Hello friends, it’s been a long time hasn’t it? I suppose many of you who have me on Facebook haven’t seen me around lately. You might see the occasional like, the periodical post, the rarest of comments, but mostly, it’s been the sound of crickets hasn’t it? I am sure that I have missed a lot of important moments in your lives, from birthdays, to new jobs, to losses, and more. To a degree, I’m sorry I missed those moments, but I’m not sorry about putting the distance between me and social media.
I appreciate the magic that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms create by allowing us to connect with each other, even if we’re far apart or we don’t see each other enough. Or even just keeping up to date on the people we’ve known through the various stages of our lives. I love seeing the updates from my regular customers from jobs gone by, knowing that they’re doing well, and grieving for them when they’re not. It’s the same for the friends I had in school, or the people I met in some other way.
This post isn’t a love letter to social media, and it isn’t a declaration of hate for it either, I just simply wanted to explain why I haven’t been around much. If it encourages you to follow suit, I’m thrilled, if it makes you think about how the constant connectedness makes you feel or look at your mental health, I’m happy. For a long time, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, seeing post after post after post about all of these things going on in everyone’s lives and thinking to myself, “I don’t even care.” It’s not that I didn’t care about the people who were posting, but I found myself just overloaded with information on their lives that I had no need or desire to know.
I slowly started to drift away, finding myself only really watching videos of cats (I mean, what else is the internet good for anyway?) and finding memes to send to the few people I actually regularly talk to. One of those friends mentioned to me that she actually ended up deleting the Facebook app from her phone because of how the mindless scrolling affected her mental health. After a while, she said she found herself significantly less anxious and that she was encouraged by a book she was reading, and one that was on my “to be read” list for a while.
Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig is a book that talks about how social media and rapidly advancing technology can have massive effects on our mental health, and how we deal with stress and anxiety. I’m sure you all know that I struggle with anxiety. As I go through each new day, I feel like I learn more about how I struggle with it, and how it affects my every day life. I even have moments where I realize that I was struggling with anxiety even as a child and early teenager.
Armed with page markers, I tabbed every part that I related to, felt important, or felt that I needed to remember in moments of high anxiety. With the encouragement of my friend, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone, and later when I read Notes, felt like I made the right decision. I found it incredibly unsettling how many times I unlocked my phone just to mindlessly scroll, and realize, “wait a minute, I deleted Facebook,” and then lock my phone again. As time went on, I found I checked my phone less and less, and I started to feel better.
I often had moments where I wanted to show something to someone that I was out with that was on Facebook and was stuck with either just forgetting about it, or going through the tedious task of logging on in my phone’s browser. After that, I left it logged in for a while and would check in for maybe five minutes or so daily. I know that people use Facebook to connect and send invites to events, so I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything like that I was invited to.
The thing is, I don’t hate Facebook, I just realized that I needed to cut my consumption of it down significantly. It wasn’t good for my mental health knowing all of these things about people, comparing all of the things I saw that were going wrong in my life, to all of the things going right in others. It wasn’t good spending all of this time that I could be reading or connecting in real life with people. It wasn’t healthy the compulsive need I had to “get rid of the tiny red dot” in the corner of the apps on my phone. It’s why I also turned my work emails off when I wasn’t working.
So far, I feel better. It by no means eliminated my anxiety, I still struggle daily with it. It just made me feel like I could control this one unhealthy aspect of my life, the ability to make a mentally healthy choice. I still check Facebook daily, but I severely limit my time on it, and I find that I don’t spend more than a couple minutes scrolling instead of the constant 30-40 minute scrolling sessions that I used to do. I know I miss a lot this way, but at the end of the day, I need to responsible for myself, what I consume and how I consume it.
I know the whole irony of this blog post might be the fact that I’m writing it at all, and sharing it to Facebook, but I know that sometimes it takes a nudge, a little bit of encouragement, someone to say, “me too,” to take the plunge. It’s what I needed from my friend to do it for myself, and I know that more and more people are choosing to disconnect from a world that constantly connected. I hope that this post encourages you to take a look at what you and your mental health needs. I hope that if you’ve been thinking about leaving social media behind for a bit, that it gives you the courage to do it. I just hope that it makes you feel like you’re not alone.
I love you all deeply.
So until next time, if you need me, you either have my number, or you can use the Facebook messenger app.
Sprinkled in star dust... 