A guide to social media cleansing (and good habits)

Recently I decided to take up an entire month of lockdown being social media free! I won't lie to you, sometimes it was lonely, but overall I would say that the experience was honestly one of the best things I've done for myself in years!

The rules that I abided by were simple; don’t use social media at all, unless it was for school (I do media studies and graphic design so a lot of my work has to be backed up via inspiration online.) On top of this, also set myself the challenge of getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning due to bad sleep habits over lockdown.

And when I say it changed my life, I really mean it. Within a week I went from being a month late on all of my school work in every lesson to being completely up-to-date and doing extension work on top of this too. My average grade went from being a grade D to grade B, with some circumstances even being a grade a; which was a huge step up in some classes that I was previously failing. I found the feedback that I was receiving was a lot more positive, and the overall relationship between me and the teachers and education in general became a lot more positive. I have gained such a drive towards making my work looking really nice and filling it with lots of good content.

But why is this you may ask?

Well it’s simple. 

The two biggest roadblocks in most people’s lives are the need for sleep and the obsession to social media. After I removed these 2 things out of my life, it meant that I could do pretty much anything I wanted to do, and it gave me time to think about what I really wanted to do, instead of just going “oh, ill just check my phone because im bored”. Instead, as I had nothing to do, I would just do work to fill up the empty time and I would actually get really into it. The waking up early part of my challenge gave me more motivation too; as when I was getting up earlier I would be getting more things done, as most of those hours were now not being wasted at 2am anymore listening to music. I was getting up early and going to bed early, feeling totally accomplished with each day’s passing.

So what was it like returning to the normal world afterwards?

Actually, extremely underwhelming.

I was expecting to have missed out on so much, with all sorts of things going on that I wish I would’ve stayed online for.

But guess what?

I missed out on NOTHING. Literally, nothing had changed since I was on my phone at the beginning of the month! Everyone’s lives were exactly the same and nobody had any interesting updates! social media actually felt really bland! Overall I realised that the reason we believe that social media is so important is because of our fears of missing out; when in reality, you could probably stay off of social media for months and miss very little. I was still friends with people, people were still having the same conversations as they were last month, and snapchat stories + instagram posts were still filled with the same tired content on people that I would forget 5 minutes later as I had seen them posting practically the same content over and over again for years.

So if you’re considering trying it out for a while, I would definitely recommend it. Not just because of how much progression it will let you achieve, but also due to the self-realisation of how unappetising social media really is post-cleanse. Nowadays I very rarely check social media because of this realisation and I love having all of this time to either spend on myself or to spend planning things for the future!

So yeah, try it out! If you don’t want to do it for a month maybe just try it for a few days, and then if you like what you see, just continue doing it until you feel ready to go back online! =]