Time for a detox!

Have you ever thought about doing a digital detox?

I must admit until last week I hadn’t.  I have taken the decision to have a social media free month for September.  I know this probably isn’t the full definition of a digital detox, but this is the term I am running with.

I watched a video at the end of last month on Facebook (oh the irony) on how people are spending more and more time on social media and ending up in a rut.  You check your phone first thing in the morning, at multiple points during the day and then last thing at night before you go to sleep, day in day out. We are now apparently checking our phones every 12 minutes on average.

When watching the video, I actually recognised a lot of what I do.  I should be ashamed to admit that I have an addiction to my phone and can be a slave to social media.  I can spend hours (and yes i mean hours) endlessly thumb scrolling through content on these apps.

Do I even read half of it? No.  Is it all the same content I read when I last scrolled through?  Yes.

So for the month of September I have deleted all social media apps from my phone to see how I go.

I am currently 1 week in and I can honestly say I am not missing them.  I really thought I would be pulling my hair out, desperate to be connected to ‘system’.  But alas no.

I am actually finding that on an evening I am getting to sleep much quicker than normal, and during the day I am finding out I actually have more time to do things than before so I am not rushing everywhere.  I say this like its a surprise and something new, but if you think about it, these are pretty obvious results.

At the minute the plan is just to have these deleted until the end of September.  But who knows, this could be the end of me and Facebook. I am going on holiday the first week of October, so I may be back then just to post those obligatory pictures to make my friends jealous.

Have you tried anything like this before and how did it make you feel?