The shocking way I quit the Facebook News Feed
You’ve been there before: You’re scrolling the Facebook News Feed, seeing the same stuff over again, but for some reason you keep going.
You go back to the top of the timeline and pull to refresh. Nothing. Then you pull again.
All the while, you’re asking yourself “why?,” observing your own behavior with the same puzzlement and amused fascination you might have watching an infant without object permanence. How could they possibly not know the ball is now under the cup!?
I had had enough of this. Overall, I’m a person with excellent self-control. I quit carbs and sugar with no problem; I don’t do caffeine; I’ve willfully quit alcohol for several months at a time; hell, I even managed to write an entire book, without missing a deadline. But, I couldn’t quit the Facebook News Feed.
It was time to take drastic measures. Shockingly drastic.
If you pay close attention, you can feel a tinge of anxiety right before you check Facebook. That becomes your cue. When you finally check Facebook, you feel that anxiety dissipate: Maybe there’s a new News Feed item.
It became my quest to quit the News Feed on Facebook. Some people decide to quit Facebook altogether, but I still find elements of it valuable: Groups, Events, and Messenger, for example.
Using the Facebook News Feed is the primary way you pay for Facebook (or, on mobile, the only way). That’s where the ads are, and that’s where some secret algorithm designed to get you to spend the most time possible does its bidding.
If you want to understand what was going on in my brain, look no further than ’s “Hooked” model.
The tinge of anxiety I felt before checking Facebook — or before refreshing the News Feed once again — was my Trigger, actually doing the checking was my Action, and seeing new information was my Reward. (My Investment would include my reliance on using Facebook to maintain friendships and acquaintances, which was why I didn’t want to quit Facebook entirely.)
“Neurons that fire together, wire together,” is an old saying in neuroscience. Each time I did the Action after the Trigger — and each time I was Rewarded for doing so — the neural pathways for this loop were carved deeper, making metaphorical grooves that would keep me on track to do it again and again.
So, I needed to hijack this loop. I needed to get this train to jump the tracks somewhere between Trigger and Reward. Enter Punishment.
Pavlok is a wristband that shocks you. While they do have a Chrome Extension you can use to shock you for visiting certain websites, the shocking is still effective if you do it manually.
So, I let myself feel the Trigger (the tinge of anxiety before refreshing the News Feed), I did the Action (refreshing the News Feed), and I delivered the Punishment (pressing the wristband to deliver an electric shock).
I did this three times in one day, and the tinge of anxiety that had been my Trigger went away. The surprising thing was what happened after each electric shock. I put down my phone, and started being productive. I swept the floor, I changed lightbulbs, or I did the dishes. I sought different Rewards.
I went an entire month without using the News Feed at all. It became totally uninteresting to me. In the meantime, I filled in the time I would have been wasting on the News Feed with productive things. I’m now able to responsibly use it only the extent that it serves me.
Maybe this is the “Unhooked” model.
, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products will be on my podcast this Thursday to ponder “Is Silicon Valley Leading Us into the Robot Apocalypse?” I’ve also interviewed Pavlok founder, (Subscribe on iTunes)
