Breaking up with social media, for a better relationship with myself

Imagine you are in a crowded room; everyone is shouting, everyone is hurting, everyone is angry, the volume gets increasingly higher over time as nobody feels heard. Everyone wants to voice their opinion, have their say, share the latest thing that’s pissed them off. Everyone is raging, then some missing pets walk in. The room is way too loud and way too crowded, nobody is listening, very few people are actively creating change, mostly, people just want to shout. You feel overwhelmed, suffocated and helpless, so you need to step out for awhile. You need to breathe in order to find yourself amidst the chaos.

This is social media. The noise is deafening, everyone is raging and I just had to leave for awhile.

My long love affair with social media

For a long time, I was ferociously addicted to social media. The fast-paced adrenaline buzz of building connections, sharing stories, learning, engaging, laughing but mostly just feeling lonely and looking for someone to talk to. For someone to see past the posts and realise how much I was hurting and how much I felt alone. When I was a teenager I loved chat rooms, MySpace, then came Bebo which took the brunt of my wild youth thankfully no longer to be seen. I was late to the Facebook game but when it came, it was thick and fast. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat; a kaleidoscope of connection. I had a blog, a social media marketing business, a whole world of connection right at my fingertips and the possibilities of it all were exciting, endless, albeit a bit overwhelming.

I never took to Snapchat. From the early days, I found it completely bizarre to be in a room of people all getting ready to go out, snapping about what a great time we were having, yet nobody in the room speaking; I wasn’t having a good time.

My Tweeting days lasted for awhile. Mostly in line with some Twitter networking groups, I took part in and promoting my business and music blog and radio show but it was the first to dwindle as my energy started to wane.

I developed a love/hate relationship with Instagram. I wanted so much to use it to promote positive mental health, exercise and when I qualified as a life coach in 2019 I saw it as a tool to help others who were feeling stuck. Except I got too sucked into the likes and comparisons. While I only followed a handful of “influencers”, I followed them with envy and it ate me alive as I compared my life to those who I glamorized as having a better life than me.

Facebook was the biggest lure for me. Throughout the years, hours, days, weeks spent scrolling for updates on the lives of my friends and family. Addicted to the refresh and constant connection. It made me feel like I had loads of friends, lots of craic. Until it didn’t.

Finding myself lost in it all

As I began to understand my own user-behaviour while deep-diving into some serious self-development through the coaching, bit-by-bit I began to release myself from the traps of social. As someone who lives alone and works remotely, I’m alone 90% of the time. Social media provided some kind of a break from this as it made me feel not-so-alone. Except I was and these networks were not helping but rather fueling false security. My poor mental health, my user-behaviour and my own self-consciousness meant I used tools that can be used for so much good, as tools of self-destruction.

The inner loneliness I felt never eased but rather the constant scrolling created a dis-ease. 2019 was a massive year of self-discovery as I began to really ask myself the purpose of using these tools. What is the purpose, what is the benefit to me, how are they helping, how are they impacting? The more I questioned things, the more I began taking myself out, looking back in at the patterns of behaviour from others. As I saw myself reflected back it was ugly; a version of myself I didn’t want to be any longer. What I saw was an addiction that fuelled anxiety and I was so caught up in the chaos of it all I didn’t know why I used it anymore, what it was for or really who I was in it all.

A defining moment for me was in a life coaching session when I was working on creating more time for myself. In this busy busy world, how do we get a moment? I had a task to keep a “time journal” on what I was spending my time on daily. A massive awareness moment came one sunny afternoon sitting in my garden scrolling on Facebook. I realised I spent 20 minutes just then sitting and scrolling. Standard. I also realised it takes 20 minutes top to bottom to sweep and mop all my floors yet I always complained that I couldn’t find the time to clean my house. It was the beginning of the end. I bought a Nokia 3310 for calls and texts and began the transition to reduce my time on social media.

Creating sustainable, healthy habits around social media

Now I’m not saying “quit social media so you can clean your house”, I’m not even telling people to quit social media, it’s simply how I brought awareness into my own habits for a more wholesome life. It brought more awareness of how much time I spent on my phone and how it made me feel. I rarely checked Twitter so that wasn’t in the equation but Instagram stories and Facebook had to be re-examined.

Creating habits took time, months in fact, but I got there. I began monitoring how many hours I spent on the phone using the iPhone’s in-built screentime. It is painful to see how much time we spend on our phones. Sometimes unavoidable as I work a lot on my phone but what I wanted to build here is how that time was spent. I felt Instagram was the biggest culprit as it was the one which made me feel most bad about myself. Gradually, I stopped posting, then I reduced the amount I posted on stories until I stopped using either. Overtime I reduced how much time I scrolled, how much I watched stories, what stories I watched until eventually, I stopped checking it altogether. I removed the app and occasionally opened it on my desktop until I didn’t anymore. Now it’s at the point that I no longer think about checking it and when I do, I have a quick peep only to remember how much I hate it now. A strong word to use against a technology tool but it’s the behaviour that has begun to make my skin crawl. The in-authenticity of it all makes me uneasy and I’m reminded of this on each of those moments I briefly check it; glad that I’m not sucked back into the void.

