Yesterday I went to bed early and started thinking about some recent events in my life. Instead, I felt the urge to take the phone, open Instagram or YouTube and scroll some reels or shorts. I’ve noticed this pattern for a long time now. Whenever I am bored or thinking about something uncomfortable I jump into this path. You have probably experienced this too. To distract ourselves from something, we open some social media apps and start scrolling, then hours go by in a blink of an eye. We are doing this instead of focusing on some boring stuff that will help us improve ourselves. After some time, we even forget about what we were thinking of and start focusing on the next unavoidable thing that needs our attention.

In my case I was not always like this. I used to be someone who could focus on reading about boring quantum computation stuff for hours. But slowly I turned to be this person, who could only focus on things that necessarily need to be done at the moment. I started scrolling social media and constantly listening to music–just distract myself from my thoughts. This was not some new habit, I used to watch a lot of television in my childhood, but there were some external controls over it like my parents. But now there is no one to control me. I am guessing that this happens to many other people. Why does this happen? How does this affect our lives and what should we do about it?

You see, this is not some new phenomenon, we always used to have some kind of distractions for us. Earlier, we didn’t have these modern technologies. If we want to distract ourselves from something then we can pick up a book for reading, go out and play some games or socialise with people, we could try to learn some new craft or many other things like that. All those things helped us in one way or another

But in today’s technological world distractions have become so cheap, easily accessible and highly addictive. Yes I am talking about our mobile phones, social media or electronic devices. We have at our hand a never ending stream of distractions just one click away. You can keep on scrolling some social media without ever getting bored about that. Even worse, big tech corporations are investing billions to make you do that. In a way these technologies are helping us to improve our life standards and collective consciousness tremendously. No one can deny that fact. But at the same time it gives us the power to distract ourselves so easily and start affecting our lives negatively. We need to think about the cost of these distractions too.

Why does this happen? We come across a lot of events in our daily life. As a first thought we don’t even care about a lot of events that do not directly affect us. Even if some of them involve us directly we don’t focus on it unless it becomes bad enough to affect our routine. The problem is that this threshold differs from person to person. The scale to measure this turning point actually grows as we are more and more addicted to those distractions. At some point we reach the level where it does more bad to us than any good that could happen.

What I am saying is that distractions are not always bad. It helps us come out of the things that are bothering us and after regaining some strength and perspective, we can go back and focus on that thing again with a fresh view. But it becomes bad when all we do is distract ourselves from the things that matter. Sometimes even though some thoughts are tough to process and some work is tough to focus on, you need to work on them to get better. At that time if you keep on distracting yourself then it won’t help you.

Sometimes distractions help us improve ourselves too. For example I had started running or working out as a distraction but it became a habit and improved my health. Someone might have started playing chess as a distraction and at the end they might have improved their concentration and critical thinking. So distractions can be either a slow poison or healing medicine based on which habit you pick as a distraction or how much you are in control of your distraction.

So as a final word of advice, distractions are good when you pick the right ones. Even fun and useless ones are good if you know when to come out of it and have the power to do that. Even with all these facts in mind, sometimes you need to sit idle with that uncomfortable thought or work on that boring task to move past it and get yourself to a better position.

Sometimes those long boring or uncomfortable thoughts are the ones that change our life trajectories. It might create Eureka moments in our lives. Keep this in mind next time when you pick up your phone to scroll Instagram.