Being extremely mindful of my social media use for a full year has been enlightening. I am going to do a social media break for winter again. I found that very valuable.
Now, as fall begins, I'm finding myself seeing the thought patterns more than the actual behaviors. Previously, I was hyper focused on how often or how long I spent on social media. I gave myself screen time limits via the StayFree app, noticed when I didn't hit that limit, and felt proud of myself for only using social media once a week or less. Now, I'm noticing differences in how I approach stuff.
Photo sharing was the first to change. Social media makes it very easy to select 10 to 15 photos to share with your friends instantly, then get lost in your feed archive of your life. Fair chance your friends wouldn't even see the post, given the algorithms and the fact that the service that you use has a different goal than all of its users.
Instead I now make a photo album for each season to cover life sharing and archiving, and then every once in a while I might make a separate one for a trip or event. I share these with people individually or on my newsletter or website. I'm more mindful about what I share, and sharing more meaningful experiences, stuff that meant something in retrospect, not just things that seem big right in this moment.
Of course the words have changed, I've moved from captions on those photos specifically to a monthly review or very often now I make long winding reflections on my life that I may or may not share. But that's kind of going back to where it was when I was blogging regularly; I don't see it as a difference from stopping social media, but rather a return to how I prefer to process things.
Now I'm starting to notice how my reactive output is changing. In the past I might have wanted to immediately tweet something, or use a twitter-like service so that I could deal out 50 tiny thoughts full of massive anger, ranting about the state of the world or annoying people or whatever else. I believe this is because I started using twitter very young, so as I was growing into myself and learning how to be part of the world's conversations, twitter is how I did that.
In some ways I think that's how I learned how to communicate that way. I still do that. I'm still very reactive in text messages and the twitter alternative service that I use. I even do micro blogging, which encourages short quick posts like that. These are my little brain farts, usually, then get interrupted and overwhelmed with complaints and anger when I have these moments of reaction. Recently I realized that. I wrote a whole bunch and I replied to myself a whole bunch and then I thought, what? Why am I spending this energy fighting with this stupid app to try to get my thoughts out?
And I think that's what getting ahold of social media addiction is for me. I think I'm starting to really understand what the impacts have been overall. It's not just that I used it a lot, or that I'm addicted to my smartphone... It's that tweeting is my go-to when I have a complaint. It's that adjustment between instantly sharing versus waiting until the end of the month or season. Getting ahead and taking control means I'm not using it as the first and best way to share something. Because frankly, it's not the best way to share anything. And it's not the best way to process anything. (Disclaimer: Since this post is on my blog and about me, you might disagree about you.)
I'm looking forward to continuing this journey, it's been rough pulling myself away. It's no joke when they say these sites are catered toward making you feel good so that you'll keep going to them hoping that you'll continue to feel good. Part of what got me away from it initially was putting in checks. I'd confront myself: "All right, I've been using instagram for an hour now, I've already looked at all my friends posts. If none of the next five things make me laugh, then I'm done for the day." Not for this hour, but for the entire day. Without fail, none of the next five things made me laugh.
Doing this helped reveal just how much I was ingesting from these sites that was angry, negative, dismissive, or otherwise neutral. Lots of ads. Lots of things I didn't care about. I would be scrolling through that for 15 minutes hoping for one spark of joy.
It took me a while to get over that, I'm not going to lie. It's not just the social media, it's the automatic action of picking up my phone that's a problem. I'm still working on that one. I'm training myself that when I automatically pick up my phone I open one specific app (the one I use for writing), not go through each of the apps to figure out what I could be doing on my phone right now. (I used to call it "checking all my inboxes.") That always inevitably led to minutes wasted on each social media app that I had, looking at stuff that isn't funny. I felt too often like I was getting to the end of the internet, no more new posts to show! Only repeats of what I've seen before.
Now, I get a beautifully curated feed of hilarious and interesting content from my friends. Like letters from the war.
And when I want sparks of joy, I find them. I don't go to the landfill looking for something shiny, I do something that I know brings me joy.
I think it will be a journey still for a while, especially as I've recognized how much the smartphone addiction feeds into phone based addictions, I mean clearly if I can't stay off my phone then it's not going to be easy to stay off social media. When I stopped using those apps, I started using my games more. I just replaced one phone thing with another. Although the specific issues with social media aren't hurting me as much anymore, I'm still getting to a point where I might need to put screen time limits on my games.
But I think recognizing more than just the data (how much time spent, what the quality is) is a good sign for leveling up in weaning off these addictions. I'm not scrambling to convince myself to use something other than my phone - I do it because I prefer it. (I don't even think of it as phone vs something else anymore.) I'm thinking more about where my energy and attention goes, and how I can adjust my day-to-day to get into what I'd like to get into. I stopped using my phone in the car (even at red lights or as a passenger) and I'm getting back into the habit of carrying books or notebooks. I'm eating better and I'm more active, not things I'd attribute directly to this process, but it helped because one of the blocking factors was that I'd prioritize phone time over taking care of myself.
I've learned a lot of little lessons about myself and how I prefer to live, but I think the biggest and most important one is that addiction takes time and effort to get over. Some people can go cold turkey, good for them. I've been using social media as a daily part of my life since 2014, and I think it's reasonable that a decade-long addiction will take longer than a season to get past. Especially since it's tied to another larger problem: phone addiction, a device that is layered into every part of our lives and slightly more difficult to cast aside.