What I Learned From A 3 Month Social Media Detox Experience

What’s higher than the temperatures in the Summer? The amount of time we spend on social media in the Summer!

Wake up, post. Sit down, post. Stand up, post. What is the first thing you do after attending a special event or activity? Post! If you’re anything like the majority of our society, then I’m pretty sure you instinctively grab your phone to capture the moment. It’s second nature to us now. Which kind of makes you think, when is the last time you’ve done anything without social media?

I probably spent more time than I’d like trying to answer that question myself because I’ve fallen victim to the habit of constantly posting & scrolling too. I mean it is the 21st century though and we hardly do anything without factoring social media into the equation anymore. As of lately, I had to take a step back. The whole purpose of social media is to stay connected, but halfway through the year I felt like it was actually disconnecting me from the present reality. It became clearer to me that my routine of capturing photos of my outfits in “Instagram-worthy” places and faithfully scrolling through my timeline wasn’t to stay connected with family & friends. To be honest, I was actually doing it because of FOMO, which is just a fancy acronym that translates into “fear of missing out”.

Before I started my social media detox, I was a full time employee who just purchased a home while trying to manage a blog, start a business and tame her newly diagnosed anxiety. The first thing I did in the morning was scroll through Instagram, then Twitter, probably Snapchat and maybe even Facebook. Why? Because who watches the news when social media can give you all you need to know with just the tap of a finger? Well, that routine ate up so much of my time that before I knew it, my entire morning disappeared and I was rushing to catch up with the rest of the day. Social media was consuming more than just my time, it was consuming my life! Which is why this post is all about how I stopped social media from consuming my summer and my life!

“Don’t get so caught up in the wave that you drown trying to stay current.”

First things first, I recognized the problem. Then, I had to confront it. My phone was already set up to send me weekly reports of how much time I was spending on my phone and guess how much time I spent glued to that little super computer? 3 hours a day! That’s 21 hours a week. You might as well say that I had a part time job that involved me starring at my phone. Which is crazy! I could have done so many other productive things with my life and before social media activated operation FOMO, I did! Yes, operation FOMO.

So, I decided to undo my social media consumed daily routine cold turkey. That obviously had some unfortunate consequences though. My favorite device became my worst enemy. To start off the detox, I set app limits to control my screen time for all of the social networking & creativity apps on my phone. Reminders would often indicate how much time I had left. I also made sure to schedule some time away from my phone in general with downtime for at least 2 hours a day. A notification would normally pop up five minutes before downtime to warn me. At the end of every week, my phone gave me a weekly report of how much time I spent on it. It’s been a significant improvement since I went from 3 hours a day to about 1 hour and 30 minutes a day. With these features, I was able to actively enjoy & be a part of my own life again.

If you have an iPhone you can do all of this and a little more too! Just navigate to the Settings app then scroll to the second grouping of selections and towards the bottom of that section, select Screen Time. From there, a graph of the time you’ve spent on your phone as well as a list of options are presented to help monitor your screen time. The tool I found most helpful was the graph. If you tap on the graph, it takes you to an actual bar graph with an hourly breakdown of screen time and the average time spent above that. You can also take this tool one step further by examining the apps listed below it which are the apps used in the graph. My phone still tracks how much time I spend on it everyday and in three months I’ve cinched my daily phone time to an hour and some change a day.

“Don’t feel so pressured to have a hot girl summer.”

In closing, this is my first post on Instyleversity in a little over 3 months. Somehow I got besides myself and halfway through the year instead of focusing to uphold my end of the bargain, I was distracted and all over the place. Soon enough, I became inconsistent & busy instead of productive which led to my unannounced hiatus. During my absence, I learned a LOT about myself, the direction of my blog and how social media has been playing a HUGE role in my everyday life. I spent more time outside taking in the beauty of nature rather than contributing to the destruction of it. I was also able to get outside of my comfort zone and receive some much needed input from others about Instyleversity that gave me a different perspective on things. I even spent some time reflecting on some of the goals I set in this year’s earlier post “Year in Review”. Most of all, I was living in the moment when it mattered the most.

I know it probably sounds crazy for a blogger to be telling their readers to take some time off from being on social media, but in all honesty this came about because of a bigger subject. I want everyone to have an eye opening experience too!

Thanks for reading!