Watching Twitch is Making Me Twitch
I started watching Twitch again after taking a break for 7 weeks. It's only been a few days, but I think it's causing me to slip back into old thought patterns and habits. I need to cut way back and limit myself to specific streams and times. Or stop watching altogether.
One of the things I'm trying to do is pay attention to how I feel and how I am affected when I reintroduce the things I abstained from during Lent. I'm done with video games for good – I'm already quite aware of how negatively those affect me. But I'm not sure exactly what it is about Twitch streams that has made me stop and say “woah...this feels weird.”
Most of the streamers I watch are DJs and musicians, so not quite as sensory-overload as video game streams. Even so, I have been a lot more sensitive to things than I was before, and have found most of the streams I usually watch to be visually and aurally over-stimulating.
It's like being teleported from a quiet library into a crowded dance hall. My thoughts have been clouded and jumbled. I find it hard to focus. I feel unsettled. I worry that I'm backsliding.
Here's my plan:
- Aggressively and diligently curate my followed streams. Unfollow those that I'm really not interested, are just too much for me visually and aurally, or that generally leave me feeling worse.
- Chat less, hide chat unless I have something to say. A lot of that over-stimulation comes from chat – emotes, bot messages, etc. It's fun to interact with the stream in that way, but maybe too much interaction is part of the issue for me.
- Set a viewing schedule and stick to it. Part of the issue is me just looking to kill time and clicking through followed and suggested streams. I'll set a viewing schedule and not watch Twitch outside of that.
If these steps don't help me regain some control (and I'm hopeful they will), then maybe I have to be done watching Twitch and just stick to the streaming part. That would be hard, but obviously not impossible. And if there's anything I learned during Lent, it would be worth it.