Overcoming my DoomScrolling Addiction [Reels and Shorts]

consider this...
you're working on a project that you've been pretty excited about for a while

now...
you are someone who keeps your phone on battery saver/DND mode when you're working but you forgot to this time...

and you get a notification on your phone

it's from a childhood friend of yours, someone who you haven't had a conversation with for a while now

you reply to them and also habitually click on the "reels" icon

BOOOM 180 minutes pass by and you remember you had something you wanted to work on

You're not alone

I'm someone whose tried everything out there that didn't work to prevent this from happening again ranging from:

1. uninstalling insta [only to later eventually install it]
2. increase my willpower [failed miserably]
3. shifting to the web version [but needing to install it everytime I want to post something on stories]

all these attempts made me think deep on why this was happening and the answer was... the existence of this stupid little icon

Removing the Problem

I initially tried to see if I could make a mod APK where the whole reels section wouldn't be there but

and then I remembered how adblockers work... they identify ads in a website and not render them... so what if I could configure an adblocker to treat the icon as an ad

after surfing reddit for less than 3 minutes [at least in my head]... I found a someone who configured their ublock origin [the best adblocker] to treat youtube's shorts icon as an ad

Implementing a Fix

I am a long term user of brave, and I knew that brave's inbuilt adblocker uses a lot of similar components of ublock origin...

so I went ahead to brave://adblock

and copy-pasted the following into custom filters

! Hide Reels Icon Desktop
instagram.com##a[href="/reels/"]:upward(3)

! Hide Reels Icon Mobile
instagram.com##a[href="/reels/"]

my instagram through brave didn't have the reels icon

for a filter list to completely remove shorts copy-paste > this list