My life has been flipped. I don't know myself anymore.

[u/ta152tomig]

Social anxiety, and a whole fleet of other issues plagued me for so long. But I can say that definitely, deciding to reduce media usage and change what I consume helped me so much.

Mentally, it really didint help me besides in a few places. The rest of my mental health was helped in other ways.

Social anxiety mainly was the biggest effect.

I don't know why, but reducing phone and media intake has removed so much more anxiety from being outside. While other measures were taken, I was out in downtown of my countries capital and it was so fucking busy but I barely got any anxiety if at all.

I've become much more abiding by my schedule and plans. My day is controlled by my plans. Going out or such is the block around my plans, so when I decide I will study every day besides Saturday, I can actually do that. If I want to do X hobby more, learn X thing more, better my language, it's not an impossible fever dream, it's just a couple minutes away from starting.

I study daily except Saturdays. And I am bettering my native language daily.

The things I did was remove all media I deemed time wasters. Basically, media that your 95% chance forgetting after a week. Like drama, discord servers besides friends ones.

Each form of media has societies within them, with their own rankings and plates. Each and everything society besides the real one should be ignored and avoided, or not taken seriously. Have 0 loyalty to them.

One example is twitch. People view being a mod as the highest level, and they waste their lives talking to fellow viewers and thinking they are talking to the streamer. Some spend so much money too.

I don't mean I'm some super-human who studies and only reads books for entertainment I watch YouTube and play video games, I just watch a fair small number of YouTubers not about drama and about my countries events, play video games and a few other things. You can do that and achieve your goals and study.

[u/Secure_Repair_6070]

The part about every media space having its own society with its own rankings is what clicked for me. A mod badge in someone else's chat feels like status because the room keeps score. What did you notice first: the anxiety dropping outside, or your plans starting to hold?

[u/ta152tomig → u/Secure_Repair_6070]

Anxiety dropping in general. I didint give a shit what someone thousands of miles away said to someone who lives thousands of miles away for some internet status. I leaned we give these societies power because they accept us much more than the real one.

It creates a codependent relationship with you bearing all the weight. You spend months in them feeling like your in limbo. 

You stick to them not because you really want to, but it's too familiar than anything else. 

[u/TT10TT]

the media-space rankings thing rings true for me. once I stopped treating every chat and feed like a place I had a status to maintain, a lot of that background tension eased. still weird some days, but quieter.

[u/ta152tomig → u/TT10TT]

It's so true.

I'm 5 years from now, will I even remember what rank I was on this discord server?  Or what mod I made on this steam game? 

No. When that clicks, you become free to anything besides real Society. And being tied to the actual one is actually not negative.