Reckoning with My Social Media Use

Trying to Change, Give Advice, and Trust the Process

A Day Off Social Media

I haven’t spent a day (completely) off of social media in around 2 years now, and that scares me. The amount of time that I spend on my phone certainly demonstrates that I have an addiction to the social media apps that I use on it. I’ve been thinking for a while that I should try to take a day off of my phone altogether, but I don’t know exactly how I’d do it. Would I just limit myself from social media? Or would I try not to use any app that wasn’t essential (i.e. apps other than Phone and Messages)? Would I take the day off my phone completely? Would I take the day to be away from screens completely? If I did this successfully, would I continue to take time off?

These are the kinds of questions that pop into the mind of an overthinker who’s obsessed with and addicted to social media and wants to think of ways to avoid challenging himself to live a day without it. However, regardless of how I structure my day off, change only comes through an effort to change one’s ways, so I’m prepared to make an effort and see what I can improve after I do so.

What follows will be some form of recounting the experiences I had on my day away from social media, how I enjoyed it, and what I hope to do next. For my future self who is going to be writing about this, just know that you don’t have to enjoy it! It’s a change to your habitual nature and your structure, and it will feel threatening. However, it may also open you up to a feeling of bliss that you would not have found if you hadn’t tried it. I await your response.

The Day After

I tried it out! And to be quite honest, the attempt was somewhat half-assed. It doesn’t feel like there was a whole lot that differentiated it from a normal day in my life, because I was able to create stress for myself in other ways. In particular, screen-time still dominated my daily schedule, despite my phone not being the primary screen of use. I found a way to occupy my day either watching sports or TV shows, which kind of began to defeat the purpose of why I was doing the day off social media in the first place. I was still depending on easy distractions, which didn’t completely align with my initial purpose.

At the same time, I think a dreamlike image of what spending a day off social media would feel like also contributed to my stress levels on that day, despite previous warnings to myself. If my time off social media was not giving me profound peacefulness, tranquility, and preventing me from being insecure, then was I doing anything right? Everyone I see and read about who’s taken time off social media has said it drastically improved their mental health, so why isn’t it improving mine?

It’s taken me some time to understand why, and I think I finally do.

Leaving social media doesn’t just magically fix all of your problems. That’s an illusion that media have pushed you to believe, or a story that your mind has created through your interactions with people who have left social media feeling happy and healthy. The simple fact is, leaving social media makes you reckon with the life you live outside of it. If you can accept that experience, then it is far easier to accept your problems. If you choose to continue to avoid accepting your present moment, you will continue to find distractions in other forms. Social media is likely NOT the root cause of all your problems, as they exist with or without social media, and the comparative nature of social media is not absent right when you log off your Instagram account.

It’s foolish to try to tell you that anything will bring you extended, un-interrupted happiness, but developing a practice that helps you accept your present moment, avoid comparison, and embrace uncomfortability is important. If you leave social media, but continue to think in the comparative ways that social media encourages, then you haven’t really left social media. If you continue to behave like a comparison addict after you’ve left social media, then you’ll continue to live in a headspace where your experience seems like its inadequate compared to the fictional narrative lives of other people that you procure in your head. Leaving social media MAY be a healthy step for your mental health, but it WON’T do the work for you magically. You have to put that work in yourself.

So what’s the point? If leaving social media doesn’t necessarily help on it’s own, what will? What if leaving social media is too difficult?

That last question is one that I contemplate a lot every time that I consider leaving social media. I get so much information that I find useful and valuable from social media, despite the major pitfalls of it, and the issues that it causes me. How do you mend the wounds social media causes without ridding yourself of it? Do you try to use it less? That’s a good start, but it’s not always an easy solution. Initially acknowledging that you have an obsession and a problem is already difficult for people. Asking people to then consistently remind themselves that they must curb their obsession while still using it is even more difficult. It’s like telling an all-day drinker that drinking is bad for them, but they can still drink at certain times of the day. It doesn’t really root out the problem.

In my opinion, the most pertinent aid to those who seek to root out “numbing” social media use without stopping social media use entirely is the task to try and use social media in a mindful manner.

