There’s a term in addiction treatment: bottom lines. You, the addict, must set (usually in accordance with a sponsor or professional therapist) your bottom/red lines, which define the behaviours you know are unhealthy/destructive and that you wish to knock on the head. The idea being that once you have a clear idea of the behaviours that are negative, it’s easier to address them.

We base our sobriety on these so-called bottom lines. I do think for sex addiction therapy in particular though, the title is an unfortunate one (bottoms?), but I believe it’s an American import where the term bottom has different meanings.

I digress.

For years I have been addicted to Twitter. I have an incredibly addictive personality, and although I’ve never been addicted to alcohol or drugs, I have formed pretty powerful addictions around sex and social media. With Twitter, the instant social feedback you get is like a powerful drug. It didn’t take me long to figure out that being controversial on Twitter leads to more feedback, which powers the cycle. So I became hooked.

This is bad for a number of reasons. Firstly, I find it hard to control what I say online. Yesterday I told Owen Jones he looked like ‘jailbait’. Bad idea. I sit there and wind people up. There are people who are wrong on Twitter, so there’s a constant, never-ending stream of arguments to be had. Angry feminists (fembots I call them) are particularly catnip-esque for me at the moment.

Secondly, it is a huge distraction. When I took two months off from Twitter from December onwards, I was able to write an enormous amount. Probably touching 100,000 words over different projects. I was able to reflect on a lot and do some serious work on myself. Since coming back, I’ve been distracted by the little notifications that go off each time I get an @-reply. My writing has dried up and I can’t focus for more than 10-15 minutes at a time.

So it’s time to give it a rest again. I’m making Twitter a bottom line in my addiction recovery process. I’m not quitting Twitter in the way I did last year, merely putting it somewhere safe. I’ve set it up so that it will automatically Tweet links to new blog posts. This may mean I blog more, but so be it; at least with blogging I think a bit more before I hit ‘publish’. For the time being, this is the only way I’ll use Twitter.

Do please RT blog post Tweets, read my blogs, and comment on them if you have something to say.

I also won’t read DMs, so if you want to get in touch you’ll have to email me – luke.n.bozier [at] gmail.com.