If I tell you something is a form of entertainment, you will have a natural attraction to it because we like to be entertained. But if I label that same situation as addiction, no one wants an addiction. And that helps you break the habit.
Usual Frame: Social media is a form of entertainment.
Reframe: Social media is an addiction.
You’re not entertained; you’re addicted. Once you accept that frame, you have a chance of breaking free. I should note that social media “addiction” is not equivalent to drug, alcohol, or cigarette addiction. Substance addictions will not budge with reframes because addiction is outside mental control. Breaking a bad habit is easier. Social media is more like a bad habit than an addiction, but reframing it as an addiction is the stronger play for reprogramming your brain. You don’t care so much about breaking a bad habit as breaking an addiction. Addiction just feels worse. Use that to your advantage.
Internet Insults
Every day on social media, trolls and critics attack me over my appearance, age, intelligence, personal life, character, and talent. I’ve become an accidental expert on how to reframe deep insults into my own entertainment, and I recently came upon a reframe that helps a lot.
Usual Frame: An insult is damaging to my mental health.
Reframe: An insult is a confession that your accuser can’t refute your opinion and/or has personal problems of some sort.
This reframe won’t fit every situation, but people who enjoy good mental health are not spending much time insulting people on social media or anywhere else. Likewise, when people have a strong argument, they stick with facts. You only get triggered to insult someone when your argument has been dismantled and you feel the need to act out.
On X, I use the reframe this way:
Critic: “Of course you have that opinion, Dilweed, it’s because you are uninformed and stupid.”
Me: “I appreciate your confession.”
Then I excuse myself from the conversation without explaining what I mean by “confession.” Sometimes I mean my critic has lost the debate because they resorted to personal attacks. In that case, I claim victory and scamper away to happiness. Other times, the personal attacks are not associated with an argument. In those cases, I mean the “confession” to be about the person’s poor mental health. I’m no mental health expert, but insulting strangers is rarely a sign of good mental health.
When a critic (a jerk) enters “fight mode” by hurling a personal insult at you on social media, they expect an insult in return or perhaps a blocked account. What they don’t expect is a puzzle. What the heck does it mean when someone says they appreciate a confession you never offered? It instantly changes the tone of the exchange and puts you in charge because you know what you mean, and your critic wants to know because it is about them.
Don’t tell them. Walk away. That’s how you win.
I’m also testing another reframe I borrowed from a Twitter follower that goes like this.
Usual Frame: An insult hurts because it means someone dislikes or disrespects you.
Reframe: A stranger’s opinion of you—even if it gets published in The New York Times—is little more than their personal diary entry.
No one cares what you write in your diary. That’s between you and yourself. If you choose to make your opinion public, that doesn’t suddenly make it matter. Think of all the dark thoughts you keep to yourself. Do they matter to anyone else? Nope. Saying a dark opinion in public doesn’t suddenly make it matter. It’s still just a diary entry in a different form—boring and unimportant.
For completeness, I must explain why you might see me engaging my critics more than my reframes suggest would be wise. I direct energy to a critic when they make a defamatory and untrue claim of fact that would live forever as truth on the Internet unless I deal with it. In those cases, I want any future sleuths to know the false claim is disputed and why. So I create an “interesting” body of semi-abusive content to draw attention away from the false claim and toward my often-funny debunking of it.
For example, a prominent attorney on X accused me of being wrong on my pandemic commentary because I tend to “trust institutional data.” I saw a need to remind his followers that I’m the creator of the Dilbert comic and have been mocking institutional data for more than three decades. Sometimes I think no one on the planet distrusts institutional data more than I do. A recurring theme of my daily livestreams involves reminding people to distrust data from any source and why. The attorney’s post got a lot of attention and amplified existing misconceptions about me that were, in my opinion, an obstacle to my good intention of being a useful public voice. So I sprayed some insults in his direction on X along with some debunking to make sure as many people saw the correction as saw the initial claims. Fake news can get twenty times the attention of a correction, so I try to solve for that problem by creating more of a spectacle and sometimes being more of a jerk than observers feel is appropriate.
Don’t be like me! My situation is unlikely to be relevant to people who are not public figures. I only mention it because my actions will seem inconsistent if you don’t have that context.
Germaphobe Reframe
I was a bit of a germaphobe until I learned that exposure to germs, bacteria, and the ordinary “ickiness” of living makes your immune system stronger. The worst thing you could do is avoid all of that until one day something gets you.
Now I think germs make me stronger. Because they do. But it isn’t the truth of the claim that makes the reframe work for me. The power comes from the programming that is embedded in the words.
Usual Frame: Germs will harm me.
Reframe: Germs make me stronger.
This isn’t the sort of reframe that is likely to work instantly. It might have an immediate impact for a few readers—maybe you—because people are so different, but that would be unusual. For most, it will take time and repetition. Start by doing all the same cleaning and precautions you would always do, but over time you might find yourself getting a bit more flexible about the vigor you put into avoiding germs. You’re not in any rush. Just repeat the reframe whenever you feel yourself worrying about germs. Give this one a few months before you know for sure if it’s working or not.
It might seem crazy that a person can reframe a bad feeling into a good one using nothing but the power of words. But it’s more common than you’d think. The next reframe is my best example of that.
Coldness
Recently, I watched a friend assembling a fire pit in near-freezing weather conditions during a party at his mom’s home. Everyone who saw him toiling away in the backyard asked if they could get a jacket for him. He waved them off, completely comfortable in his short sleeve shirt. I was wearing full Antarctica protective gear as I chatted with him to ask how he was able to handle the cold.
He told me he once had a psychedelic experience in which he realized the sensation of cold was nothing but a signal from his body to his brain, and unless there was a risk of frostbite, it was nothing to fear. Now he simply disconnects the signal whenever he wants, and the cold registers as a sensation, but it is not alarming or uncomfortable.
I didn’t believe him, of course. It sounded like a prank.
Time passed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about his story. One day, a friend invited me to join him to try cryotherapy—the sub-zero chambers you stand in for a short time to summon a variety of alleged health benefits. I declined because I don’t handle the cold well. A few weeks later, another friend messaged me to say he started a cryotherapy business, and he invited me to try it. I declined because, well, you know.