Over the course of my university career, I’ve accumulated some habits that some may characterize as Slightly Unhealthy. While I’ve managed to beat one of them in particular1, there are still two such habits that I’d like to make a concerted attempt at defeating, in the time that I have between when I graduate and when I start work. It is my hope that this attempt will encourage me to continue to lead a healthier life when I formally enter the workforce.
This is the big-ticket item. As of the time of writing, my average daily caffeine consumption is somewhere around 400 mg. One might note this is the maximum daily intake recommended by Health Canada.
What’s interesting is that this won’t be my first time doing this. During my second year of uni, I made the extremely ill-advised choice to quit caffeine cold turkey over spring break. There were likely other confounding factors, but I was completely unable to function for that week, and my sleep schedule ended up all over the place. These issues were fixed once I reintroduced caffeine into the equation.
This is why I tell people I’m addicted to caffeine, even though it isn’t an “addictive drug” in the most common sense.
For my attempted caffeine detox, though, I’ll be a bit gentler on myself; not just because I don’t want a repeat of that spring break, but also because I know better now. The requirements will be as follows:
I’m sure most of my reader base will sympathize with this.
With the abundance of free time stemming from not taking any classes of substance, and winding down my involvement in clubs to prepare for my successors, I’ve wasted a lot of my time in the consumption of short-form media. At some point during spring quarter, the brainrot had affected me to such an extent that, as my roommate put it:
taking [one class] is legitimately giving you brain damage
And the scary part is that I agree. Thankfully I’ve been able to undo some of the damage that short-form media has done, through the pursuit of intellectually stimulating activities, but I still find myself scrolling YouTube Shorts on occasion.
Thus, my goal is to also disable/uninstall YouTube, Chrome (to prevent doomscrolling), and Discord (to prevent vector-borne internet diseases such as Twitter) from my phone, starting June 15, 2025. This will continue for an unspecified period of time. I can still be reached through the usual contact methods, but hopefully I will change and grow as a person as a consequence of not being Dangerously Online.
I’ll probably still post to this blog, but in an effort to reduce my screen time in general, I might even reclaim the lost art of writing things on paper, and transcribe my writings digitally after the fact. The big challenge here is of course writing legibly, something I get increasingly worse at the more time I spend in front of a computer.
We’ll see how this goes.