As I ease my way back into the jungles of Instagram after my 2 month hiatus, I contemplate on the many wonderful, surprising ways this social media break changed the way I think and live my life.

In this podcast episode I share with you:

• How we don’t realise the real extent of our dependency on social apps until we step away from them
• What influenced me to take my break
• The way it impacted my content consumption, relationships, and mindfulness
• The freedom of not feeling the need to documenting everything, all the time
• Why JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) is way better than FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
• How unquenched boredom can be a gateway to high quality leisure, clarity and boundless creativity
• And so much more…

Listen on the embedded player below, or on your preferred podcast platform.

“We don’t have to have that fear of missing out on things. If we miss out on something. So what? And if it’s really important and you’re meant to know about it, or you’re meant to be a part of something it will find its way to you. You can trust the universe, you can trust in that. And that fear of if you go off all social media you’re gonna be living under a rock, that is so wrong. It got proved in my two month break.”

Susmitha Veganosaurus – The Feel Good Factor Podcast

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Transcript of Social Media/Instagram Break episode

(edited for a better reading experience)

Hey everyone. So good to be back here talking to all of you. I hope you enjoyed the meditations I posted last week. I have more lined up, but today I thought it’ll be nice to have a little talk. I wanted to share this very powerful experience I’ve had in the recent times.

So I’ve been off in Insta for two months and, ha ha I never thought I could do something like that, but yeah, I was completely off of Instagram. I did not even log in for anything and…Wow! What a shift that experience, that decision made in my life.

To give you a little bit of a background, when it came to social media, a few years ago, I had begun to become aware of how much of my time it was sucking, just draining. I would spend a lot of time on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, you know, all these places.

And I decided I needed to start cutting things out one by one. Initially I figured I’d focus my attention on one social media platform and delete the rest. So I deactivated my Facebook account and then, maybe early last year, I deleted my WhatsApp.

People were pretty shocked that I did that. They were like, “how’re you communicating with everyone?”

These things are such that you get so hooked on to them, you’re so dependent on them, that it doesn’t even occur to you that there could be other ways of living your life. A way of living your life without these particular apps, or these particular platforms.

Especially with WhatsApp, people are still very surprised. And the funny part is, when I say, “Hey, let’s keep in touch”, or if I ask someone, “Hey, drop me a message, this is my number, and we’ll take it from there”, people take my number and first go look for me on WhatsApp.

And when they don’t find me there, they’re like, “Oh, there’s no way to contact you.” Haha Ever heard of sms, regular texting?

It doesn’t even occur to someone to just send a normal text anymore.

Which is so funny because we would text each other quite a bit in the beginning, before smartphones you know. When we had our old Nokia phones, we’d just text each other. If any of you have used those, the older, pre-smartphone phones, then you’d know that for each word you had to click, click, click the letter buttons, twice, thrice to get each letter. And then each word would take quite some time. Of course, there was autocomplete, but still it would take quite some time.

I guess that limited us. The technology not being so fast kept us also from getting addicted to texting, or just being on the phone all the time. And as it got easier and easier to connect… which, you know, it’s wonderful, right? You’re here, someone is in some other part of the world, and you just drop a message and they get it and they respond. It’s like, you’re right there having a conversation with each other.

And before smartphones, that was not… I mean, yes, if you got onto your computer onto a chat platform, maybe like Yahoo chat and stuff, yes, that was possible… but that is nothing compared to just having your phone in your hand and sending someone a WhatsApp message or a Viber message or whichever, right? So yeah, once people got used to that, it became kind of impossible to imagine a life without WhatsApp or without being on social media of any kind.

So yeah, I deleted Facebook and WhatsApp, and after that I had only Instagram left. I wasn’t active on Twitter anyway. I think it’s a Petri dish of negativity. I would never use it anyway, so I never bothered to go back to it.

But Instagram was my guilty pleasure.

