What Is a “Content Blackout”
and How to Take Your Life Back: this week in happiness
You get home from school or work. The sun is still out.
You sit on the couch for a few minutes to relax, open Instagram, and start scrolling.
It feels like ten minutes. Then, you look up and realize it’s 1 a.m. Where did the time go?
That blank space between opening your phone and realizing it’s tomorrow?
That’s what I would call content blackout.
Casinos are designed to do the same thing: shut off your sense of time and make you spend more than you intended. They will do everything they can to prevent you from forming a single coherent thought. For example, casinos are built with curved walkways because right angles create decision points, conscious interruptions for the brain. You might think, “I should probably leave.”
When you open your phone, you’re entering a digital casino built with the same psychology.
Behavioral researcher BJ Fogg, whose work has inspired many social media design principles, literally teaches product teams how to hook users through behavioral science.
Now, imagine the power of modern psychology combined with the budgets of billion-dollar tech companies.
That’s what you’re up against every time you open an app.
How does the BJ Fogg model work and how can you use it to reclaim your time?
Behavior = Motivation × Ability × Prompt
Or, as BJ Fogg puts it: B = MAP
All behaviors, from opening TikTok to going for a run, occur when three forces align:
Motivation: what drives you hope, fear, pleasure, pain, belonging or exclusion.
Ability: how easy the action is to do.
Prompt: the trigger that tells you, do it now.
Behavior occurs when a person is motivated and able to act, and is prompted to do so.
Ability and motivation are not mutually exclusive. For example, someone with high ability but low motivation may still perform the behavior because it is easy. Likewise, if you are highly motivated, you will be able to perform difficult tasks.
Based on the B=MAP model, you can begin to understand why habit stacking is so effective.
Habit stacking involves attaching a new habit to an existing one. For example, you could decide to do ten push-ups after brushing your teeth.
Brushing your teeth is your prompt. You already have the ability and motivation to exercise, but without a built-in cue, the idea remains a vague intention.
Tech companies know the B=MAP model well.
They make the behavior (scrolling) effortless, the motivation (connection, novelty, and validation) irresistible, and the prompts nonstop.
This is how you end up in a content blackout. Your behavior has been mapped, and you have to fight to control yourself after that point.
Notifications are the perfect example.
A random alert about someone you barely know isn’t meant to inform you; it’s meant to pull you back in.
Once you’re on the app, you seek social approval in the form of likes and comments: tiny hits of belonging.
Scrolling is an engineered addiction.
We’re visual creatures, and every time you swipe, you’re promised something new, funny, or shocking.
However, the same psychology that traps you can also set you free.
If you start designing your own prompts and adjusting the difficulty level of what matters most to you, you can regain control of your attention, one habit at a time.
Now back to content blackout, have you ever noticed how time seems to disappear when you’re scrolling? That’s not in your head.
A 2017 study by Lazaros Gonidis and Dinkar Sharma from the University of Kent found that social media literally warps your sense of time. Users regularly underestimate how long they’ve been scrolling; what feels like ten minutes is often thirty or forty.
“We flick through the videos one after the other… and without realizing it, we have spent an hour or two, instead of ten minutes.”
Why? Short-form content hijacks your attention. Each clip occupies your brain completely for a few seconds. When the next clip auto-plays, your focus resets before you can form a memory. Additionally the dopamine that you once got from 1 video now takes you three or four videos to get. This isn’t to rag on dopamine, without the reward chemical we wouldn’t do much of anything, you just want to be more careful about what behavior is being rewarded.
This creates a state of mind that is total engagement without awareness. You’re hyper-present yet mentally absent.
So, how do you break the spell? Let’s borrow from casinos and BJ Fogg’s behavioral model.
1. Create interruption points.
Casinos curve their walls to prevent you from noticing time passing. You need to do the opposite and build decision points. Set a timer or screen time alert. Even if you ignore it sometimes, that small interruption acts as a prompt: Do I really want to keep going? It’s an opportunity to choose in a system designed for frictionless consumption.
2. Use the Fogg model against itself.
We can also use the Fogg model to reduce motivation, prompts, and ability when we need to focus, for example. We can go into airplane mode (no notifications = no prompts), put our phone in our bag, and put our phone across the room. This reduces ability. to reduce motivation we can change our phone to greyscale
3. Give yourself a “lifetime ban.”
If you can, try disconnecting as fully as possible: delete your account, log out, change your password, and delete the app. If you want to use Instagram again, you have to go through a 5-10 minute process where you can decide if that’s what you really want, rather than doing it out of habit. Once you are out of the loop, it is much easier to stay away.
A content blackout isn’t just about losing time; it’s about losing choice. Every scroll, swipe, and notification pulls you a little further from steering your own attention and life. Time is the one thing we can’t have more of, so treat it accordingly.
BJ Fogg tiny habits framework:
Sources
https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-018-0098-3?utm_
https://www.behaviormodel.org
https://www.iitk.ac.in/counsel/resources/IATManual.pdf
https://ui-patterns.com/blog/making-the-fogg-behavior-model-actionable
https://boldist.co/marketing-strategy/fogg-behavior-model
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-time-passes-so-quickly-scrolling-on-tiktok-2022-7?op=1