Recalibration

I recently decided to go on a recalibration. I eradicated Instagram and YouTube shorts, stopped playing those quick chess games, and cut out news websites. All the things where you find yourself autonomously reaching for your phone. These are all rapid reward loops—high stimulation habits that trained my brain to expect frequent, unpredictable hits of novelty.

The mechanism is simple: my dopamine system adapted to that constant input. Now, removing it, there's a gap. The goal is to sit with the discomfort, build boredom tolerance, and slowly draw myself away from constantly reaching for my phone. To let my brain recalibrate to a low-stimulation baseline.

The phone has genuinely become a real problem.

One thing I've noticed since I cut all these out is that when I forget what the plan is, my mind starts inventing alternate explanations for why I feel uncomfortable. I'll start thinking about some business thing or some work or personal related thing in a kind of negative loop. The pull toward stimulation is constant, and when it can't find its usual targets, it finds new ones.

The most important thing I've realised is to consistently remind myself what my plan is with this. Remembering what's happening and why I feel like this helps me reframe the discomfort as recalibration, not reality. Which somehow turns it from a feeling of unquenchable thirst into something quite exciting. I'm not just enduring this—I'm using the disruption to rebuild deliberately. Which is one of the reasons I'm writing about it right now.

From research i've found out the timeline is weeks/months, not days. The acute discomfort softens around week two or three. A genuine shift in baseline takes two to three months. Full neurological reconditioning—where stillness feels natural rather than maintained—takes longer.

My goal is to attain comfort with stillness, sufficiency in quiet, needing less. To increase my tolerance for delayed gratification.

The new practices are simple:

• Aerobic exercise, 20–30 minutes
• Deliberate boredom—no phone, no filler
• Slow feedback loop learning: reading, writing, working with my modular synth
• Protecting sleep
• Brief meditations, 3–12 minutes