I just couldn’t stay away from Instagram. It was such, I mean, it is such a lovely place to build a community. The energy and atmosphere’s very different from other platforms. And depending on what kind of atmosphere you create, you can curate the energy, you can curate the kind of information that gets exchanged, the kind of comments that people post. You can curate all of that just by posting certain things.

Like, I keep my energy really upbeat and positive and I want people to feel good when they’re reading my Instagram. And I don’t mean good in an artificial way, but really in a sincere, real way. People should see the authenticity, feel like they can be authentic too, see that they can share from their hearts and not worry about what others think, you know. That is the kind of atmosphere that I’ve built on my Instagram profile over time.

And I’ve made such a beautiful friendships over Insta. It’s a place with so much potential, and I really love my Instagram account. So that was the one thing I couldn’t get out of or delete.

Though what I’d started to do was, just delete the app from my phone and then I’d install the app only if I were to do some stories, or once or twice a week if I needed to do some things, which could be done only on the app. Otherwise, I would, as far as possible, try to log into Insta on my browser, because when you do that on your browser, it’s a very different experience. It doesn’t suck you in as much, and you definitely don’t go down the stories or reels rabbit holes because it’s a clunky experience. There’s no autoplay. There are no suggested posts. It’s just a different experience.

It’s not meant to be pleasant or comfortable to use Instagram on a browser. They’ve designed it in such a way because they want you to be hooked.

They want you to spend as much time as possible on their platform, so they’ve designed it in such a way that you are on the app. And the app, it has the power to just pull you in.

So I was feeling good about myself in this past year where I reduced my Instagram very mindfully, quite drastically. I mean, I would still run things, I would still have my posts there. I would still interact with people, but do it in a very limited way compared to what used to happen before when I’d open the app and then before I know it, I’m out of the app coming up for air and it’s hours later! So that had stopped happening thankfully.

I’ve been reading a lot about how our attention, our focus has been stolen. How we really don’t even realise how much of space in our minds, in our daily lives, social media takes. And so I thought, let me take a break.

I wasn’t feeling very well a couple of months ago, so I decided, “now would be a perfect time. I will, for now, just not get onto Insta.”

I even created this post mentioning it, so that people don’t get worried because, you know, I would do that too. If I see a friend posting on Insta, and then one fine day they just stopped posting, and they hadn’t been there for weeks together, of course I would worry about them! I didn’t want any of my folks to worry about me. So I created a post saying, “I am going off Insta for a month, maybe longer. And this is my email. This is my website. These are the ways you can get in touch with me if you, if you miss me. But otherwise see you when I’m back.”

Once I did that post a few things happened. So a few weeks of no Insta, I didn’t feel too much of an inch, to be honest. I thought maybe every couple of weeks I’ll feel like, “Oh let me sneak in, just log in and see what’s happening.” But I didn’t feel that, and that really surprised me. And by the end of one month, which was the end of August, I just didn’t want to go back. September came, and though initially I’d said that I’d go back in September, I kind of ditched the idea.

I said, “No, let me extend it a little longer, a little longer.” It felt peaceful in the mind, and somehow my life seemed to have filled up with more quality leisure.

I admit, I did continue to binge watch on Netflix and all that. That’s not something I stopped. However, because I had stopped Insta completely, I was able to fill up my time reading, consuming longer form content like listening to podcasts, or reading really long articles online, and things like that. I also started to spend more time with my spiritual practices, like meditation and stuff like that.

Slowly I realised that the pace of my life changed completely, and it took me by surprise because, like I said, I was very proud of myself, I thought, “Hey, I’m not using much Insta anyway, so a break’s not gonna make a diff big difference.” Except it did. Big, huge difference. I was surprised how much clearer my mind became just because I was a hundred percent not on Insta.

