Real Self-Care: Social Media Cleanse

This post is part of a month-long series on Real Self-Care for world-changers. It’s about the experimentation: figuring out what works for you and following your heart. Simple, messy and everything in between. Self-care should be custom, intuitive, feasible and kind – to serve your actual life.

Social Media Cleanse

On Day Eight, I talked about turning our devices off before bed time for better sleep. What I’m proposing today is a riff on that: a social media cleanse. You pick the duration (a day, a weekend, a month), and for that time, you won’t consume social media. I recommend deleting the apps from your phone and using a plug-in to block the sites on your computer (if you have a hard time with boundaries). The idea is simple, but powerful: rid your life (temporarily) of social media and see how you feel.

While many of us love the feeling of connection and the exchange of ideas that we can feel via social media, sometimes it can veer into unhealthy territory. Instead of sending a tweet or Facebook post, why not call someone on the phone? (A friend called me a couple of weeks ago, and we had a lovely hour-long conversation. It felt very old-fashioned!) Or even send a personal and hand-written note.

I think social media has it’s place (I happen to love Instagram!), but it’s important to notice how it makes you feel. I started feeling anxious about likes and hearts and retweets a while back, so I turned off all notifications on my phone. When we’re so saturated in social media, it’s hard to gauge how it’s affecting us. So taking a break and noticing the results can be a good way of sussing that out. I’m planning to try a deep social media cleanse this winter.