by Ella McIlvain
Social media is an ingrained part of our culture these days. I think most people we know are connected on some platform of social media. It is an amazing source of connection with friends, family and people across the globe. Though there are many pluses to social media it can also have some negatives. The constant display of your life and other peoples life on things like instagram and snapchat especially can get to be a lot. For us young adults it can get to be a competition of whose life looks the best, who is having the most fun, who is doing the coolest things, who looks the best. All these images in our face can take a toll on us mentally whether we want to admit it or not. It is easy to then begin to feel sad or lesser from scrolling through all these great pictures. I like to think I am confident in my sense of self and am not jealous of others nor do I care what they are doing vs what I am doing, however even though you may be confident and sound in your own skin it still affects you. One of my major pet peeves I’ve recently acknowledged is that when we get a moment of inactivity we most times automatically pull out our phones and mindlessly scroll through social media and that bothered me like can’t we just be without having something in our face like when we were younger and our phones and social media accounts weren’t an option so being able to just sit and be present was ok but now it seems like the ultimate discomfort and we must then get on our devices to fill that time. I once having noticed this decided to ween off my social media accounts and go on a cleanse from the feeds. I personally really only used instagram and snapchat; I have facebook but it isn’t a source to me that is comparable to snapchat and instagram I don’t use it the same.
 So I set myself up to delete both snapchat and instagram off my phone and see what happened. At first it is a little bit odd to not have them and I was even a little surprised because I was never a crazy social media gal to begin with and even I was like feeling that urge of habit to just sit there and pick up my phone and scroll in down time, it was weird. However you do get used to not having it and I tried to then use my time in other ways which is nice. I feel much more at peace and not as worried about what the world around me thinks, it’s good time for self focus in a positive way. It’s like a feeling of relief to not have to deal with and think about those devices regarding the perfect picture, caption, edit etc. It has been a couple months completely free of snapchat and then a filtered instagram use for information. I really enjoy not being on social media and I could feel a difference mentally and see one in my time use. I would recommend that anyone try and take a social media cleanse for a little bit because who knows what you will discover.Â
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