celui qui fait fondre mes hivers

The internet (and again social media specifically) operates on what behavioural psychologists call a “variable reward schedule”. It’s the same mechanism that makes slot machines so difficult to walk away from because you don’t get a reward every time. In the case of Tumblr, that reward would be a nice post, a comment/reply or a reblog. What you get instead is unpredictability, and that unpredictability is what makes the dopamine loop so powerful and unfortunately also so hard to get out of voluntarily.

Most bigger platforms had, or still have, behavioural psychologists in their teams specifically to exploit that mechanism, and over time, it really shoots our attention. Research from UC Irvine found it takes around 25 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. That means that if you’re online on and off for hours, your brain never fully completes a thought cycle.

Over time, sustained attention (the kind needed for reading a book, completing a task that requires focus, watching a film without your phone, or simply sitting with a feeling without trying to resolve it) becomes genuinely harder. It dysregulates our nervous system. Discourse, conflict, distressing news, posts that make you angry or sad, all of that activates our threat response (your sympathetic nervous system, fight-or-flight, whatever you know it as). And when you’re online, that activation never fully resolves. Chronic low-grade activation is associated with anxiety, hypervigilance, and difficulty feeling safe even when you are safe.

Being chronically online also distorts your social baseline. Human nervous systems evolved to read faces, tone of voice and physical co-presence. We NEED this (as a general rule), no matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t because we’ve been hurt. Online interaction, even with people you like or love, doesn’t fully activate those systems. Over time, that can deepen a particular kind of loneliness, and that’s confusing because you are talking to people constantly, right?

And one of the most harmful things is also that it completely erodes body awareness. When you’re staring into a screen for hours, you stop receiving your body’s signals (hunger, thirst, the need to move or stretch, getting tired). And that’s especially important for people who already have complicated relationships with their bodies due to chronic illness or disability.

Online friendships

I genuinely believe online friendships can be meaningful. But I also believe that parasocial and semi-parasocial dynamics are very easy to form online, and they’re also very easy to confuse for closeness.

When you follow someone’s life via their daily posts, your brain builds a model of them that can feel like closeness (or, to the contrary, you can build a picture of them that is completely wrong in other ways). And sometimes it is. But sometimes, the connection is more one-directional than it feels, and the loss when that person leaves, blocks you or simply turns out to be quite different from that model you built of them can feel sort of devastating. Simply because your nervous system experienced it as a close relationship, even if the other person didn’t.

It’s how human attachment works, but it’s at loggerheads with a medium that often only mimics intimacy without really delivering it.

Some honest questions to sit with (as genuine self-inquiry)

You don’t have to answer these to anyone but yourself:

When I close my laptop or put down my phone, what do I feel in the first few minutes? Boredom? Anxiety? Relief? Emptiness?

Is being online giving me energy, or am I often more tired, irritable, or sad after long sessions than before?

When have I last eaten, and what? Did I have water? Is my body okay right now?

When something upsetting happens online (argument, callout, someone being unkind), how long does it take me to stop thinking about it?

Are there things I used to enjoy (games, art, music, books, being in my body in some way) that I’ve gradually stopped doing? What happened there?

If the internet went down for 48 hours, what would I feel? What does that tell me?

As I said, these aren’t gotchas, they’re just invitations to notice.

Small, accessible things that can help

I’m not gonna say “go for a run/exercise” or “just go outside” because while these things can help some people, they're also ableist as a generalisation. But there are some genuinely small things I regularly go over with my clients, and many of them have limited energy, reduced mobility or generally a limited amount of “spoons”

Build a micro-transition ritual. The brain needs a signal that one context is ending and another is beginning. It can honestly be as small as “close the laptop, take three slow breaths, drink some water”. That’s a full ritual. It helps your nervous system to downregulate.

Use “do not disturb” or app timers as a scaffold for a brain that’s been trained out of self-regulating by social media professionals who know a thing or two about your dopamine system. Give yourself support with that, like using Opal or Freedom or one of the many other systems out there (they all have free plans that are honestly enough). Or simply delete that app for a while and make it more difficult to access.

Introduce one offline sensory thing per day. No, that’s not the same as “just get a hobby” or “do some exercise”. I really mean something sensory (something that you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell), like a nice candle, or tea you make deliberately. Or listening to music while lying down and only doing that (no background music while scrolling). It’s about reconnecting your brain to your physical environment, because it has real effects on nervous system regulation.

Notice the content, not just the quantity. Passive scrolling (consuming without interacting) is consistently associated with worse mental health outcomes than active use (creating, reaching out, commenting intentionally). So if you have to be online (but don’t make that your first choice because it’s easier), creating things (even a reblog that isn’t empty but one where you actually engage or comment) is genuinely better for you than scrolling silently. Ignore the rage bait, pick something that makes you happy to connect with and create for. Which brings me to…

Have one conversation a day that isn’t reactive. No discourse. Just reach out to one person you like, about something you like, for its own sake. It activates different neural pathways than conflict-driven or anxiety-driven engagement.

Tend to one physical need with deliberate attention. Eat something and actually taste it, or stretch one part of your body while noticing how it feels. It’s not about “improving” anything, it’s just a way of reminding your brain that you have a body.

If the internet is the main (or even only) place where you feel seen, safe, and connected, it’s something worth sitting with without shame, but definitely with attention.

Online connection isn’t worthless, but I truly believe people deserve more than that. You deserve to feel okay in your own body, in being able to sit with yourself in silence in your own company (even if you’re bristling at that, but it is so, so important). And if being away from the internet feels impossible or unbearable, it’s honestly a nervous system screaming for help.

You are allowed to want more for yourself, even if the “more” is very small and very slow. It’s possible to build it into your life, even if that life has real constraints.

[Sources if you want to read further: Jean Twenge on screen time and wellbeing (especially in children and young adults), Gloria Mark’s attention research at UC Irvine, studies on variable reward schedules and dopamine (Schultz, 1997), and the body of literature on social media use and loneliness including Primack et al. (2017) in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.}

When I was choosing which part of Kakashi's life I wanted to paint for this zine, I knew the exact moment I wanted to catch. That second of stillness after he opens Obito's eye for the first time.

The moment just before he pulls his father's tanto for the last time.

To kill a man.

Work in progress 🌱

In print ❤️