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INTRODUCTION POST

After using this blog without really curating it, i’m going to rebrand myself and give it a purpose.

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Essentials about me :

- my name is Nesrine (pronounced Nasreen), I’m 22 years old by the time I make this post, and I’m French born and raised with a North-African ethnicity

- what I like : summer (without the global warming part), beaches, sunsets and twilights, books, learning things, greek mythology and sharing random fun facts everyday

- I’m also very politically active, in France I’m considered an « islamo-gauchist » which is just someone caring for everybody’s rights and not just rich christian cishet able-bodied adult white men

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Why do I open this page :

- I’ve given myself the challenge of doing a month-long dopamine detox, and only two days in and I’ve found back my old love for writing

- the aim of this page is to write pieces of fiction, essays, reviews and whatever I feel like writing about at the moment

- and I give myself the challenge to keep this page at least more aesthetic than what it was previously

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Precisions :

- no matter how much I can struggle with writer’s block or lack of inspiration, you will never catch me using AI, because of my political beliefs and my will to keep my writing skills intact

- if I treat a subject in my writings and it feel insensitive, I’m more than ready to learn ! No human is perfect and if that happens, I’ll gladly accept someone correcting me

- I don’t allow translations, nor I allow extracts being taken without my credits

One week into a dopamine-detox

As you may - or may not - know, I’m going through a digital detox, or a dopamine detox, for all August until I go back to school. And I wanted to share a bit about my journey here !

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Why did I start doing this ?

Tbh, I often indulge into unhealthy behaviors with my phone, endlessly doomscrolling and ending the day with a massive screen-time. But as summer was finally here, I wanted to go back to my hobbies without academic pressure and pure pleasure. Needless to say that I didn’t read, write or watched as many series as I wanted initially. That’s why I decided to delete the culprits off my phone for the whole month, to have a reset in my brain and hopefully change my habits, and eventually indulge with more intention and control once I get back on these platforms.

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What are my strategies ?

- having a purpose. I know it seems useless, but to go through a dopamine detox as a social media addict, you need to have a purpose and constantly remind yourself of it. For me, it was to learn back to enjoy good things in life : as I’m very political in my daily life, hearing and seeing climate disasters, wars, strikes, political corruption and constant unrest all over the world has its cost on my mental health. Even if it’s my field of study, I’m human before anything else, and I need to rest before going back to my activism. And also to have my love back for my hobbies, as previously said.

- deleting most social media, Instagram and Tiktok being the ones I spend the most time on. I decided to keep Tumblr because I like this platform, and I use it with the purpose of said detox.

- keeping an hour or two per day without my phone, locking it into another room than my bedroom so I can focus more. I spare these hours for one hobby per day, whether I decide to read, to write a piece of fiction, watching a movie without distractions.

- handwriting more. I have some journals I didn’t use for a while, so I took them with me. My personal journal aside - because I used it even with my addiction to social media, I opened a new journal to write little pieces of fiction, and another one to try and outline novel ideas.

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How is it going so far ?

The hardest part is going from and overstimulated nervous system to a nervous system used to that noise but being stripped of it. Boredom is the habit I need to relearn to have, yet my brain still itches, and I often go back on Instagram, at least to check about my friend’s stories and notifications. Yesterday, I even spent the evening scrolling back for an hour on Tiktok, and even if I felt repulsed by what the algorithm showed me, it still kept me hooked. I deleted everything just before bed, and I’m back on track now, hoping I can last longer doing nothing.

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