Lessons learned from my social media vacation
In 2023 I took a month off from social media. Here are my insights.
(This is a post I sent to my email list in January 2024. I made a few 2025 updates.)
In December I took a break from social media. I decided to call it a social media vacation because that sounds a lot more fun than detox, cleanse or fast. Here is some background on my experience plus some tips, tools, and action steps for better managing social media.
The Decision
I've been feeling very strongly about digital life and supporting people with getting more intentional in their screen usage. I have my own story of being in front of screens all the time and then making a lot of lifestyle changes that led me to really enjoy the actual world a lot more. A story for another day.
I'm observing how screens and especially social media are ruining our perceptions and our natural abilities and desires. We all see it. I believe most of us don't even feel good on devices but we can't stop.
So, if I want to help others with digital life balance, I have to be able to balance it myself. So in November it came to me that it was time to take a break from social media. I decided to do this in December which felt doable. I set up some things to make it harder to use social media.
Preparation
With some friends, I only had contact info on social media, so I asked them individually for other contact info, and I made a few posts for people to contact me before I left. My main forms of contact are email, phone, and Telegram. I am still using Telegram for direct messaging and for some groups. I have a folder in Telegram called "Alignment" which only includes groups that I directly participate in and are valuable and solutions-oriented. This way I wouldn't have to go through and unsubscribe from everything else.
The specifics:
I uninstalled Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter from my phone.
I blocked those sites on my Mac.
I wasn't logged in to those sites on my phone web browser.
I only browsed my Alignment folder and direct messages on Telegram.
Observations
One of the first things I noticed was emotions came up. My general frustratcions around my decisions and what to do about work and money and finding my next location, and on and on. These have been surfacing all year in 2023 but now I didn't have my go-to coping mechanism. Sometimes I would sit with those feelings and then get more agitated. But what was interesting (and probably predictable) was I went to other coping mechanisms.
I started binge watching YouTube. Years ago I used to watch "Let's Plays," or videos of other people playing video games. I stopped back then because I was getting into the holistic health mindset and knew it wasn't "good" for me. But now I was revisiting it and remembering that I really enjoy this form of entertainment. At least in this case I'm laughing during my passive fun. Whereas social media gets serious and gloomy about the "current thing" or the "upcoming thing" and it's an emotional roller coaster. There was one video where I laughed harder than I'd laughed in a looooooong time. I had to pause the video and just kept laughing for a few minutes.
I will admit the YouTube watching did get out of hand.
Another thing I noticed is some of my creativity and focus started to come back. I was having more ideas and taking the time to actually do some things. I took more notes and wrote things, got more concrete ideas for things I could do, and I was more able to focus enough to do them. I had this realization:
I now believe that the real danger of AI is not that it'll become smarter than us, but that social media and screens will make us dumber than robots.
I started to reach out to people individually since I wasn't making posts. This was an interesting process. I had to consciously decide I wanted to share a thing with specific people instead of just blasting it out to everyone. Then I was having some feelings around rejection and not wanting to "bother" people and other general discomfort.
It's also new-ish to me to just "check in" on people to see how their lives are going and if they want to hang out. I usually feel like I have to have a direct purpose to starting a conversation. Here it really helped that it was the holidays.
So I made a list of people to reach out to and said happy holidays (or winter solistice or whatever I thought was relevant) and asked how they're doing. (Sorry if I missed you...) I started some conversations, reached out to people I haven't talked to in a while, and even had a few video calls. Internet interactions are still pretty bizarre to me, although I guess I could say the same about real life interactions. Reaching out to people can still be a challenge sometimes, because I'll play out all these scenarios in my mind about what could happen and what they might think and so on. But like most other things it improves with practice. Also important to observe the evidence that the thing we feared didn't actually happen. Some people didn't respond, but nobody was angry or reacted in some weird way and some people were happy I reached out even if I hadn't in a long time.
Breaking the fast and going forward
My creativity and focus have now continued into January, even though I’ve returned to social media. I’m continuing some projects and forming some content and offerings for my mission, which has also become more clear. I now feel more strongly about how badly we need to get a grip on our screen usage.
