Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Tons of people are totally consumed by digital entertainment these days. They waste hours every day in their little dungeons scrolling on their TikTok feeds, until they eventually stumble upon porn and jack off. These men never try to improve themselves or stop wasting time. Pathetic.

Thankfully for you, you clicked on this post. It means that, unlike most of your peers, you are conscious and smart enough to realize that your excessive scrolling has become an issue. You desire to know how to stop this evil app from parasiting on your time.

In this article, we’ll discuss how TikTok keeps you hooked, and how you can use their own methods to stop scrolling and manage your time better.

Why You Can’t Stop Scrolling

If you’re reading this article, you likely already know all the dangers of TikTok and overstimulation. If you still have no full awareness of how bad they are for you, click here to learn more.

I’m not gonna waste your time. The main reason you can’t stop wasting time on this damn app is that you experience too much easy pleasure.

“What Does This Mean?”

You see, my reader, hormones control us. We do most of the things we do because of hormones and the way they regulate our desires. Some of these hormones are called neurotransmitters – hormones inside our brains that are responsible for controlling motivation, pleasure, reacting to the environment, and ensuring our survival.

One of these neurotransmitters is called dopamine. You’ve likely heard many influencers and friends discuss dopamine, but never really understood what it is and how it works.

Dopamine is responsible for controlling motivation and desires through making the promise of a fulfilling reward. Your brain wants food, water, shelter, and clothes because they ensure your survival. Dopamine gives you motivation to obtain these things as regularly as possible, since having more of them increases your chances of living a better life.

Unlike what most people think, dopamine isn’t about feeling pleasure. It’s about motivation to acquire that pleasure. And that is the key insight you need to learn before moving on to the next section.

How TikTok Keeps You Hooked

Whenever you get onto TikTok, your main subconscious goal is to find entertaining content that makes you specifically feel satisfied. You open the app, watch a couple of videos, and then the vicious cycle begins:

“Trash, trash, trash. Oh, a good video! I’m gonna save that in my favs! Trash, trash, garbage, trash. Why is the feed so shitty? Oh, finally, a quality video! I still want more though. Trash, trash, trash. Oh, look at that girl twerking! Feeling horny now, time to coom!”

As ridiculous and childish as the paragraph above sounds, it describes what happens inside of your brain whenever you get onto TikTok. You simply can’t stop wasting time here, because you never feel like you’re satisfied. You’ve seen much entertaining and stimulating content before, but today, you want more to feel that same level of pleasure.

Have you noticed that this is very similar to how gambling works? You come in with a goal of making it big (dopamine releases), get trash rewards over and over again, until you receive a bit of that good reward. You are still not satisfied, and your brain releases even more dopamine to keep you motivated.

In most cases, you keep spinning the lever for hours, until you realize that you lost a few hundred dollars and several hours in this casino. Your dopamine sensitivity and baseline decrease, and now you feel bad for not controlling yourself.

Easy Pleasure is Ruining Your Life

TikTok knows everything about you. I repeat: if you’ve been on their platform for a while, they know everything about you, down to the little details. For this reason, they can offer you tons of content that you specifically desire. But they don’t do this. Why?

Because you would view a few great videos in a row, get your desired dose of brain stimulation, and then leave to mind your business. Their goal isn’t to keep you satisfied or entertained, but to waste as much of your time as possible, so that you eventually buy a product they advertise.

I hope you now see what the problem is here: you come in anticipating a big reward, get a few bits of it among piles of trash, and end up depleting your time and dopamine afterwards. This also explains why you feel so tired and exhausted after scrolling on TikTok. Your brain releases so much dopamine on scrolling that it has none of it left to build motivation for other things.

Chasing easy pleasure and easy rewards, for example, entertaining content on social media, gives you a temporary dopamine increase due to big anticipation of a reward. But when you finally finish scrolling, your dopamine baseline goes below the point you were before the scrolling session.

It means that engaging in activities that bring a lot of pleasure now, over time, makes you less happy and addicted to these things. You can read more about the concept of instant gratification here. What matters now is the counterintuitive solution to your problem.

How to Stop Wasting Time on Anything, Not Just TikTok

You now know how chasing pleasure and rewards through easy activities wastes your time, and ultimately, your life. It is also a big mistake to get motivated through focusing too much on the end reward – a successful business, a hot girlfriend, a new car, a new house.

Whatever the fuck it is that you want to get, stop focusing so much of your attention on the final goal. Yes, it is highly recommended to remember why you do what you do, but if you want to be truly effective at work and managing time – find pleasure in the process of working. Why?

You see, focusing on the big reward at the end can give you initial motivation to start, but is inefficient in the long term. All the big rewards everyone wants require months, sometimes years of constant efforts. To continue doing meaningful hard work consistently, especially when you don’t feel like it, you need discipline – tons of it.

Putting in effort for a few days, and not seeing the end reward makes you really upset, trust me. Most guys are pussies: they give up after seeing that their goal requires tons of effort, persistence, and dedication. But I know as a matter of fact that it’s not gonna be you.

