Okay, maybe this doesn't "count" as a goodbye, because I'm only taking one month off of social media, and by the time you receive this email, the month will almost be up. BUT, that time off was much-needed and has been illuminating, so it feels worthy of being written about.
Anyone who has known me for long knows that I've been on-again-off-again with social media for nearly 20 years. In the blogspot era, I'd start a blog, write my innermost thoughts on it regularly for a year, realize 100+ people were reading it daily, freak out knowing those barely edited stream-of-consciousness ramblings were not how I wanted to present myself to the public world, and delete it.
Once MySpace came out, I'd check it every day, feel bad about wasting my life away on MySpace instead of interacting with people in real life, force myself to not sign on for a month, then buy concert tickets or make other IRL plans as repentance. Rinse and repeat with pretty much every platform I've been on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads. The pattern was there from the start, but became magnified once I got a smartphone, about a decade ago.
I hate this pattern.
Being so on-again-off-again with social media makes me feel exposed, vulnerable, and ashamed. Although I'm drawn to it, I can't handle social media well for long, I haven't been able to figure out how to incorporate it into my life in a healthy way even after almost 20 years of trying, and because of the way I use it, everyone knows that. Or, worse, they might just think I'm completely emotionally unstable.
Yet, I don't want to delete it altogether. Social media still provides me value. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I actually like when someone from high school or elementary school or whatever who I totally forgot about friend requests me out of the blue. Yeah, maybe it's awkward, but it's fun! Sometimes we impacted people even as children or teens in ways that make them think of us decades later??? How cool! I don't want to shut myself off to those potential connections.
Another unpopular opinion: I like seeing photos of people's meals. And people's kids. And I like reading the oddball jokes, musings, dream recollections, complaints, and even the political rants that people usually keep silent when they are face-to-face and trying to be polite. That's why I liked Twitter so much (before Elon Musk ruined it) — in many ways it felt like being exposed to a ticker tape of innermost thoughts that you'd normally never get to access.
Since part of me does truly enjoy social media, I've often wondered why I also struggle with it so much. Learning I am a highly sensitive person with ADHD seems to hold the answer. (Well, part of the answer. The millions of dollars tech companies have spent intentionally engineering social media to be addictive and exploitative have probably played a role, too!).
Highly sensitive people process things more deeply and require more time for this processing Even just a few minutes on a social media platform likely exposes me to dozens of stimuli — breaking news about a natural disaster, a plea to participate in political action, a photo of someone's dog, a vaguely worded status update that makes me concerned for a person's mental health, an advertisement for organic towels, a photo of someone looking great, which has nothing to do with me, but might make me feel self-conscious about my current sweats-and-t-shirt situation nonetheless.
If I were to truly honor my highly sensitive nature, I'd give myself ample time to process each thing I saw. Time to read the entire news article about the disaster and thoughtfully comment, then donate, if I felt so compelled. Time to consider if the political cause is one I have an interest in or time for helping out. Time to savor the dog photo, maybe comment, maybe allow myself to wander off into feelings of gratefulness for dogs in general. Time to reach out to the acquaintance who seems potentially unwell and carefully think through the phrasing of my message. Time to reflect on if next time I buy towels they should be organic, conduct related research, and if the answer is yes, decide if this company is really the best one to purchase from. Time to process the insecurity that arose from someone else's attractive photo, to practice self-love, and to remind myself that their looks have no bearing on mine, and I can admire their attractiveness without reflecting on my own.
But I don't sign into social media for only a few minutes, then spend the next 10 to 30 minutes processing what I saw. I sign in, get hooked on scrolling, and finally break away maybe half an hour later, while feeling shitty and also meta-shitty, by which I mean I feel 1, bad generally because I'm overstimulated and emotionally overwhelmed and 2, more bad because I'm angry at myself for not learning (after two decades!) that doing this always makes me feel bad, because I'm angry at myself for not having the willpower to break away after the few minutes of use that actually provided me value. (Where ADHD plays a role).
And if I should've been doing something else with that time, like working, I feel even angrier with myself, and then end up entering my work hours in a flustered, distracted, decentered state.
Whew!
I haven't identified a clear-cut solution, but after a few weeks off of the stuff, I have a better idea of where I'll start:
1, only checking social media from my desktop. I hope someday I'll be able to keep social media on my phone again without misusing that privilege, but I know that right now, I simply cannot. It quickly becomes an addiction that spirals me into a state of perpetual overwhelm.
2, not checking social media every day. I notice that when I check it every day, I think about it way too much. I need at least a one-day break between social media checks to give my mind some room to breathe. I'll experiment to determine the ideal schedule for me, but I suspect it'll be somewhere between every-other-day and once a week.
3, once I'm on social media, only staying on there for a predetermined amount of time. I'll experiment with this too, but I suspect it'll fall between 5 and 20 minutes per platform. More than that and any value I receive is likely canceled out by damage done.
So, you'll see me back on social media soon! But hopefully not as often as you used to. And in case anyone who faces similar problems is wondering how the logistics of this will work, meaning how I'll keep myself from just constantly checking social media from my browser, I'll change my social media passwords to super long and complex passwords that I will not save to my browser's saved passwords. Instead, I'll physically dig up a piece of paper with my passwords written on it and type them in every time, which should add friction and make the process less automatic. Wish me luck!
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Good luck!!! This all resonated with me because I also struggle with social media where like, I see the very real benefits of it (I connect with SO MANY people that way!), while also similarly feeling overwhelmed and stressed out and bad about myself because of it. It's extra complicated when social media is a legitimate part of your career. One thing I do when I'm using it the most thoughtfully is go "Around the Horn" (yes, it's a baseball term), where I put "ATH" on my To Do list and then that's when I make my rounds to IG, Threads, and Discord, just kinda cleaning up notifications and responding to a few things and then ducking out.
I never thought about my need to process stimuli as one of the reasons social media makes me feel overwhelmed. I always put it down to being “overly responsible,” which meant I had the urge to read the full article, write thoughtful comments to friends, and check out those organic products (because I could be doing more for the Earth, right?). HSP gives me a new perspective. I also heard recently that some things I believed were ADHD are simply a different way of processing stimuli; that is, someone who can be talking to me at the lunch table and listening in on the conversation behind them and noticing the shoes of the woman walking by may just process the world differently. I thought that was a mark of ADHD. Personally, I tend to be linear with my processing: I am EITHER engaged in a conversation OR listening to people behind me OR looking at people’s shoes. I have to block out everything else in order to focus on one thing. So fascinating, the way our brains work.