There’s this Oliver Burkeman book, 4,000 Weeks. I actually read it twice. I’m not much into reading nonfiction, or rather, when I do, I read it very slowly. But with this book, Oliver Burkeman’s, 4,000 Weeks, I just went through it the first time. I listened to it as an audio book. Then the second time, I wanted to read it again during this break. And again, I went through it so fast! So much of it resonated with me. I would say about 80-85% of the book resonated with me very deeply. And of course, I’ve been going around recommending it to everybody left, right, and center.

So anyway Oliver Burkeman mentions how with social media – in his case it was Twitter, but any of the social media where we are basically interacting with other people regularly, whether it’s a texting app like WhatsApp or Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whichever – he says that once he cut off, he began to realise it wasn’t just about the time he spent on the platform.

Say you spent an hour or two on your favourite social media platform, it’s not just about that. It’s not just about that one hour going away. Or you say, “Hey, I only spend 20 minutes there a day”, no problem, you’re limiting yourself, but it’s not just about those 20 minutes either.

Think about the amount of time you spend afterwards, the rest of the day, with whatever happened on the platform, on your brain.

Like say you read a certain post, if it’s something positive, it’s different, many times it could be something which triggered you or annoyed you in some way, and then you spent hours later thinking about it like, “Oh, I should have said this”, “I could have said this”, or “next time I’ll say this”. “This is what they said. Is it true?” Blah, blah, blah. You know, it just eats away at you.

And then there’s the other thing, especially with Instagram. All of us Instagrammers, the side habit that we automatically develop because of being on Insta is that we document every damn thing!

Like, anything you look at, you look at it from a step away. You don’t look at it directly. You look at it from the lens of, “Oh, this would make a nice Insta story.” Or, “Oh, this is so funny. If I post this, my audience is going to enjoy it.”

I couldn’t cook a single meal without clicking a picture of it. So I’d cook the meal or bake something and then before I could eat it I’d, regardless of how much I wanted to dive into it immediately, I would keep it and then take pictures and, maybe post a story. And then start enjoying all my hard work, the fruits of my labour.

These are things I was not fully aware of. In the sense that I knew it was happening, but it was just somewhere in the back of my mind. I never paid attention to how much of an impact this looking through the lens of presenting it, of showing it, sharing it with my friends and audience online, always looking at things through that lens, I never realised, what kind of an impact it was having on my mind, on my way to be mindful or experience something, until I stopped it.

So right from the beginning, after I was on my break, I didn’t even feel the inclination… say there was a meal that was in front of me, I’d never feel the inclination to take a picture because, you know, there’s no one to share it with right now. And really, do I need to click a picture of every single thing? Do I need to document every single beautiful thing that I see outside? Slowly over time, my mind even stopped thinking of it from the point of view of what someone else might feel about this experience.

And it doesn’t matter if when you share it, the people who see it feel good or feel thoughtful. That is secondary, right? It could be a positive thing, but it is still secondary.

What matters is how you feel when you are experiencing that moment. And by thinking of what someone else, your audience, will get out of it, you’re bypassing a lot of the experience for your own self.

It was such a huge thing as it dawned on me. I was really surprised and I was like, “Oh my God. “ Also, I had already stopped documenting every single thing to begin with, but even then, being off of social media and not even having a place, not even having the option to share it with anyone still made an impact. Still made a difference in the way I looked at things, the way I felt things, the way I read things.

I mean, even reading, I was reading a lot already. I’m a voracious reader – mostly fiction, but also non-fiction. I select certain authors. I love series. If I love something, I will reread it multiple times too, the stories, like years later. I do a lot of all of that. But even there, I saw that the flow of reading was so much better when I didn’t have anything to share, I didn’t have anyone to share it with necessarily.

Otherwise, if I read something really funny or something really deep and meaningful, I would take a screenshot in the middle of my reading, and then I would post it on my Insta Stories. My intention was to share it like, “Oh wow, this is so funny. I should share it within everyone. And then they’ll laugh at it, it’ll make them think too.” The intention was fine, but it wasn’t serving me because once you get on to post the story, you’re there, you know, and then it takes quite some time for the focus to come back. Even if I immediately went back to the book, it took quite some time for the focus to come back.

