I recently tried something new and cut off social media for a month. My main reasons for doing so were for peace of mind but also to challenge myself and perhaps learn something new about myself, however big or small. I got to a point where I wasn’t sure what value it was adding to my life and with life’s complicated nature I knew my use of mainly Twitter and other platforms wasn’t helping. I just wanted to take a break from it all.
Being engaged with at least one or more social media platform has become part of the ordinary and those who aren’t on any are looked at with perplexed measure. Why aren’t you on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram? How long is this phase going to last? Are you trying to find yourself? How do you survive without it? Are some of the questions you’ll expect to get and the more we use social media, the more out of the ordinary it will become. I’m not going to tell you all it was a life-changing experience and you should ditch social media for all your favourite books, that would be too predictable. I’m also not going to tell you it was easy because it wasn’t.
The first day I woke up and knew what I had to do but kept putting it off. The reasoning I gave myself was that, I’d make a conscious effort not to open the apps and pretend they weren’t there. I was of course, just lying to myself and it wasn’t until the evening that I did it, I deleted all my main social media apps: Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. Snapchat and Instagram would be quite easy to stay away from as I had slowly decreased my use over the last year by turning off push notifications. Twitter was my problem, even after switching push notifications off I’d still spend too much time on it. There was a sense of nervousness but also relief — I was absorbing all this information and the thought of not having to — made me feel more in control. I was comforted by the thought that only something positive could come of this.
The next morning instinctively began with unlocking my phone, my thumbs were ready to tap away and get my morning intake of Twitter. With disappointment, I locked my phone and spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how I’d last the month. I hadn’t planned what I’d do as a substitute to social media. That was deliberate. My plan was to try different things and see what worked for me. My natural gravitation was to use my news apps more, I spent more and more time flipping through articles and reading things that were of interest. I’ve always done this but I was doing this more frequently.
One of my first realisations was how much time can be wasted browsing social networks. I now had all this time to kill and didn’t know what to do with it. For my first 2 weeks, spare time was spent keeping myself busy through reading and journaling using my notes app. However what I realised was that these things were all still quite antisocial and not necessarily productive.
After 2 weeks I caved in and had a scroll through Twitter for about 10 minutes. Like some dirty habit, it felt like someone was watching me, so I quickly deleted it and felt a little deflated. This was not simple. After all, most of us consider our social media habits to be normal. But your actual use in hours may far exceed the average.
The average person spends nearly two hours (approximately 116 minutes) on social media everyday, which translates to a total of 5 years and 4 months spent over a lifetime. A whole 5 years and 4 months! Even some of the most productive amongst us spend a considerable amount of time on social media ‘pree’ing’ and interacting with all the information out there. I mean, even if you aren’t someone with 1000+ followers, we all have the same amount of time in a day and use more than we care to admit procrastinating on what we really should be doing.
In 2019, it is estimated that there will be around 2.77 billion social media users around the world, up from 2.46 billion in 2017. What does this mean for humans and how we interact in the long term?
Undoubtedly, social media has made us feel closer to strangers, people we wouldn’t normally come across and our loved ones with the ability to connect at our very fingertips. But it’s also made us incredibly lazy. Too lazy to call, to send that ‘thinking of you text’, to check in, to do anything more than a like or comment on a post. These acts are seen as the borometer of effort to connect in this day and age.
I spent the last 2 weeks reflecting on my interactions with others. The experience made me realise how I should be reaching out more to loved ones, not just once every few months. We all have friends and perhaps ourselves included who don’t feel the need to reach out because Snapchat or Twitter let’s them know what your last meal was, pictures from your latest holiday but most importantly, that you’re actually still alive and well. Rather than making people feel the need to check-in, we put all this information out there that inevitably makes people feel like they don’t have to reach out. Not to mention how people feel like they know who you are just from following you on social media, it’s a fallacy.
The people who actually matter will always reach out directly and that’s all that matters. My experience was that I felt more of a need to ring up friends and family rather than just texting. We can all agree that connections that last and stay fruitful are those you make an effort to maintain.
My use of Twitter has become minimal and I didn’t feel the need to download Snapchat after the month ended. If you try this, you’ll almost certainly begin to feel out of touch and this feeling may exacerbate your fear of missing out. Myself included, I was consuming more news and information on Twitter than I’d like to admit. Don’t let this deter you. Cutting back provides new and different ways to find out new things.
If you’re not feeling brave enough to delete your social media apps, try the following:
- Turn off your social media notifications, push notifications are designed to make you more addicted and keep you coming back. You’ll be surprised how much less you check your phone. Perhaps start with your most used apps and go from there. Take a look at your social media app usage via your phone settings before and after, it’s interesting to find out the impact your changes have made in numbers.
- Try putting your phone on ‘do not disturb’ mode especially for those moments you’re trying not to use your phone. If you’re worried about people reaching you in emergencies, anyone can still get through to you, they just have to call twice.
- Try to get out of the habit of checking social media right before you sleep at night, even if it’s just for the last 10-15 minutes and replace that with something productive. Like reflecting on the day, planning for the next or writing in a gratitude journal. You could even just journal casually on your phone’s notes app.
I adopted the above as small actions that would lead to long term benefits to help me be as present and productive as I can be. At worst it will make your phone less distracting and at best you’ll learn something new about yourself and potentially become more productive with your time.
Have any of you tried/succeeded in cutting back on social media use and do you have any other tips?
To end, just remember you’re never ever too busy to switch off.
