HOW I REDUCED MY SOCIAL MEDIA USE

I started using social media “loosely” for a while now and as a result I have a whole new outlook on my blogging goals and aspirations and I wanted to share some of the things that helped me reduce my social media use as well as things that I learned during this process. This post is part 1 of this 2 part series and on this post, I’ll be sharing tips on how to get the much needed break that we all need and on the next post I’ll be sharing my experience and findings so far on this journey.

I mentioned the word “loosely” instead of using the word “detox” because I am not taking a break for a short period of time as I’m looking for a realistic and sustainable solution and create a habit that I can adhere to long term. I’m being more mindful about my usage and “reduce” the amount of time I spend on it rather than eliminating it altogether. Let’s be honest, we CANNOT cut out social media from our lives fully, it’s just not feasible.

Since summer of 2018 when I started blogging and focused on monetizing by Instagram, my social media usage has sky rocketed. The truth is, I love social media especially Instagram because it’s given me much more than what it has taken from me (or so I thought).

I spent unreasonably long hours on the app to keep up with the new algorithm and to stay “relevant”, I guess you can say the FOMO has been super REAL! I have taken mini breaks here and there when life got overwhelming but while I was away from social media, I still found myself thinking about it. I thought about losing momentum on Instagram that I worked so hard to gain. I thought about losing out on potential collaborations and more importantly followers. I know these things are hard to admit but this is many bloggers’ reality these days.

Since COVID hit back in March 2020, I found my life turning upside down and like many others, I have been navigating these unprecedented times in my own ways. The first few months was absolutely revitalizing working from home and having the time and flexibility to be able to do other things that I enjoy doing, i.e. spending more time on my blog and I thoroughly enjoyed that flexibility in my life until my workload at my corporate job tripled causing several mental breakdowns in the process. Not to defend myself but I want to add that  this has been an extra difficult time lately for our family of 2 full time working parents with a 5 year old homeschooled child, not to undermine others’ struggles but this will give you a little bit more of my background and why I took this decision. Then in June, the BLM movement started, I found myself at a loss, angry, sad, frustrated and just helpless. I focused all of my time and energy to raise awareness from my platform and found myself going down a deep dark hole. I have history of depression and so even after the movement died down, I found myself in a very low point mentally that I have never experienced before. I didn’t realize how deeply I was invested and in turn affected by all the atrocities that was going around in the world (it still does). This was the last straw for me and I knew I needed to change something or else this was affecting my mental health, my family, my life in general and something I desperately needed to recuperate from.

7 WAYS TO REDUCE SOCIAL MEDIA USE

1. Announce Your Intention:

I have been on and off my Instagram in the last 5 months and I have shared multiple times with my followers as to how I’m taking things slow on my account. In the beginning, I had the “all or none” mindset where I didn’t post at all for a bit and then when I went back I was overly active. It’s only recently I have found a system that’s been working great for me. I went completely off grid a few times which helped ease the transition to a greater extent (this was unintentional tbh, let’s give credit to the summer weather and loosening of the lockdown restrictions). I posted only 4 times during the entire month of July and shared very little stories which has been unheard of in the last 2 years. Because in the past even when I took breaks from in-feed posts, I was always active on my ig stories sharing random parts of my day and I realized this didn’t add much value in my life nor it did for my followers. I have declined many collaboration offers from fellow bloggers and several partnerships that just didn’t appeal to me and I didn’t want to waste my time on doing something I wasn’t feeling 100% for. As a next step, I even went into details on my posts where I explained how poorly I’ve been feeling mentally and why taking a break In general was so important for me! The trick here is accountability, once you share something publicly, it’s harder to turn around to change your words. But this should not be the driving factor and one have to have good enough reasons for doing this for their ownself and not for others.

2. Delete Certain Apps:

I didn’t realize how much time I spend on my phone in general in doing thousand other things other than being on social media. Like I had an app where I clipped coupons for grocery and even though it was a great money saving tool that worked when things were normal and I had the time to go through these coupons at the grocery stores but now during this pandemic, I go in and out the grocery super quick and I have not used that app ONCE in the last 5 months. So I deleted it. If things go back to normal, I might use it but I’m better off without it as that gave me at least 30 minutes of my day back that I wasted on clipping coupons. This is just an example but think of other apps that literally adds 0 value in your life and do yourself a favor and just go ahead and delete them. For me Viber and Snapchat are few other apps like that which I deleted.

3. Turn Off All Notifications:

This is something I have always done since the beginning of my blogging days and I think it helped me quite a lot in keeping my usage on check on random days but it’s ever more important now that I want to do this properly. Social Media is not a life and death situation and trust me you don’t need to be notified the moment someone likes your photo or posts on their account. Turn off every single notifications and check your social media on your designated time.

