When the end of December roles around, I try to think about my goals, mental health and productivity, and set resolutions for the new year. Maybe this is cheesy, but the new year is as good of a reminder as any to reflect and recalibrate. Last year, like many, I started to feel “behind” where I “should” be, and got down on myself for not having enough. Not having a big enough salary, not having a car, not having my own place (or much in the way of furniture for that matter), not having enough time to work on my side business, not having the perfect wardrobe, not traveling enough, blah blah blah. Once I start criticizing myself, the list quickly becomes endless.
Unfortunately, when I get started on this path, I can quickly fall into a spiral while all of my productivity and momentum comes to a screeching halt. Because how can you motivate yourself to get anything done when you feel like all the work you’ve put in so far has barely moved you an inch in the right direction?
Last December was slightly different in that I only fell into this hole for a week or so, and then I decided I needed to make some changes. I know; what a concept. Let’s gloss over the fact that it’s taken me 27 years of life and 2 years of therapy to get to a point where I can recognize a negative pattern and decide to investigate the cause in pursuit of actually solving the problem. The point is: I wanted to solve the problem. So, using some good old fashioned self awareness (and Google), I started picking apart what was causing me to feel so down on myself.
I think we’ve all seen the articles in the news about social media sucking up our time, putting a rose colored filter on all our friends’ lives, and in general making us more depressed. The problem is that I never thought of myself as someone who would fall into these statistics.
I don’t spend too much time on Instagram, it’s just a way to pass the time when I have nothing else going on. Obviously everyone is only posting their best moments online, why would I think that their lives are any better than mine? Don’t be absurd, no app has the power to make me depressed.
Still, I kept turning over the concept of social media induced anxiety and depression in my head. Maybe it was putting me in a bad mood. I started paying more attention to how I felt while scrolling through my various feeds. Careful observation over the course of a few weeks, along with some information from my iPhone’s screen time reports, revealed two things to me about my social media use:
- It was a powerful procrastination tactic. I was averaging almost 3 hours a day on my phone, and up to 4+ hours on a lazy Sunday, almost entirely on social media (texting/messaging apps were the runner up). I realized that I wasn’t just looking at social media while I was in line at the grocery store, or waiting for my lunch order, etc. I was using it to put off making tough decisions. For example, I’ve been wanting to paint my apartment for months. But I could never decide if it would be worth the time, money, and effort when I know that I don’t want to be in this apartment long term. Ideally I would be in this apartment for the shortest amount of time possible, so it seemed pointless to paint. At the same time, I don’t have any solid indication of when I’ll be able to move out, and I admittedly hate the space. It’s completely dysfunctional, puts me in a bad mood, and hinders my productivity. So that means painting would be worth it. Right? Right?! I would go back and forth on this and then instead of making a decision I would log in to Instagram for the no-solution-solution of just looking at beautiful apartments, $10,000 outfits, and dream vacations for 15 minutes until I had completely pushed the painting debate out of my head and moved on to something else.
- It was making me feel like I never had enough stuff. Speaking of $10,000 outfits and dream vacations, it turns out looking at them all day long really makes you realize how far away from that “standard” (no matter how unrealistic) you are. Snap comparisons are all but natural, but when you start doing it against the glitz and shine of the Instagram world, sometimes for over an hour a day, it can really start to take a toll. This boiled over into a masochistic online shopping habit; constantly looking at the wardrobe pieces that my favorite bloggers were wearing and then feeling like crap for not being able to buy them. Thousand dollar boots, a twenty five hundred dollar bag, diamond jewelry, etc.
- It was pressuring me to always be sharing. I can’t tell you the number of mornings I thought I was having a good hair day, broke out my phone to post a selfie to Instagram stories (as one does), only to find that I couldn’t find an angle or shot that reflected what I saw in the mirror. This immediately dampened the confidence I was feeling only seconds prior, and, well, that’s super shitty. Why was I letting my phone’s camera dictate how I felt about myself?
Recognizing the realities of how social media made me feel (it’s actually crazy I didn’t realize how unhealthy it had gotten – my self esteem was really taking a hit, albeit in a “death-by-a-thousand-cuts” sort of way), combined with my typical end-of-year freak out, was enough for me to make the decision to remove it from my phone. I actually deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and deleted the Instagram and Snapchat apps from my phone (these are my two favorites, so straight up deleting them was more intimidating). I thought I would do a January detox, and then re-evaluate how I would use the apps going forward. I managed to keep them off my phone until mid-March, when I got a bad head cold and was going stir crazy in my apartment.
In the two and a half months I spent off social media, I decluttered most of my apartment, painted my hallway, painted my kitchen, painted about 1/4 of my living room (I’m working through one wall at a time), and made a ton of progress making updates to my side project, le SECT. I also started sleeping better, feeling less anxious overall, and no longer felt the need for everything to be picture perfect so it was “shareable”.
In mid-March I re-downloaded the Instagram app and made sure to unfollow anyone that I was purely following for “aspirational” content. Now, when I checked the app, there were between 1-3 new photos of my friends and family, and that was it. Then, I posted a picture for the first time in almost three months. A few hours later, I deleted the app off my phone again. Then the following weekend I re-downloaded to share some of the progress I had been making on my apartment. Then the next day, deleted the app again. It’s nice to not have that procrastination and comparison sitting on my home screen waiting to be opened throughout the week. Maybe I’ll continue re-downloading and deleting depending on how productive I need to be, maybe at some point I’ll be able to break this habit of looking to distract myself and I won’t need to have this cycle in the first place. Hey, maybe I’ll decide I liked it better when I didn’t have any social media at all. All I know is: progress is progress, and I’m feeling a lot better about my relationship with my phone and with myself.
Stephanie says
Glad to see you back! Keep up the great work.
BeckySWM says
Thank you, Steph! 🙂