It was Friday morning; I was certain that I was going to finish a lot of pending tasks. I had to finish many important tasks; it was a busy day. It was one of those days when you know you are in an extreme flow state and that you are going to bash the day by ticking tasks one by one off your list, and I was confident.

I finished my morning rituals. This is how my schedule looked like:

7 AM- 8 AM: Reading

8 AM- 9 AM: Writing

11:00 AM- 12:30 PM: Zoom call with YNF team

2:00 PM- 6:00 PM Visit the stores and offline meetings

And be back by 7:00 PM at the home

Now it’s not like I didn’t know that phone creates distraction, I did. So, I just kept it away from me. I was about to start my first task of reading; I grabbed a book in my hand, opened the first page and as I read the first line,I heard a beep, it was a notification on WhatsApp, you just can’t ignore WhatsApp notifications because it might be something important and I put the book on the table, grabbed my phone and read the message, it was from a friend who was giving me an update on things that I had asked him yesterday.

Then, I pressed the back button and there were many unread messages and I suddenly felt the urge to reply to all and I did and I suddenly realised I had to read the book but then my mind told me, let’s just check how many likes have I got on the last picture I uploaded, and I opened Instagram, I checked the likes, there was nothing but then I saw the story of an influencer I really admire and I had to check what is in this story and I clicked on it and which lead me to another story and then I thought let’s just open YouTube once and it recommended me a video from my favourite creator which I can’t miss out and I was somewhere juggling between my emails and social media until I got a message from a team member, what about the meeting, I did not realise, it was already 12 and my bullet proof schedule has turned out to be vague,

Not only I did not read or write but also I got late for my meetings and when I finally finished a few tasks some meetings had to be rescheduled for the next day and I enjoyed my coffee in the evening having a sense of entitlement, we will do good tomorrow?

If you can relate to any of the activities that I have mentioned above, say congratulations to your phone, it has hacked you completely and it now knows you to a point that it specifically know about what kind of content you would like to consume at specific times

I don’t blame technology for it, because the only purpose of us humans is to grow here as a community and we need technology to survive, it’s a beautiful thing that we can actually talk to our friends sitting in the US without thinking twice or without worrying about the tariffs, but what my point is from these companies, we should have a say in the content that we are consuming, also it should be there job to make consciously aware of how addicted we are to there apps but they don’t want that, but I am sure no social media or any app was created with the intent of what they are serving today.

However, have you ever wondered why it happens? Even after strong motivation, why can’t you leave these apps, I will explain it to you in the next 3 minutes, you simply can’t win from the habit-forming loops of these apps, take any social media app for example or any app, all of them have one similarity, an infinite loop.

It’s very easy to understand this. Think of the features on Instagram Stories, Posts, Reels, IGTV, explore page. There is no end to the content or the information that your mind is receiving and it’s an infinite loop when you start something brain wants to reach to the end, it’s intriguing for us that’s why we binge-watch on Netflix but what if I tell you there is no end to information in the new age apps, and it’s not just social media. 

Take Amazon, for example. You can scroll products until sunrise, it won’t stop suggesting. 

Even look at CRED, it’s a credit card payment app but they have almost built an e-commerce platform, the rewards approach of CRED is never-ending, there is a possibility that you can win every day and that’s why you will see more of these options in the future apps.

One more thing to note here is the reward mechanism. Facebook likes and comments feel rewarding because of the dopamine kick that we get. The same is true with the cashback system that companies have created.

So, you don’t even realise how things you do on these apps are reprogramming your subconscious because if we continuously keep expecting instant rewards, that is what we will expect in our everyday lives, but things don’t work like that.

At Last, I would like to point out that most of the apps want customer retention and it’s only logical to create habit-forming apps, so from a business perspective, they are doing great but you need to be conscious of how much time you are giving to these apps because you have an individual life beyond this phone as well and the reason of writing this article is simply to create that consciousness

If you want me to write another article to discuss the solutions to these problems hit me up at hi@yournextfilter.com or drop me a text on Instagram (@nakshatrasain) [Can you feel the irony :P ]