Your focus is not meant to be split. There are plenty of studies conducted that show multitasking is a myth. Our brains are not meant to do that.

So say you’re working on something, one activity you’re focused on, or in deep work in one activity, and even something small, like say a notification on your phone or something else distracts you for a moment, if it takes away that deep focus, it takes time to build that focus again. By the time you come back, even if you come back immediately, by the time you get back to that original state of deep focus it takes 20-25 minutes. A long time for you to get back into that deep state once again.

That slows you down. Drastically. And it dilutes the original experience too. Whether it is like I was doing, reading, something which is a leisure activity, or whether it is something productive, like doing some kind of work, or something creative, whatever it is.

That experience deserves your complete attention. It doesn’t deserve to be diluted by a lack of focus, because then you can’t enjoy the full potential of everything that it offers you.

So yeah, that was another thing that happened with the Insta break, where I wasn’t documenting everything. I wasn’t thinking of every situation from the point of view of how somebody will look at it. How my friends, my audience will look at it, will see it, the experience they’ll get out of it. And I stopped thinking of anything in that way, how to use it to make others feel good or contemplative or whatever.

I decided I could only be there in the present. I would be fully present for that experience for myself in that moment, and no one. And then, once I was done with the experience, of course I could talk about it with anybody, or maybe even tell a friend about it, whatever it is, but that was only after, not during the experience.

And talking about talking to friends, what being off social media did, what being of Instagram did, was I realised the importance of… or rather, I even more realised the importance of quality, one to one conversations.

When you’re chatting on DMs or on messenger, or when you’re commenting on somebody’s post or interacting with them, it’s a lot of fun, right? You’re constantly interacting with each other and it is fun. It’s like a party.

You’re looking at somebody’s stories and then you’re laughing along with them, or you see somebody’s post and you share your thoughts with them. And then, you write that comment, and you go on to the next post, or the next person.

There isn’t that deep connection in that. So there isn’t enough depth or meaning to those interactions no matter how deep or meaningful the comment is, or the discussion is. Because when you compare that to actually having a one to one conversation with somebody, obviously the conversation has a lot more value.

And it could be a conversation on a phone call, which, I’m very discerning about who I speak to and how long I speak to them for, and we all need to be that. But I started valuing that personal connection with people more.

I also started valuing going out and meeting people because once the chatter of social media is cut off, you notice two things.

One is, who are you really missing? Not just missing their posts, but missing interacting with, and you want to connect with them more. And, you also see who is missing you, like who values talking to you regardless of whether they’re constantly seeing you on social media. Who’s thinking of you when they’re not seeing you all the time?

So you kind of… it’s a filter, it teaches you a lot. And then you end up having better relationships. More meaningful, powerful, relationships.

I started making an effort to go out and meet certain friends, or family members. I wouldn’t do that before because it had become too convenient, you know, through the whole lockdown and all that 2020-2021 being at home, only being in touch online. I’d gotten way too comfortable with that.

I just didn’t feel like making the effort to get dressed or go out, or, sit outside the house, when I can chill in my own house, just lie in bed and chat with somebody. Or go on Insta to connect with people. That created this feeling of being connected. So I felt like that part me that craves connection was very satisfied just doing this.

But of course when I cut off from Insta, I felt the need, I saw the value, in going out and meeting people, spending time with them. And while spending time, not necessarily documenting, taking selfies, you know, all of that rubbish. Or taking pictures of the food . I mean, I wouldn’t call it rubbish. Haha I’m just saying that because… it’s not that I don’t do it, and I’ve enjoyed doing it through many years, but I feel like sometimes it really gets in the way of a meaningful connection.

Sometimes you just don’t need to take pictures. The moment can be stored in your head. Like the days before we had digital cameras.

