I know a lot of people that proudly announce "I turned off my Instagram/Twitter/Facebook notifications!" every once in awhile. I've been thinking about hopping on the "detox bandwagon", but last week, I was presented with the perfect opportunity to do so. I'll be graduating a semester late, but the vast majority of my friends graduated last week. Between the Facebook posts and the graduation photo shoots, I was cranky.
I made the decision early last week to not only turn off my social notifications but also to stay off any social media platform. I still used Snapchat SPARINGLY, but I refused to watch any stories. It was hard, but it didn't suck as badly as I thought it would.
My social media detox got me thinking: What if I went further and detoxed from my text messages?
DISCLAIMER: I didn't do this to "make fun" of people that do social media detoxes or turn off their social media notifications. I actually did that last week, too. I'm just going one step further. (One really unnecessary step.)
I ended my social media detox on Wednesday and started my "iMessage detox" on Thursday. If you want to do this, too (I don't recommend it but to each his own), here's how to turn off iMessage notifications:
1. Go to "Settings".
2. "Notifications".
3. Scroll all the way down to "Messages".
4. Turn off "Allow Notifications".
And voilà! No one can contact you!
When I started this experiment, I told my friends and my parents that if they really needed to contact me, they could message me on Facebook. I didn't really tell anyone why I was turning my notifications off, I just told them that I was doing it.
Pros:
Let me just start with the positive part of cutting off contact with the outside world for a week. When you turn off notifications, apparently that also means the little red notification number that pops up on the corner of the app. I immediately felt less stressed when I couldn't see just how many messages I was getting. I didn't feel the compulsion to constantly scroll through my messages. This past week, I didn't feel like I was on my phone nearly as much as I usually am.
Lucky for me, I was visiting family with my mother over the weekend, so at the very least, she could just talk to me if she needed something.
With all that said, there were more annoying things than good things. So here we go.
Cons:
In only 24 hours, I had missed one drunk text, one message from my old band director asking for some help, and another message from a friend asking a fairly time-sensitive question. None of this was the end of the world, but I wasn't thrilled. I responded to the drunk text the next day, which resulted in a week-long game of "phone tag" via text message. As for my band director, he wanted to chat on the phone. Due to the fact that I couldn't hold a consistent text conversation, we weren't able to catch up until two days later. I was in the middle of a different conversation when that friend asked me her question, so I was lucky enough to respond within a few hours. Still, it was annoying that I didn't even have the notification number on my iMessage app. (I know I said earlier that it made me feel a little better to get rid of that number, but eh.) To see if I'd missed anything, I had to open the app (which doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you've sworn off messages, it's annoying).
On Friday, I went to a bar with my family (I know. Weird, right?) to see my dad's band play. While I was sitting at the bar, I got bored. I wanted to just text my friends to keep busy, but I knew that if I fired off a text, I would need to keep checking back to see if they'd responded. While I didn't feel the need to be on my phone constantly, it took up a lot of time to hold a simple conversation. So I just didn't, for the most part. I ended up double and triple-texting a lot of people if they didn't respond instantly. When I realized what I was doing, I just stayed out of my messages again for a while. No one wants to be that girl.
Summary:
All-in-all, I guess it wasn't that bad. Regardless, I wouldn't recommend turning off your iMessage notifications. There's no real benefit and it just became annoying. If anything, turn off your banner notifications. You'll still get a little "ping" when you get a message and your notification number will still be displayed in the corner of your message app, but the notification won't sit at the top of your screen, daring you to answer. That's how I have my phone configured now, and it's not bad. I kind of like it. I wish there was a setting to turn off the sound notification, too. As long as I can see the number go up on my message app, I'll know that I have a message. (I guess I could just leave my phone on silent and turn off the vibration, but who wants to do that?)
Rating:
4/10. Would not recommend.
Glad I did it, but I wouldn't do it again.
