With Spring Break approaching, I was definitely feeling some burnout on social media. I love browsing, I really do! So much so that I find myself getting drawn in to the whole scrolling thing way too often. There are several women I follow on Instagram as role models. They are always choosing joy, building up their husbands, lifting others up, choosing to focus on the positive, etc. There is just so much to learn from many of these women and it’s a true gift to be able to connect with their lives through social media! I’ve made multiple connections on social media. Like, legit connections. I mean, I actually call these women my friends now and I’ve even met many of them in real life! How then was I experiencing so much burnout from social media? I wanted to find out.
Social media is not bad, in and of itself. But somehow, I was pouring a lot of time and energy into my social media and something about it was draining me without giving me the return I….expected? needed? wanted? I wasn’t sure what it was. So with Spring Break, I decided it was the perfect time to step back and evaluate my whole social media presence. Since I do work online, social media is where I do a lot of my work for my business so if I was really going to take a week off, I needed to step away from social media. My personal interactions are so wrapped up in my business interactions that it can be really hard to separate the two…and then I start to feel like I work all the time, which is a problem in my book.
Why? To evaluate my focus
My day planner is pretty awesome! At the beginning of the year, my planner took me through a process of determining my work life balance and then setting goals accordingly for the year ahead. Each season, there is a “goal check in process”. This check in landed right on Spring Break. PERFECT! I was looking forward to evaluating my progress with my current goals, seeing how my work life and my life life were balancing out, etc. So I decided to take the entire week off social media and just spend a lot of time evaluating my focus. Where am I headed? What do I want to accomplish? Am I accomplishing the things I’ve set out to do? What’s working for me? What’s not working?
Most people don’t get the chance to step back and evaluate things in their life. They only get weekends (which are busy with errands and activities) and a couple weeks of vacation time. So I’m very thankful that I can take time regularly to step away and think things through.
How? Delete all social apps and make it public!
I turned the idea of my social media break over and over in my mind. I do enjoy social media! So I wasn’t 100% looking forward to doing without it for the week. I mentioned it to a few friends in conversation. Finally, I realized that if I was serious about this social media fast, I needed to make a public announcement so I would follow through. I made a post across all my social media letting everyone know I was going on spring break and would be absent from social world as well. I knew that anyone who REALLY needed to get a hold of me over Spring Break had my cell number and could either text or call me directly. Yes, I actually hesitated due to people maybe not being able to reach me. So many people, including my family, contact me through social media. I just don’t understand it! What happened to email anyways?
Next, I deleted Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger from my phone AND my iPad. This way I couldn’t open them out of habit or mindlessness by accident. I was shocked during the week to find out how many times I swiped to the location of these apps only to see them missing. It really made me think about how many times I open these apps when I really don’t need to!
What I liked about it
To start off the week, I did what I always do…I made a plan for my week. What I would do, what I wanted to accomplish. I put things on my agenda that I don’t normally have time for;
- Cleaning out the Truck
- Cross stitching
- Listening to my favorite podcasts
- Watching movies
- Evaluating my social media interactions
- Thinking time
The days seemed longer, slower paced, and more satisfying. I was SO MUCH more present in the moment. I had been getting slightly annoyed with my husband for watching YouTube talk shows and never inviting me to listen with him. I’m interested in those things too! But as the week progressed, he did invite me to watch several YouTube videos with him and it hit me. He hadn’t invited me because I had my face buried in my phone under the guise of “I’m working”. It wasn’t him, it was me!
My mind was present, engaged enough to carry through some deeper thoughts. My husband and I ended up engaging in multiple in depth conversations about some great things!
None of this would have happened if I hadn’t decided to step away from social for the week. And I didn’t want to loose what I had gained. Social media fills the mind with so much constant information that I experience somewhat of a sense of stress just from how much is “going on”. I knew I wanted to continue my social media interactions, but I was ready to find a way to make my time on these platforms A LOT more intentional.
What I didn’t like about it
There were of course several things I did not like about taking an absence from social media. As I mentioned before, there are several women that I follow both as role models and friends. I missed engaging with these people on a daily basis. It was a bit annoying that I couldn’t hear what they were sharing. But with all good things, I think it’s good to take a break, just for the sheer appreciation factor. When we do without something that we enjoy for a period of time, it makes us appreciate it all the more when we come back to it.
I also didn’t like learning how much I actually use social media when I don’t intend to. I open my phone to pull up a recipe to cook dinner and out of habit open up social instead. 10 or 15 minutes of scrolling later, I bring myself back to the task at hand and resume my recipe search. This was not an easy thing for me to admit about myself! But I was glad to learn it and see it clearly so I can be proactive about my usage.
How I plan to move forward with social
Going forward, I want to be very proactive and intentional with my social media usage. It’s been nearly two weeks now and I still haven’t resumed posting to my feed! I’ve jumped on stories a few times, but nothing like I used to. I did not lose any followers, contrary to what I had heard. The thing that’s always bothered me about pouring my creative energy into social media is that I have very little control of the platform. Instagram has locked me out of my account in the past, for several days. Facebook has shut down my peers private groups with no warning or explanation. Sure, social is a great place to connect with people….but I don’t feel like it’s a genuine connection until I have an email address, phone number, or some other way of staying in touch with these people outside of social. And so, I plan on putting my blog as a priority over social. Rather than trying so hard to build my following on social, I want to pour my efforts into building my email list instead. My blog, my email list…these are things that I own and I control what happens on these platforms. So you might notice less content from me on social, more blog posts, consistent letters to my mailing list, and more private messages on social platforms. I’m not going anywhere! Just putting things I control on the internet as a higher priority. So my question for you…..are you on my email list!? Because that’s where you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me. And I want to have a genuine connection with you!