And you don’t need to share it with the world that you met this person or this is where we went and this is what we did. You don’t need to share it with anybody. It can be just your own. That particular hour or two hours, whatever, it’s your own.

I realised who I want to spend more time with, who I felt like meeting. And not just the one to one meetings, but also the group meetings.

A couple of weeks ago, a few friends met. A bunch of us, we met at this new place, new vegan, whole foods plant based restaurant in town, and it was so beautiful.

One friend of mine had come into town, she lives somewhere else. And then she just texted me saying, “Hey, do you wanna meet up? A few of us are meeting up on the weekend, and would you like to join too?” It would be a nice vegan get together, a small one. And I was like, yeah, very excited about it because I like cozy group get togethers.

And especially I wanted to meet her because I hadn’t seen her for quite some time. It would be nice to meet her, and I was looking forward to meeting a few of the others who would be there. So I said, “yeah, I’m gonna be there.”

It was so nice, we spent hours together. A bunch of us even stayed back. So the lunch happened and was so nice and enjoyable. The host of the place, the owners, they were so great. They sat with us and we had some great conversations and we just didn’t feel like leaving.

A few of us just hung back and we stayed there till into the evening, just talking and just sharing things and it was so beautiful, and so meaningful. And through the talk, I didn’t feel the need to touch my phone or take pictures. We took a few pictures in the beginning when everybody was having lunch, but that’s about it. Like after that, I didn’t feel that need at all.

Normally in a situation like this, if people are taking pictures of each other, you know that they’re gonna tag you and post it on Instagram, so your mind goes there.

I would be like, “Oh, goodie, I can’t wait to go home and open my Insta. They would’ve tagged me on the stories, and then I’ll share those to my stories.” I mean, if you are an Instagram, you’re familiar with these feelings. Haha

But that day I had nothing else. I was in that moment. We enjoyed it together. Whatever few pictures we clicked on the phone, I had it on my phone for my benefit to look at later, and it felt so nice.

To be honest, I probably may not even have made the effort to go there and be present with them if I had already been connected on Insta. I might have used some reason to just stay back home to indulge my more lazy self, my more introvert self.

But this came at a time when I wanted to have a meaningful connection, have meaningful conversations, and I had this opportunity, I could clearly see it, where I could get to meet a few good friends, hug them, sit and chat with them. It was it was a beautiful experience and I’m so grateful that I actually went there.

It’s a 50/50 chance whether I would’ve gone there or not if I’d still been connected to everybody online.

And while we were there my good friend Shruti, she asked me, she’s like, “don’t you feel FOMO? Don’t you feel afraid you’re missing out when you’re off social media? Like things will happen and then you won’t get to know about it and you’ll miss out.”

It was very funny because in that moment the only thought that came to me was… I told her, “You know, to be honest, I’m actually afraid to go back. I have the fear of having to go back and be on Insta again.” Because I mean, I have this community I have put so much effort into, and I do love the place and I love the community, so I will at some point go back. And I’m afraid I’ll have to do that. So that’s the fear I have.

But later I was thinking about it, the fear of missing out, and then I remembered this term, which is, joy of missing out. And what I had been feeling was that, JOMO.

It felt good. It felt good not to be overwhelmed with all the information. It felt good not to have to know every single thing that was happening because obviously you can’t be involved in everything, and then you truly feel like, “Oh, no!” You see all this happening and then you don’t do all of it, or you’re not there for everything, that doesn’t feel that great.

The funniest part was, that particular meeting, that lunch that all of us were at, that was not posted on social media for people to find out about. It was just a bunch of friends all just texting each other, and that’s it. There was no separate WhatsApp group or anything created for it. Nothing was required. People texted saying, “Okay, at this time we’re all meeting at this place, who’s joining?” And that’s about it. It was just such a nice casually planned occasion. And then all of us just met, and that was it. That was all it took. And yeah, even though I was not on social media, I didn’t miss out on that event, on that meeting.

