I’ve been uploading meditation videos on Instagram with a particular focus. That particular focus is, aiming to regulate people’s feeds.
Recently I got an email from a professor at UCSD. The professor asked me to talk about his book on my YouTube channel. This seemed very funky to me so I found his name on the UCSD website and emailed him myself (a good strategy for you too!).
He replied that it was indeed him who asked me. He really wanted to get the message in his book out into the world and for some reason he thought my YouTube channel would be a good audience for it. He offered me the pdf of the book itself but since the book sounded pretty interesting I purchased it and gave it a read the next day.
The book is called Crave: The Hidden Biology of Addiction and Cancer and it turned out to be a very informative read. Turns out, we’re doing a horrible job in a very systemic way and that is leading to more cancer. This is the most oversimplified summary of it but the relevant part for you today is this.
As a society we’ve gotten so used to instant gratification we started systemically normalizing it. As he says in the book, “What was once indulgence has become necessity”. From constant snacking to doomscrolling and constant caffeination from work that never ends, our brains are getting fried and our body is paying the toll for it.
Take this quote from the book:
A vibration, a flash, a sound. Each one draws the mind toward the screen. The device is built to capture attention, stir emotion, and sustain engagement. It delivers a stream of small, frequent rewards, each designed to activate the brain's pleasure circuitry with minimal effort. This input is constant. Notifications, updates, likes, messages, videos, headlines. The scroll is endless, and the engagement is instant.
As a guy who spends a lot of time on the screen to save humanity from suffering, I could not relate more to this. The last sentence couldn’t say it better. Scrolling is endless and in that endless stream there is constant instant engagement.
I personally know many people who took a break from Instagram by completely removing the app from their phone. I think this is a great way to reset the dopamine system in the body as a consumer. But what about from the creator’s perspective?
I think as creators we could be doing more to influence that endless stream. I saw some content creators set a bait for instant engagement to encourage viewers to take a break from the screen or go to bed, and I thought “we need more of that on Instagram”.
So I picked the hashtag #RegulateYourFeed and started posting me meditating and guides on how to meditate. Does it perform well as a piece of content? Hell no! But is it doing the job of slowing down people’s feeds? I hope so.
Today I encourage YOU to also join me in creating more slow, still content for your feed. #RegulateYourFeed. Make the digital space somewhere you CAN slow down, if you want to.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
