Have you ever laid in bed at night and felt empty? Almost like your entire day was meaningless? You didn't accomplish anything on your to-do list. You're going to bed with the same set of problems you woke up with and you're the exact same person you were this morning. You didn't make any lasting impacts to change your life.
You rewind your day. Nothing good happened, but nothing particularly bad did either. You'd classify your day as bland, boring, and casual and you're crippled with unfulfillment.
Do you ever get these sinking feelings?
I do. However, I'm in the process of learning that more often than not, these feelings come after a day I've spent primarily on my phone. That's right, that little handheld communication device everyone owns. A necessity in today's society.
So how could such a small piece of technology leave with me with complete dissatisfaction at the end of the day? Here's why: I usually spend way too much time absorbed in social media. I don't simply check my notifications and exit out of the app, I slowly scroll through each feed.
Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest... They each promise immediate entertainment and instant connection. They offer an inside scoop into people's lives. Super fulfilling and an incredible investment of my time, right?
Wrong. Realistically speaking, there is absolutely nothing beneficial that comes through mindless social media browsing.
The connections you encounter on social media are surface level. They aren't deep, emotionally invested relationships. You're just gazing from afar into the mere windows of people's lives.
Not only does social media fail to encompass what an actual friendship is, it leads to comparison.
I don't care how confident you are, the more time you spend looking at other people's pages, the more you will compare your life to theirs. You'll find yourself secretly judging some people and thinking, "Ooo, I've got it better than they do," or you'll look at someone else's life and wish you had what they had.
Lastly, social media can rob us of the present. That is, what is going on in real life, right in front of our eyes.
To face this epidemic, that social media is taking up too much of our lives, we've gotta be real with ourselves and acknowledge that 1) it's powerful and 2) it's addicting.
It has the power to take away our contentment and our joy, and the more time we spend devoted to it, the more control we allow it.
I'm not saying that social media doesn't have a place, I'm just suggesting that we evaluate the amount of time we spend on it each day.
And that's where this article leads, I want to challenge you to take a day off social media. Simply move your social media apps off the front screen of your smartphone and turn off all notifications. For once, only use your phone to communicate through texting and calling.
Watch your day change. Not only that, but your perspective and your attitude. Suddenly, you'll have time for the important things you've been neglecting. Cleaning your home, reading, exercising, prepping healthy snacks, striking a conversation with someone, even just thinking.
After your day off, I encourage you to keep those apps off your front screen, and only get on social media if you have something you want to share. After a couple day of this, maybe, if you think you can handle it, allow yourself to browse through your various timelines. But after a few minutes, be done for the day. You have to tell yourself that you don't need to read everything on your feeds. If you're actually curious about how someone is doing or what they are up to, shoot them a text, instead of just stalking their page. You can only see so deep into somebody's life through their accounts. Real relationships happen in real life.
I can honestly say the less time I spend on social media, the happier I am. If you struggle with the amount of time you spend browsing through social media like I have, I hope you take me up on this challenge. I hope you break your social media addiction and start to enjoy what's actually going on in your life.