The other funny thing was, throughout that Instagram break of mine, during that Instagram break of mine, two new vegan places opened up in town. And I got to know about both of them. Yeah, I got to know them a little later than their launch, I wasn’t on top of things and I didn’t get to know of them immediately.

But really, why should I be the first to know? Why should we be the first to know anything at all?

The important things will trickle down to us. We will get to know about it. Like in both these instances it was through friends. I’m part of this very very low noise, it’s almost not-a-group group on telegram, of vegan friends. It’s just a little tiny thing, nothing like the WhatsApp groups, and we don’t spend hours together chatting on it or anything.

It’s just a small, tiny way to keep in touch. A more quiet way to keep in touch, and only share more relevant information or have more meaningful conversations. Friends on that group had shared pictures, and they posted about it and they were like, “there’s this new place and this is what is happening, and it’s so good.”

And I got to visit both the places during the break. I got to go enjoy the food, have nice conversations with friends, spend hours together there, not taking pictures of the food at all. It was a lovely experience. So then I realised that, yeah, JOMO is great!

We don’t have to have that fear of missing out on things. If we miss out on something. So what? And if it’s really important and you’re meant to know about it, or you’re meant to be a part of something it will find its way to you. You can trust the universe, you can trust in that.

And that fear of if you go off all social media you’re gonna be living under a rock, that is so wrong. It got proved in my two month break.

Hey it was a nice, fulfilling two months. I got to do multiple things. I got to find out about many things, whatever was relevant. I got to have meaningful conversations and meaningful meetings with people. I got to live my life taking in all the long form content and digest it completely, for my own self and not for anybody else. And it was just so beautiful.

And having been on that break, I am getting back now. But I know that it’s not gonna be a pull, like that addictive pull that Instagram had on me before, no matter how small, I know that’s not gonna happen anymore.

I’m gonna very slowly ease myself back into it and limit how much I’m gonna spend time there. Only as required. And having stayed away, I realised that life can be really wonderful when you do miss out. Quote-unquote ‘miss out’ on the constant activity and information, and the buzz on social media.

You don’t need to have your finger on the pulse the whole time. You just don’t need it. It’s not required.

I’m gonna do this more, just take off completely for some time. Having had the time to just live my life in a much more slowed down, easygoing manner, I have realised what I want out of life a lot more. I’ve got more clarity about what I want out of my life going forward.

It was a beautiful reset and it’s gotten me more creative.

I’m writing more. Writing, but not really for posting, for my own self, for my own pleasure and joy and clarity and all the magic that writing involves. I’ve recorded a few meditations and posted them on Insight Timer, and right here on the podcast too. I’m just slowing down and doing things, and I’m really enjoying that process. I’m feeling very fulfilled in that process of taking things very, very slow.

Johann Hari, he’s written a book about stolen focus and in one of his write ups, he speaks about how until you get yourself properly bored, you will not actually put in the effort to do real quality work or creativity. Particularly creativity.

Because we don’t have this thing of boredom, right? In the sense of, people get bored really fast, but you also have the solution really fast. It’s right there at your fingertips. You get a teeny, tiny bit bored, like, you can’t…

People are not able to stand silence, or a moment of stillness, or boredom.

You feel a teeny bit bored and you reach for your phone. You don’t even realise you’re doing it. And then you’re going on social media, you’re connecting with someone, you’re checking what messages have come, you’re checking what emails have come… You don’t allow yourself to get bored.

There is something or the other that is addictive, available to you at your fingertips, which distracts you. All these distractions which keep you away from being still, that feeling of there’s nothing to do, that bit of actually experiencing that stillness.

And Johann Hari, he went to a place where he had no internet connectivity. He had no phone, no email, no computer, nothing. He just lived life like, you know, like when, we lived life in the nineties. Early nineties where you really weren’t connected all the time, and then you did things and you still had a nice fulfilling life. And in fact, probably a much better, much more fulfilling life.

