Short-form videos are junk food for the mind, and they have no place in a healthy lifestyle.

What an hour of scrolling on TikTok, Shorts or Reels does to your mind is akin to what eating three bags of chips, four bars of snickers with a liter of cola does to your body. I don’t need to describe how this mental binge eating makes you feel, you already know it: brain gets foggy and sluggish, you get overwhelmed, somewhat envious, sometimes even guilty, and ultimately numbed down to a feeling that emanates from a plain, gray, desolate landscape.

If a numb, gray life, is what you want, this guide isn’t for you. But if you are serious about becoming your best self to live a full life, a life of meaning and fulfillment, you might have just found your ticket out of this mental wasteland.

Because if you are dedicated to self-improvement, the habit of scrolling on these platforms is nothing but a burden to you. A burden that drags you down just like a weight hung from a hot air balloon – disallowing you from going up and beyond to achieve your full potential.

If you’re ready to drop this burden to reclaim your mental clarity, read on, because this guide will show you the way out.

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First, let's understand why people even spend time on these platforms. Because to a rational outside observer, this would come off as puzzling:

On one hand, scrolling on through short-form videos wastes your time, it chips away your mental clarity, presence and mindfulness. Since you are avoiding boredom by scrolling in the subway, at restaurants, even while taking a shit, you essentially have no time for sitting with your thoughts. Those thoughts that you shove under the rug don’t go away, they come back for revenge in forms of insomnia, overwhelm and a plethora of other mental health problems.

What do you gain from all this?

Maybe a nose puff (a modern, energy efficient method of laughing). Perhaps a life hack or two (that you won’t even remember after scrolling down 30 more times) and…that’s about it. Some young guys believe there’s more because their feed is different, but that’s a myth we’ll tackle further down in the letter.

When you make a rational assessment of the pros and cons, it’s hard to understand why people even make such a trade with their time. To make the matters worse, those people don’t even enjoy scrolling on these platforms!

But why do they keep using them? I will tell you why:

It’s a trap.

A trap built by software engineers and psychologists working in trillion-dollar companies. A trap that exploits the circuitry of your brain to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, so that the companies can exploit your attention by showing you more and more ads.

Here’s an overly simplified explanation of how this trap works: your brain is hard-wired to seek novelty, and when you scroll up and see a new video, it triggers the release of dopamine, which makes you want to repeat the action. You scroll one more time, dopamine is released again. Check comments, a little more dopamine. Scroll again, a video of a girl pops up, a lot more dopamine. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, as you keep scrolling and scrolling. A process optimized by mighty algorithms built by those companies to keep the dopamine flowing, and you scrolling.

As you can see, there’s no real enjoyment in there. NO ONE truly enjoys spending time on TikTok or its competitors. Those who think they do, are either new to the trap, or they have been trapped for so long they have forgotten what enjoyment even means.

Don’t let dopamine being called the happiness hormone confuse you. Happiness in real life is much more complex than dopamine stimulation, and in fact, the constant flooding of dopamine actually depletes your ability to find enjoyment in most ordinary pleasure of life!

Even after a week of staying away from mindless video scrolling, you will find yourself enjoying a dinner with a family, a walk in the woods or a workout. I’ve heard people say that they even enjoy studying now that they are not watching TikTok all day!

Why don’t more people see it this way? As rational beings, shouldn’t we all want to quit after weighing the pros and the cons?

It’s because of 3 myths that blur their vision:

1. The myth of the good stuff:

- Dude, why the fuck you’re spending 3 hours on TikTok?

- It’s fine bro. I only watch good stuff

**shows TikTok feed**

andrew tate → huberman lab → michael jordan quote (sigma edit) → i bet you can’t subscribe with your (skips the video) → ali abdaal

See? It’s LEARNING…

Let’s stop kidding ourselves.

Seriously, let’s actually sit down, and like rational men, consider the return of investment of spending one hour scrolling vs one hour of literally sitting under a tree doing nothing.

ROI of watching short form videos for one hour:

- You might find a few good videos that will teach you something new — that if you don’t forget them by the end of your scrolling session — can give you a new insight on an area of your life.

- You may nose puff or even laugh at a few funny videos.

But by the end of the hour, after flicking through a few hundred videos (people often underestimate this, but “just a few videos” often ends up being more than 200), you probably not remember much, your brain will be foggy and tired, and you’ll feel unmotivated.

Compare this to the ROI of sitting under a tree doing literally nothing:

- Your brain gets to rest.