4. Set Aside Designated Time For Social Media Use:

I am still struggling with this but this could be a serious game changer. I know a lot of successful bloggers do this and I think that is one of the Key factors to their success. If you want to be successful in blogging, you do need to put in the hours but definitely need to be smart about your time management. I used to write IG captions or blog posts on the go, at playgrounds, on lunch breaks, while watching a show and then realized I wasn’t producing quality contents because I definitely would be distracted while doing 2 things at once. I want to set aside about 2 hours for blogging: research, writing, etc. other than shooting and editing. Shooting and editing can be squeezed in between a busy day but the technical part needs to be done in a more calmer environment so I think early in the morning and end of the day is ideal. I also want to set aside an hour straight for engaging and posting on Instagram where I want to be fully active rather than constantly logging in and out throughout the entire day.

5. Spend More Time Outside (or do things that you enjoy):

Luckily I started this journey during summer so I had lots of opportunities to be outdoors but unlike other times, I did not record every single thing I did on weekends like I used to before. We went on a mini vacation in between and I did not record even 1/3 of the activities we did during the time which was very very refreshing. Yes, it’s fun to watch others’ travel stories, I do enjoy it too but I felt the need to truly disconnect while I was away and only shared few clips here and there when I was absolutely free and had nothing going on. Remember, I’m not trying to eliminate my time on social media, so I’m still sharing my life, just not as much as before. I also started doing more work around the house, updating little corners that needed my attention and again unlike other times, I just stayed away from sharing every single detail. And I know this can backfire because end of the day, I’m a blogger especially with a home décor niche; so not sharing such details may not be of my benefit but this is where I’m trying to be more strategic and just be very selective on sharing things that will add value to my blog yet give me back a lot of uninterrupted time.

6. Monitor Your Daily Phone Usage:

Instagram along with IPhone has the usage tracker now and I highly recommend using that because let’s be real, we all like to think that we use social media mindfully as we are all busy adults however if you look at those data, your jaws will surely drop, at least mine did. At one point my Instagram usage was averaging 9 hours a day but I kept telling myself that I don’t need to feel guilty as this app brings part of my income and it’s also a source of positivity and inspiration. But let me tell you this, even at my day job that pays 3 times more than what I earn from blogging, I spend only 7 hours a day so I caught my own bullshit and decided to make a change right there.

7. Unfollow Some Accounts:

On Instagram, engagement is Queen, if followers were the KING! Without engagement your followers mean nothing and this is something that will affect the likelihood of landing brand collaborations. So it’s very important to get back to those dms and comments and also in turn engage with the people you follow. And I noticed a lot of times, I can be scrolling mindlessly for hours going through accounts that bring me no inspiration or joy. So I periodically go through my “following list” and clean it out and only follow people that I love connecting with. Having a large following list also means having to spend twice as much time on engaging on them which is not feasible for a busy working mom like me. This is a super important tip, implement it in your Instagram usage and you can thank me later.

REDUCING SOCIAL MEDIA RELATED ANXIETY

8. Stop Watching The News:

During this pandemic, I knew the first step in tackling my mental health issues was to reduce exposure from the news. No, I DO NOT believe ignorance is bliss rather it’s a choice and sadly it’s a choice I had to make to protect my mental health. Since the pandemic broke out, I’ve been glued to the tv- night and day and it went on as the BLM movement escalated. So I made a conscious choice and stopped watching the news altogether, however I still got highlights of the world events from friends on Facebook and also on Instagram. But the information load was manageable. It wasn’t like being bombarded with hundreds of bad news thrown at you like a meteor. Upsetting news that I heard here and there still affected me but it was a load that I could live with.

9. Mute Certain Accounts:

If you follow a mixture of accounts with various niches on Instagram, you will have an idea of what type of news that person shares and based on that hypothesis, I started muting some accounts to shield myself from further triggering news. Trust me, if you are a heavy Instagram user like me, this will change your life. The reason I muted these accounts instead of unfollowing them is because I don’t NOT like what they post but at that time, I couldn’t process the information they were sharing and I wanted the option to go back and re-follow their posts and stories. This way I could be discreet and also didn’t break the connection I had with that person. This is a really cool tool of Instagram that I absolutely love!

10. Be Flexible:

In this day and age technology is the necessary evil and we absolutely cannot eliminate it from our lives fully and we need to acknowledge that. My main goal was to cut down mindless usage of the social media/phone which in turn addressed many of my mental health issues which was a huge motivating factor for me. I will definitely stumble and fail in the process but knowing the WHY and HOW will keep me on track. I think it’s got a lot to do with my mindset as well. When I started seeing the benefits of being away from my phone, I started feeling better about my decision and it was much easier to stick to it. Let’s hope I can continue this in the long run! 🤞

If you made to this far, thanks for reading along, I honestly didn’t think I have so much to say about this topic but goes to show how important this topic is for me and on the next post I will be sharing things I learned from this journey. Hope to see you there!

Now you turn! Have you taken a social media break lately? How did you feel about it? What helped you stay on track? If not, what stops you from taking one? I would love to hear your thoughts!