So he talks about how he had to get properly bored. Like you sit with nothing and then there is no phone, there’s no internet, there’s no email, there’s no tv, there’s nothing to log into. There’s nothing to watch.

You have to get bored. You have to really put yourself in that position where everything that is a distraction, that is a quick fix, dopamine inducing, addictive thing, you get that out of your life.

And then, only once you go into that particular point of stillness will your brain start to focus on how to entertain itself in way more quality, fulfilling ways.

I was already seeing that with my digital detox Sundays every week. But yeah, this is a lot stronger, lot better. I literally had on my phone, there were only two things to look at, or to distract me rather. There were other things to read and all that, but the two distractions I had, one was my email, the other was my Telegram messenger. There are only so many emails, and they are very limited, like I said, my telegram is very, very limited, it might as well be texting, it’s as limited as that because I’m not part of busy groups.

There’s only so much you check, and beyond that, there’s nothing, there’s nothing to do on the phone except to either read or listen to a podcast or read a long form article or a book. So, after a point, you just dive into that long form content. More and more you start relying on that content.

And then once you cut that out too, when you keep your phone away, you start being more creative. You start thinking more creatively and you will do things which you put off.

I found joy in cleaning, in writing, in my art. I started finding more and more joy in all of that because I didn’t feel like, “Oh, there’s something else waiting for me.” That little tiny itch in your brain, which is like, “Oh, just open Insta, see what’s happening.” That was not there because there was no Insta. So I would just be involved completely in whatever it is I was doing.

I wanted to tell you all of this because I hope it inspires you to cut off from social media completely for some stretches of time, to take those breaks from social media, or even digital breaks, things like that.

Try it out and know that even though you may feel uncomfortable at first it is so totally worth it to sit in that discomfort and go through that, because on the other side there is a much more beautiful life. You feel more present and alive and fulfilled. And there’s clarity.

I cannot tell you enough, though I’ve spoken for so long haha, I cannot tell you anywhere near enough about how wonderful it is. I cannot put that into words. And I want you to experience this for yourself.

While I was on my break, one thing that multiple people told me was so, “Oh, I want to do that too, but I don’t know how. I don’t think I can do it” or, “I want to do this too, but you know, for my business I need to be there” or for whatever… there’s always a reason.

If you want to do it do it. No excuses. Don’t try to justify your presence on social media in any way. Take those breaks.

If it means you do it for a week, you do it for 21 days, you do it for a couple of months like me, whatever it is. Just do it and try it. And until you try it out you won’t realise the value. And once you start, when you feel that initial itch to go back, don’t go back. Push yourself a little more. Because once you start pushing yourself, that’s when that addiction gets detoxed from your body.

Your brain starts creating new neural pathways. The habit that your brain has formed, these habits of leaning on distractions, for that habit to go away, you need to take a little time staying away from it. And then after point you, you just won’t crave it anymore. The craving goes away.

Then you’ll work around a way to ease back into it in a much, much more healthy way.

And you will also clearly see how much of your presence in any of these platforms or groups or wherever is necessary, and how much isn’t. So I strongly suggest that you try it out for yourself.

And if you do let me know. Let me know. I’d love to hear from. Drop me an email, and tell me all about it. In my earlier episodes I used to ask people to drop me a DM on my Instagram. You can do that. I’d still love that too. But very likely I’m not gonna respond very quickly because, haha I’m taking it really slow with Insta. But know that I will respond to you.

So yeah, you can drop me a voice note on Instagram about how you felt if you’d like. Whatever your take away is from listening to this episode.

Well that’s about it for today. I have another meditation that I will be posting soon on the podcast, and also I’m hoping to be back again soon with some more talking. So yeah, talk to you soon. Take care.

Transcribed using Otter