When I logged back in to Facebook and Instagram I noticied they don’t have as much of a hook in me. I read a few posts and I just didn’t feel okay and I stopped. I didn’t even feel like I missed anything. Everyone was still talking about the same garbage they were before I left. I did DM some people and look at some funny/cute things but otherwise it just wasn’t appealing. i initially didn’t even reinstall the phone apps.
I am spending some more time in social media at the moment because I’m hooking up the Healing Octopus Instagram and Facebook pages and I plan to post some content there mainly to get people to the mailing list and website. I am also working on some tutorials about exporting data from social media and changing the privacy settings to make social media less creepy. Let me know if those are topics you’re interested in.
I’m a little annoyed that I had to install the Instagram phone app in order to update the website links on my bio. Instagram has a few features that can only be done in the app but most things can be done on the web site.
I’m slowly scaling down my YouTube time by spending more time on creating than on consuming. Although laughing is clearly valuable so I will still watch things, just maybe not get sucked in to it. My plan is to watch how much time I’m spending on YouTube and reduce my daily time limit.
I had some thoughts on limiting social media to something like checking it once a week, but I'm using browser extensions to set daily limits so I won't have to think about it.
Summary
Work on your inner stuff, or else you'll replace one undesirable habit with another.
Practice and protect your focus and creativity.
Reach out to people individually, sometimes for no reason at all.
Emphasize in person interactions or at least video calls.
Sometimes you'll need a break from a thing in order to realize how much of an impact it has on you.
Tips, tools, and action steps
I’m a huge fan of getting concrete action steps and practical tips. Here are some tips and tools to help with screen usage, even if you’re not taking a social media vacation. I continue to use most of these.
I see myself depending on these apps less as I strengthen more of my internal discipline and resolve my own inner stuff so I won’t feel a need to spend so much time on distracting sites. So I see these tools as more of a temporary measure to get started.
Freedom app: Allows scheduling focus time so distracting sites are blocked during certain hours. (2025 update: I don’t use this any more.)
Freedom browser extensions: I used Insights to measure how much time I was spending on sites. Pause adds a waiting screen before loading distracting sites. Limit sets daily time limits for distracting sites. (2025 update: I don’t use these any more.)
Unhook browser extension: This removes a lot of the distracting elements of YouTube. I have it set to hide the related videos sidebar and the related videos cards at the end of videos. This way I can avoid most of the shiny things. (2025 update: Instead of Unhook I now use FreeTube, which is a standalone app for more privately using Youtube, and I disable most of the distractions.)
There are some other extensions that will hide feeds on social media sites but I haven't tried them yet.
Habo habit tracker app: I used this to mark each day when I was not on social media. I like this app because it’s simple, privacy-friendly, and doesn’t require a login. I recommend using paper though because then you get the physical experience. Another time I was tracking a habit I had a large sheet of paper and drew a calendar and drew check marks for the habits I completed each day. There’s a ton of productivity info on this method and how it works, but it’s simple enough to just start doing it.
Little Snitch: This is a Mac firewall app that I used to block the web sites. This is overkill for this purpose but I had it already and hadn’t discovered the Freedom app in the beginning of my vacation. There are a few other nerdy ways to block websites on computers.
Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite mobile apps. I don't have Facebook on my phone right now, but when I did, I was using the Facebook Lite app. This app is meant for developing countries where bandwidth is limited, so it doesn't have so many "features" and is harder to use. In other words it's less addictive. If you only need Messenger on your phone, there is also the Messenger Lite app. (2025 update: I think the Messenger Lite app was discontinued.)
Let me know if this is helpful or if you have questions or other feedback. I’m thinking of having a social media group challenge at some point, with support and accountability.
(2025 update: I took another month off the following July and December 2024. I didn’t do it this year because I’m working on my service offerings and I’m promoting myself and my services on social media. I find this more annoying because it’s difficult for me to mess with social media “in moderation” where I only do work stuff and not get distracted. I haven’t really solved that problem yet. I also generally dislike creating content for social media so that’s been another challenge…)