I’ve been around my fair share of mindfulness, and avoiding the occasional “Zen parenting” from my Buddhist father is almost impossible. However, despite my Dad’s consistent wisdom, my example of mindful behavior comes from the description of a Zen class at Washington University. During my freshman year, I met with some Professors that wanted to pitch their classes for us to take in the upcoming semesters. One professor told us about a Sophomore Seminar where meditation would be a key aspect, and detailed for us some of the practices we would be doing if we were to enroll.

She mentioned that one thing you could do to be mindful was to “mindfully eat” a grape. This example stood out because it produced in my mind the image of a person slowly eating small bites out of a grape, taking each bite with absolute focus and clarity. It seemed absurd, like we would be little mice chewing on a block of cheese. But it is almost the quintessential example of how to be mindful. Grapes, being one of the smaller fruits, are so easily just popped into your mouth. We rarely ever think before we’ve eaten 20+ of them. If we were to eat each grape with absolute attention to that one grape, how it feels, tastes, how the juice flows into our mouth, then we are paying attention to the most miniscule but most immediate and detailed moments of our present experience. That, in a sense, is a goal of mindfulness. It’s being in the present moment and noticing the various aspects to our experience which create the moments we find ourselves in.

So, let’s apply the example of mindfulness when eating a grape to social media. Can we mindfully use social media? I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. It’s certainly difficult. This may not be right, but I can certainly picture what mindful use of social media looks like. First, it involves slowing things down a little bit. It involves paying attention to all the things that you do on social media (or your phone) that you often do without thinking. Pay attention to each swipe if you’re on Tinder, each post you like on Instagram, or each tweet you retweet. Pay attention to what you see. Do you just see your phone? Do you pay attention to the background of your environment behind it? Do you pay attention to your hands sitting patiently on the edge of your phone case as you watch a YouTube video? Ground yourself in the fullness of your experience.

This will make it easier to prevent yourself from the mindless social media use, the use that sucks you into the phone, the use where you can’t see past the moving images on the electronic screen. It doesn’t fix everything, and it’s not easy to do (occasionally or consistently), but it does promote a form of social media use with less attachment to the events within your phone, one that pays more attention to the entirety of the present moment and accounts for the minute actions that make up our experience.

Collecting and Reflecting

I struggle every single day with social media use. One of the most integral parts of my day-to-day experience is also the most integral factor in my self-doubt. Is it possible for me to use social media mindfully and productively? While that remains to be seen, it’s a question that begs answering. What is true is that using social media mindfully is extremely difficult to do, and that it is quite likely that most of the time we use social media, it will not be in a mindful manner. Especially for someone who has used social media mindlessly in the past, it is difficult to not fall back into the repititous scrolling and interacting patterns that we become so used to. To use social media mindfully is basically using social media in a way that works against the core addictive quality that social media creates. It is a middle-ground that is extremely hard to toe and it won’t often be toed successfully.

I’m gonna be honest. It’s gonna be extremely difficult for me to do this consistently. I know that. My mind consistently tries to work against me when I try to limit social media use. I get frustrated with myself. I get angry. I wonder why it can’t just be easier. I’ll try to take my own advice about going easy on myself, but that’s one of the hardest things for me to do when it comes to things that I consistently want to improve and consistently DON’T improve. It is helpful to remind yourself that every moment is a new moment, and in every moment you have a chance to be a person completely uninhibited by past choices, but this reminder does not help ALL of the time. This is why PATIENCE is important, more than anything else. While every moment of one’s life is extremely important, change does not happen often within a day. You won’t magically feel like you don’t have a social media addiction because you used it mindfully once. If you use it mindlessly after that, it’s easy to feel like you aren’t growing.

My general point is that despite the difficulty with a process of trying to change your habits, your best bet is to not overreact, to be patient, and to trust that over time, you will continue to grow if you continue to make efforts to employ healthier habits. Don’t expect perfection, and trust that you’re improving. This doesn’t just apply to reducing social media obsession, but many facets of life. If you trust the process of growth, and have faith in that, you’ll be able to overcome moments of doubt and “relapse”, and grow into a person who is more independent and comfortable on a moment-to-moment basis.

Thanks Philadelphia 76ers! Not a fan of your team, but “trusting the process” is now a motto of my life, and I hope that it helps also inspire you as well in whatever processes of change that you try to go through.