose, knowing that soon I’d be opening the bottle and getting relief.

I know what addiction feels like, even though, technically, I’ve always been a functioning person, and I realized that exposing myself to Twitter like this was creating an addiction.

So I decided to do an experiment.

I’d give myself as much Twitter as I wanted, and I’d pay attention.

For a couple of weeks, I’d get on my computer at my regular times, before work, at the kids’ nap time (I have a home daycare), and then at night, and I’d just let myself do what felt right.

Turns out, what felt right was so wrong.

Here’s what happened:

I wasted a lot of time.

I usually write, manage my eBay store, or make low-content books when I’m not working.

They’re hobbies that I enjoy, and they keep me busy.

As Twitter took over, I went from checking back from time to time to not even bothering to do anything else.

All I cared about was the dopamine hit of the next thing that reinforced what I already felt and believed.

I noticed that I only sought out things that made me feel seen and validated.

It felt good to go from tweet to tweet, feeling like I was learning something new or having camaraderie with like-minded souls.

In reality, I wasn’t learning anything new. I’d see one breaking news tweet and hundreds talking about that one thing.

This scenario played out over and over, for hours at a time.

I became preoccupied.

I found it harder and harder to stay in the moment. I was always thinking about what I might be missing.

What news was breaking? What were my favorite Twitter personalities saying about it?

This is how addiction feels when your next hit is all you can think about.

It wasn’t all-consuming and didn’t interfere with my job or family life. This was because I was aware of what was happening inside me, but if I wasn’t consciously aware of these developing feelings. It probably could have snowballed out of control.

It makes me wonder how many people have become addicted to Twitter without even knowing it.

I know the site is designed to do this, but feeling it happen in real time to yourself is still weird.

I got depressed.

I started feeling worse about life.

Things that didn’t bother me began to bother me.

Things that triggered me triggered me more deeply.

Yes, I have leftover issues from my childhood, but they’re largely manageable. I’ve spent a lot of money on therapy to get them that way. I’m a pretty happy person, usually. I generally appreciate my wonderful husband and daughter and the happy little life we live.

But somehow, as twitter took up more space in my head, the happiness and contentment I usually feel started to shrink.

I was more easily agitated, and there seemed to be a grey cloud hanging about me when I wasn’t getting my fix.

I became obsessed with politics.

Sure, it’s hard not to be these days.

It’s been a hard go the last few years.

So many people are acting crazy right now, and there’s so much going on that you almost feel like the world will fall apart if you miss something important.

And to a certain extent, this could be true.

But for the most part, a regular person like me is of very little consequence — except when it comes to voting, where every person is essential. But unless I become proactive in some real way, I’m not that important in the overall scheme of things. (Yes, I know — the butterfly effect — but I’m not really talking about that here.)

So being obsessed with politics doesn’t really serve me in any way. I like to keep up on things (especially American politics because, as a Canadian, I know that when America sneezes, we all catch a cold), but Twitter intensified that, and not in a good way.

When not on Twitter, I found myself watching a lot of political podcasts. Again, not necessarily a bad thing in moderation, but I was becoming obsessed.

So I can see how this Twitter side-addiction could be particularly detrimental if your politics are toxic.

From how my mostly benign interest in politics was making me feel, I think if you throw corrupt sources deliberately preying on weak people with the addictive qualities of social media, people are going to go overboard. It’s inevatible.

I started to become physically sicker.

As I became more conscious of the side effects, I began to feel worse physically.

Maybe it was because I was sitting more, moving less. Perhaps it was because my mind was suffering, but physically I was feeling weaker and sicker.

I was eating more junk food, maybe because I was more stressed and needed comfort. But I found myself eating more than I would if I was writing articles or doing something productive.

I’d been trying to go for more walks before this experiment, but I didn’t go for one walk during this time.

I also didn’t walk on my treadmill.

I just sat there for hours, refreshing and obsessing.

And because there was so much stressful stuff, I became overwhelmed and physically drained.

So this is what I found when I took a step back and examined the effect that letting myself get caught up in The Twitterverse had.

I’m a pretty mindful, psychologically self-aware person, and this is what it did to me as I was paying attention. I can’t even imagine what happens to someone who either isn’t self-aware or has emotional injuries they’ve never addressed.

I understand even better now how someone who is easily triggered could get sucked into social media, not just Twitter when it’s so emotionally manipulative.

And my experiment was mainly done on the media, not the message.

Yes, I consumed the message, but my political leanings are pretty harmless. I care about people, policy, justice, and human rights. But I’m not overly involved in it, and it still became toxic.

So I imagine this is how it must be for someone who unconsciously gets sucked into lies, disinformation, and hate on Social Media.

That makes me scared and sad.

It makes me understand how I’ve lost friends to the toxicity of the last few years and how they got where they are.

Because if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone, and it can happen to you.

My solution was to cut myself off.

I decided to stop checking in, give it a rest and take a break.

And my mind began sorting itself out straight away.

Within a few days, I got my drive back and even managed to write this. The urge to get out and walk also returned.

My sense of calm and my coping mechanisms kicked back in relatively quickly as well. I’ve been grappling with some life events lately, and since cutting out Twitter, I’ve felt more able to cope and even had an epiphany that made me feel better.

So, I think I’ll just keep my Twitter use to very casual if that, and hopefully, I’ll go back to my old viewpoint, which is I don’t really get it. Which, really, I still don’t.

So this is my cautionary tale.

I hope someone out there finds it useful.

I hope that if someone finds themselves sliding down that Social Media rabbit hole, they’ll be able to catch themself before it’s too late.

Because no matter your social media of choice, it might be time to take a step back, give your head a shake and take stock.

You might be hurting yourself, and you don’t even know it.

You might even be addicted.

I know I was.

Thanks for reading!☺

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Erin King is the author of the book “How To Be Wise AF: 30-Day Guided Journal For Women” and other health, wellness, and well-being resources.

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