To succeed in your endeavors and stop wasting time on TikTok and other bad habits of instant gratification, you need to do the opposite of chasing big rewards or pleasure. You need to actively pursue discomfort daily, and paradoxically, make it your pleasure.

Do The Opposite: Make Pain Your Reward

Yes, that’s right: the more pain you experience, the more motivated and productive you will be. How does this work?

Experiencing much pleasure in the moment temporarily increases dopamine secretion in the brain, as it signifies the anticipation of an even bigger reward. But once big pleasure stops, dopamine levels go below the initial baseline, which means you become less motivated and less energetic whenever you complete a TikTok scrolling session.

But if you do the opposite, experience as much pain and discomfort in the moment as possible, your dopamine will temporarily decrease. Once you finish the uncomfortable activity, though, something magical happens: your dopamine levels go above the initial baseline, which in turn increases your motivation and energy.

Ever wondered why you feel so good after doing intense workouts? Yup, it’s because of dopamine and the way it reacts to pain and pleasure. Using this knowledge you can boost your drive, kill procrastination, stop wasting time and be 10x more productive during the day. Actively chase pain and discomfort through various activities, and make them your source of motivation.

The next time you wake up, try your best not to pick up the phone and scroll like everyone else around you. Instead, meditate for 10 minutes, have a quick workout, and hop into a cold shower. It is uncomfortable and harder than wasting time, but that’s the whole point: you sacrifice pleasure now, so that you can have a better life later.

If you want to make progress in limiting TikTok usage, do uncomfortable activities and good habits that feel uncomfortable now, but improve your life and wellbeing as the time passes by.

How to Embrace Pain More

“It all sounds good, but I won’t be able to do all these good habits all day long. How will it help me with stopping the scroll?” You see, reader, the higher your dopamine baseline becomes from these challenging habits, the less you want to indulge in degenerate activities.

You are addicted to TikTok, because you don’t have anything much to do. Over time, this and other social media apps lower your mood and motivation so much to the point that you feel little pleasure doing other natural activities, like socializing, or going outside.

Addiction is a consistent narrowing of activities that bring enjoyment. In case with TikTok, though, you don’t even enjoy being on this app. You may feel pleasure, but you don’t feel genuine desire or aliveness when you stay on this platform.

Sometimes, to beat pain, you’ll have to fight it with even more pain. And that’s the most difficult part: you’ll have to abandon the only activity that brings you pleasure, and start doing those that cause pain in the moment, but improve your wellbeing after you finish them. Delete TikTok (including your account), and start spending more time on these things:

Do more physical exercise, start weightlifting for an hour at least 3-4 times a week. Take cold showers in the morning, so that you feel energized, clean, and confident for the rest of the day.

Do activities of discipline, such as cleaning up the house, or washing the dishes, or doing your school/work assignments. Whatever the uncomfortable activities you can do, do them instead of grabbing the phone.

Additional Tips to Stop Scrolling

There are some other strategies I can give you to stop wasting time. Here is the list of them:

• Find your purpose. People often overindulge in pleasurable activities because they don’t have a noble cause to live for. Find your Life Mission, and work hard daily to complete it.
• Set your screen color scheme to black and white. Open your phone’s settings, and adjust the screen color on your devide. If you don’t know how, search it up in Google. It will significantly limit the stimulation your phone gives you, and for this reason, you’ll abandon TikTok more easily.
• Help people. Making a difference in this world and assisting people with solving their own problems will help you develop a sense of purpose, and thus, help you fight the scroll addiction. Do volunteering work, help random strangers you see, or if you want to help people even more, while earning tons of cash to become a free man, consider starting an online business.
• Educate yourself. If you finish all the daily good habits, have several hours of the day left, and feel the urge to scroll, grab a book. You can pick one of the books in this list, or read some other book of your own, so that you can get valuable insights on wellbeing, productivity, mental health, fitness, business, history, and other topics that might interest you. It will slowly but surely change your mindset and help you turn into a real man.

Summary

I’ll be honest, it isn’t easy to stop excessive TikTok scrolling. You may be struggling with some other social media platform, like Instagram, or Snapchat, but that isn’t the main deal.

What matters the most is that you should realize the importance of chasing discomfort to stop wasting time, increase motivation, and improve wellbeing. The more you do painful and uncomfortable activities, the more progress you’ll make in life.

Do good habits on a regular basis. Meditate, exercise, read inspiring books, travel, help people with their issues. Just go and do something you don’t feel like doing! Slowly, but surely, you’ll spend less and less time on TikTok, and more time on the right things that most people aren’t willing to do. That’s how you become a 10% man.

Once you realize how good it feels to live life with purpose, meaning, and discomfort, you will never want to go back to your old lifestyle. After you finish reading this article, get up, do some pushups, and a simple 10-minute meditation.

Before you begin implementing this advice, though, ask yourself these two questions:

• What are the things that I am afraid of doing?
• When can I do them and overcome my fears?

If you have any additional questions, or want to leave your opinion about the post, feel free to write them down in the comments below. See you next time.