Nuki News #17 - Addiction to Twitter

 Let me start by saying, I do really enjoy using Twitter! And I’m sure quite a few of you follow me on there as well! It’s no small part of my art life and business either. Recently I hit the 3,000 follower mark there, and about half of my commissions are from folks there. But I also think it’s important to bear in mind my relationship with the platform and evaluate what I’m doing to myself when I use it. I do think I have an addiction, or at the very least a mild one that makes me feel compelled towards going onto the site frequently. Granted, it’s a compulsive feeling for  something that gives me positive side benefits(feeling of a positive community who enjoys the art I produce, business and income, progress or validation in my career by seeing numbers go up). So it isn’t like substance abuse or gambling. The only thing I’m ‘losing’ is my time and attention, perhaps...or is there more to it?

Back around August of 2019, I started getting anxiety from social media, but Twitter especially. I had a very productive year of art up until May, and, after June and July where I burned out,  I felt like I let people down. I saw all my friends posting more frequently now that they’d been freed from their college semesters, and  I started to feel anxious whenever I checked Twitter, and got caught up in numbers, trying to get certain amounts of followers, likes, retweets, etc. Things outside of my control, and honestly not productive for me to focus on. After realizing what I was doing to myself, I found a chrome extension that allowed me to turn numbers off, and focused back on drawing something I wanted, gave myself space to engage in a inspirational media(Playing Dragon Quest VII) and did art practice whenever I wanted to draw, but didn’t have ideas. Doing that, I turned my anxiety into action. Got my confidence back doing that for a few weeks.

We’re a  year later, there are rather important movements going on Twitter(the BLM movement and pushes for reformation of how policing is done). And through this I’ve come to realize how addicted I’ve been to the site. I’ve had moments where I’m checking on it multiple times in just 10 minutes. If you go to my streams, I tend to check twitter frequently and get distracted by it.. It feels like every time I feel inadequate, or bored, or in need of interaction, I go to Twitter to get a fix of positive reinforcement. But with these recent social movements, and me wanting to be informed of them, combined with checking on things so frequently, I ended up stressing myself out to the point I couldn’t draw for 3 days straight. My source of positive reinforcement and comfort turned into angry comments, watching upsetting and disturbing videos of violence, and rather worrying news. This was similar to what I went over in the ‘Crisis and Calmness’ issue of NukiNews back in March.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/35257632

I warned that keeping informed of these sort of events is good, so long as everything is level headed and not dramaticized. However, Twitter has a habit of giving you an unfiltered stream of consciousness, and typically promotes more hard stances on things. I’ve made my fair share of tweets adding to this, and the anger I felt from the injustices I saw really affected me. But it was very emotionally taxing.

Good news is, I did find a simple  solution that’s worked well so far. That is basically to make it harder to access Twitter. Taking Twitter off my bookmarks on chrome, as silly as it sounds,  actually helped me stay focused on my stream this week, and I never checked it during my stream at all. This was a first for me! I also make sure to lock my phone so i have to input a password every time I want to access it, and then have to log into my Twitter on the mobile app. This kept me from wanting to check my phone needlessly, either.  I like this solution a lot, because it doesn’t mean I turn away from issues being talked about on twitter or my audience. But I use Twitter only when I need to! I’ve been keeping it to the start of the day or end of the day, or when there is something I really need to post if I need to go on it between those times! 

It is important for me to say though in closing that I am no expert on addictions and I lack any qualifications to make any real statements on this as medical advice. I’m just writing out my own personal experience, and a method of handling my specific situation that seems to be working for me! Maybe this shouldn’t be considered addiction necessarily, but merely a bad habit. I wonder, do you feel similar? Are you always checking a site frequently?