I recently went through a break up with my boyfriend of over a year. It was my first serious relationship, and to put it bluntly: I was heartbroken. I searched for ways to find happiness again and focus on positive things, but continued to remain fixated on the gaping hole that was once such an important part of my life. It wasn’t until about a week after we broke up that my mom suggested I take a break from social media. I immediately dismissed the idea, convinced that this had nothing to do with my moping around. Besides, I checked social media multiple times a day, why would I give up such an accessible source of my entertainment? However, I was desperate, so I decided to try it out for just a week. I learned so many important lessons in just one week without fixating on tweets, posts, and snapchats that I think are very valuable and can be easily overlooked.
One of the most important things I have realized after this experiment is how much I tend to compare myself to other people in my feed. After the end of my relationship, my self confidence was at an all-time low and I suddenly felt embarrassed about my current situation. Scrolling through the posts of what seemed to be my friends’ perfect lives only made me feel worse. We’re told over and over again how everyone stages their lives to look picture-perfect on Instagram, yet it is so easy to forget that other people really are going through struggles and hardships too. I was comparing my unhappiness to my friends’ seemingly perfect lives, and getting rid of this factor helped my confidence so much.
The average person spends around an hour and forty minutes scrolling through social media feeds every day. This amount of time is (arguably) completely wasted on staying attuned to the lives of other people. From my own experience, I realized I had a big chunk of time to dedicate towards other things. Instead of scrolling through Facebook and Twitter before I went to bed at night, I would read a chapter of a book. It’s the little things like this that I never considered doing before that resulted in such a refreshing break from the internet.
After one week cold turkey, I have begun to post and scroll through my feeds occasionally, but much less often. Social media can be so fun- getting to post pictures and ideas you love and getting to be involved in those of your friends. However, out of this I took away how UNIMPORTANT it all is. It can be so easy to become wrapped up in what everyone else is wearing, who is hanging out with whom, and who is getting the most likes on a picture. I encourage anyone reading this to limit the amount of times you scroll through your feeds by just a little bit, and I promise you will notice a huge difference.