Oh Facebook, my real addictive pleasure. That was the hardest to break. Daily, I got lost in the endless scrolling of other’s lives while feeling so very unhappy in my own. So many things I wanted to do but so little time to do them, yet for hours I scrolled. It seemed impossible to not check it. Deleting the app didn’t work as I just kept checking the browser. I told myself I needed to be on it to keep in touch with people, for some groups I’m in, for my business pages. I was locked in and “had” to be on it. Increasingly it has become more of a toxic place; outrage, unhappiness, bad news. For a long time, I quietly admitted I needed to get off it for my own sanity but never acted on it.

Election 2020 was the final straw; so much anger directed at nobody. Directed at the Government of course and the absolute state of things but to the point that I questioned: “what is giving out on Facebook going to do about it?” I’m all for activism, going to make a real change, I applaud anyone who takes their time to make a difference in any way they can; protests, community work or just being kind in any way you can to make this world a better place. However, shouting into the void isn’t helpful but rather fuels further discontent.

Finally, it was the death of Caroline Flack that made me decide to get off it once and for all. I don’t watch much TV so I can’t say I was a massive fan of hers or really aware of her work but I was aware of what she went through and how I, how many, read an initial article on what happened between her and her boyfriend and quickly judged. I read it at the time and forgot about it again; I don’t usually follow celeb culture but it did catch my eye when it happened.

I was also now very aware that this beautiful, intelligent, funny, successful woman was dead. Her death triggered something in me. It again made me look at our behaviour as a society and how we fuel outrage, we fuel the gossip columns and we make clickbait exist by clicking on it. All one needs to do is read through the comment section on Facebook of any click-bait post to see how outrage is fuelled. Rowing with strangers on the internet, judging those we don’t know, supporting tabloid culture; to the point, this woman felt no other way but to take her own life. I suddenly felt so outside of it all looking in. I had been a long, long time stepping out of the arena and suddenly there I was standing out on the edge looking in at the chaos. It felt scary, confusing, bizarre, absolutely unreal and I couldn’t understand how so few people could see this, how so very unaware people are of their own behaviour; “You slag off strangers on the internet but you’re against cyberbullying? You click and comment on every bullshit article but voice sadness at a suicide?”. I felt in a vacuum of silence as a noisy rage built all around me and then it was in me and for a few days I felt really, really angry and had to really stop myself from replying to a number of posts that ignited my own rage. I brought awareness into it and knew it was time. I had outrage fatigue. I needed to get off my personal social media for good.

Building a better relationship with social media

I have a great relationship with many friends across the country on Facebook Messenger and I was very reluctant to lose that very brilliant communication tool, so I researched and found I didn’t have to. Switching to WhatsApp for so many people wasn’t entirely possible as I keep in touch with many, many people on Messenger in the nice wholesome way that social networks should be about; we check up on each other, talk about life, talk through our issues and have a laugh. This is what I wanted, my time online to be valuable. I found that by ‘deactivating’ not ‘deleting’ my Facebook account, I could keep Messenger. So I switched my business pages to an alias account so I could access them, let the admins of two groups I’m active in know I’m leaving and ask them to keep me posted with news of meetings or updates and with a massive sigh of relief I deactivated my Facebook page.

I don’t miss any of my personal social media accounts. I still have Messenger to keep my relationships. I have access to my work social media accounts within working hours for productivity. I have a healthy relationship with my iPhone which now lives in my office room, has no sim card and doesn’t come outside the house with me. I have my trusty Nokia 3310 for contact. I check Messenger and WhatsApp throughout the day and use them as a social network to keep social and keep my connections without wasting time or growing anxiety scrolling.

How does it feel? It’s been less than two weeks since I made that clean break. I work full-time on digital so I can’t say as of yet that I feel this sensational digital detox cleanse but I do notice some subtle differences. I feel calmer; not total Buddest zen Monk but slowly I can feel myself become that bit lighter. The overthinking hasn’t subsided but it’s becoming less muddled. I’m listening to so much new music, not just listening but engaging, remembering and enjoying it. It’s no longer background noise but I’m finding new artists, listening to full albums and finding real pleasure in music again. I’m keeping on top of housework; I’m no Mary Poppins but there’s a consistent tidiness with isolated messes no longer piling up, laundry and dishes getting put away straight away. This type of environment is so good for my mental health; a tidy place for a tidy mind. I’m starting to tune into ways to spend my time, the “I wish I could” has turned into “I am going to” as I’ve booked a personal trainer, a sewing workshop and a one-day silent meditation retreat; I may get to that zen Monk state after all.

Social media is fantastic. As I mentioned, I live alone in a rural village with my family, friends and even my boyfriend all living in different towns and counties. If it wasn’t for social media I wouldn’t have the fantastic three-year relationship with my boyfriend; heck if it wasn’t for the invention of online dating I might have never met my soulmate. My sisters live in different counties and even countries while my Mam recently moved to another county, without social media I’d miss them so much but with it, we all have constant contact while still getting to see each other regularly. It’s the relationship with social that needs to change. Using it as a tool for bonding is helpful, using it as a medium to fuel your outrage and unhappiness is toxic to yourself and to others. Even if you’re not adding fuel to the fire, you’re consuming it and it’s not healthy. Monitoring time spent online is rewarding as it leads to time better spent on things you love. There’s no need to go all-in and opt-out completely like I did but taking proactive measures to only follow what brings joy, weeding out the bad stuff and occasionally putting the phone away will do you wonders. If I can build this conscious habit, trust me, anyone can.