Hi,

As artists, creatives, and professionals, social media is an increasingly growing part of our lives.

Many talk about how easy social media’s dopamine addiction is but very few people talk about strategies for how to actually combat it.

Let’s explore below a few strategies that have worked for me.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

Over the last few years, I’ve heard of lots of artists and creators having unhealthy relationships with social media.

Dopamine addiction.

Mindless scrolling.

Comparing themselves to others.

Feeling anxiety and pressure to create content and always be “on”. Social media has become increasingly important for artists and in many respects, artists nowadays are breaking from moments on social that lead to fandom.

With how much emphasis there is on using social media, it’s easy to develop an unhealthy relationship with it. Here are a few tactics that worked for me:

1) Gray scale

About a month ago, I tried experimenting with the iPhone grayscale feature and it’s been a game changer. Gray scale essentially changes your phone’s settings from being in color to completely grey.

The purpose of removing color is to make your phone less stimulating and addicting. I was a little skeptical when trying this at first but it actually works. It transitions the experience of being on your phone to a “dull” presence and makes it less exciting.

Though it’s been helpful, one of the challenging things has been not being able to see assets (artwork, music video content, etc) in color when posting content.

2) Moving apps off the home screen

This one may sound obvious but really works. To increase the friction of opening up social media on my phone, I created a folder to “house” all of those apps and moved that folder to the last screen on my phone instead of my home screen.

Now, whenever I want to open social media, I have to actually slide multiple times and then click into the folder, as opposed to it being right on my home screen and easy to grab.

Though in theory I can search directly for the app I want, that extra work to slide and find the folder has subconsciously made me more hesitant to open the apps.

3) Timers

This tactic has been around for a while but I started putting timers on all of my social media usage. Some apps let you do this natively (like Instagram) while others are in the form of Browser extensions that track how much time you use.

I’ve found that once my timer goes off and I have a tangible look at how many minutes I’ve been using a particular app, it’s easier to process how long a scrolling rabbit hole actually goes.

4) Turning off notifications

Another thing that can be helpful is turning off notifications to avoid overstimulation. Between social media notifications, text messages, phone calls, emails, etc it can be overwhelming and incredibly distracting.

Turning off notifications can help increase focus and reduce stimulation.

5) Finding a social media manager

This one may not be applicable to everyone but more artists and creators are hiring social media managers to run their socials for them.

These social media managers can help create content, post, and maintain your socials to help alleviate some of the burden of everything mentioned in this newsletter.

6) Post and close

One thing I can be guilty of sometimes is posting on social media and then obsessively refreshing my post to see how much engagement is coming in.

Like…obsessively lol. Every few minutes obsessively. Looking at how many likes, comments, etc. It’s natural - that’s literally what social media was designed for.

Instead of artist and creators obsessing over or evaluating how much engagement they’re getting in real time, just close the app immediately after posting. Once you click the publish button, you close the app and don’t open it again until the next post.

Yes yes…it technically goes against some engagement best practices like responding to comments right away to drive engagement but for mental health purposes, posting and then immediately moving on is one of the best ways to not get lost in the dopamine spike that happens when posting.

Social media and creating content is integral to growing a career as an artist and creator in today’s day and age but it doesn’t necessarily need to be done in an unhealthy way.

Hopefully this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

_{The Vault}

 1) Emergent - my cousin actually introduced me to this one! It’s similiar to Lovable, a platform that can be used for building web applications with AI but Emergent has more integrations. For example, it recently just integrated with Claude Sonnet 4.5 More info HERE