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8 tweets

1
So it turns out, quitting Instagram fixed my eye-sight. Sounds crazy, but here is what happened.
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I'm pretty short sighted. Without glasses, my normal reading distance is something like 10cm. And when my eyes are tired or I am in reading in bed, I often do so without glasses.
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No about two years ago I started having problems where I couldn't really align my eyes to look at objects that were far away. I saw two slightly superposed versions. It got worse, sometimes I couldn't really look at things that were as close as 5m.
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Some days it was better some days it was worse. It didn't affect my working (looking at screens all day, you know), but being outside got really tiresome some days.
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Now like probably many others I often started scrolling through instagram while still being in bed, without glasses. This means I am looking at something as close at 10cm. I had a hunch this might somehow strain my muscles, but really believed something was wrong with my eyes.
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Then I read the book Hooked on how to build "habit forming" apps and realized what a hell of a click bait machine Instagram really is. I quit cold turkey.
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And the amazing thing is: a few days later my eye sight completely returned to normal. I had already seen myself getting surgery to fix the muscles.
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About two weeks in, the emails started coming. "You have unread notifications!" "Look what you're missing out on." By this point, however, I'd rather have FOMO than not being able to see straight. :)