- Random thoughts will come and pass, so will emotions, they will come to the surface and dissolve. When you give them enough of your time and attention, even the most tangled of your emotions can untangle.

- You will feel more mindful (especially if you are really sitting under a tree)

- You will come away from this hour of doing nothing with more clarity, motivated to do something productive.

- And as a bonus, I highly recommend this kind of retreat if you are stressed or anxious, because an hour of boredom erases stress and anxiety just like how time will erase all of us.

Think about this.

If even doing nothing beats scrolling on TikTok, then imagine how much more productive you’d be if you instead worked on your business, read a book, or exercised.

2. The myth of normality

"Everyone watches TikTok, so it’s normal. Why shouldn’t I?"

If you think everyone wastes time watching TikTok, then you’re looking at a mediocre slice of humanity, unfortunately, one that is for now the majority.

But there’s hope, more and more people are stepping away from this trend to live healthier lives. If you were to compare yourself to those who’ve achieved great things without the distraction of short-form videos, then you would consider watching TikTok to be abnormal than the other way around.

Which, it is.

How is it that humans built to run, to learn, to love, find it normal to bend over and spend hours looking at a 6-inch rectangular box?!

Society may normalize that, but I am not buying it, and you shouldn’t either.

3. The myth of moderation

Moderation sounds reasonable. Just as a single bag of chips won’t kill you, 30 minutes of TikTok won’t rot your brain either, especially if you are overall living a healthy lifestyle.

However, if you are a young man serious about self-improvement, you’ll just quit completlely, because you want to be better, you have no room for mediocricy.

But if you insist, you can go the route of moderation. Limit your usage to 30 minutes per day for example, set a timer so that it kicks you out after the 30 minutes is over. Try sticking to that. But if you can’t, if on some days you ignore the limit and scroll for more than that, then remember that it’s not your fault that you want to watch more and more — that’s the point of it, these platforms have spent billions to make their apps as addictive as possible. However, it was your fault to have given these apps a chance to stay, instead of quitting them completely.

Robert Greene’s 15th rule comes to mind: Crush Your Enemies Totally. Deleting TikTok and getting it out completely from your life, makes you feel victorious: “I am no longer a TikTok watcher.” Moderation makes you feel weak. “I want to watch more but n-no I can’t watch more than 30 minutes.”

That’s why I advise against moderation. Quitting completely will make your life easier.

The Way Out

If you’ve read this far, you’ve taken the most crucial step. (If you skipped ahead, go back and read above. Addressing symptoms isn’t enough; you need to cure the root of the problem.)

Some people call TikTok, Reels, or Shorts an “addiction”, but frankly, that’s an over exaggerated use of the term. 

There’s no intense pain that pulls you towards using these apps. Each time, it’s either a mechanical habit, or you deciding to watch rather than do something else. That’s why, now that you understand just how pointless it is to hijack your brain with endless dopamine from videos you don’t even care about, quitting is straightforward, and easy.

The next step is so obvious, you probably don’t even need me to write it, but I’ll still write it:

Delete the apps.

Delete TikTok, delete Instagram.

For YouTube, there’s an easier way to block Shorts:

1) delete all your watch history

2) pause all your watch history

That’s it, now you won’t get video recommendations, and shorts will no longer scroll.

From here on, when your friends send Reels and stuff, watch those, but no more. Soon, you won’t even want to watch them. Frankly, after some time you will start to consider finding new friends who aren’t just Reel hunters.

When you look at other users, don’t feel deprived of something good, because you aren’t! It is them who are depriving themselves from more free time, mental clarity, and real enjoyment — one that doesn’t come from cheap dopamine sources but is searched for in real life.

If you need those apps for work, you can use them for work, but only for work.

Set clear boundaries: Only use them on your laptop. Set clear work hours. And be mindful with what you are scrolling through and why.

Congratulations, my friend, you are now free from TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and all future video scrolly traps to come!

Now what?

Chances are, you used scrolling to numb your brain and avoid difficult emotions. Your goal now is to dissolve that emotional baggage and fill your free time with healthier activities instead of other time-wasters like video games.

Practice journaling, meditation, and self-care. Read more, be social, exercise, get some sunlight, touch some grass, and allow yourself some thinking time.

This could be the beginning of your new life.

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Thank you for reading this week’s letter!

This is my longest and, I believe, most important letter yet. If you agree, please like this post and subscribe to Get Work Done, my newsletter for weekly productivity and self-improvement insights.

And also, if you have questions or thoughts to share, comment below—I reply to everyone!

See you next week!