When I spend too much time online (reading news, Reddit, blogs, etc.) it isn’t immediately obvious how much of an impact it has. In my day to day life I can usually manage to function and continue doing all the things that I need to do. It would be easy to convince myself that it doesn’t really have an impact beyond the time I spend doing it, but I also know that isn’t true.
Every morning I get up and write in my journal. It’s free-thought stuff kind of like Morning Pages but I keep it like a journal so that if I ever want to go back and look at them I can. If I have a good day then the following morning my journal is focused and tends to follow one line of thought from beginning to end. If I have a bad day then it affects me like a hangover. When I sit down to write my journal I can’t keep to a single line of thought for more than a paragraph, my mind skips all over the place and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anything done. It feels awkward and stilted.
And I know that this is just a visible symptom of the problem. That same distracted style of thought is present everywhere and in everything I do and it can take a couple of days to get over it.