Around March/April of this year, I vowed to myself that I was going to take a social media break for the summer. My main focus was deleting Snapchat and Instagram and I think for the month of July I’m going to get rid of TikTok too.
The reason I wanted to forgo any social media for the summer was mostly because I felt burnt out from it. It sounds stupid and for anyone who looks down on Gen Z as internet-obsessed nothing I’m about to say is going to help that, but I was addicted to my phone and the social version of myself that I curated online. Every day I felt FOMO when I didn’t check on everyone’s profile every few minutes or I based my days around waiting for people to respond to me and once I took a step back and processed that, I felt pathetic.
Why was I allowing the likes on a photo or the number of messages I got every day or how many people watched my story to dictate my happiness? And even further, why was I allowing other people’s internet presence to affect what I thought and what I did?
I wanted to take a step away from the constant flood of information and oversharing and happy faces to reconnect with myself and who I was. I know that I’ve become more secure in myself these past few years but I know there is more room to grow in my confidence so why would I stunt that opportunity for growth?
I will admit that the first week was rough. I felt like I needed to let everyone know what I was doing and thinking and I needed to make sure I was on top of everything going on, but now I don't really miss any of it at all. I don’t miss thinking about who was going to see my story or who was going to like my post first. I don’t miss trying to get the best angle on a photo to impress other people. I don’t miss the constant anxiety that came from thinking about what I was “missing.” Because at the end of the day, there is so much more to life than the digital persona you create.
I probably sound like a pretentious idiot who thinks they're “too good” for Instagram, but I know that once my hiatus is over I’m going to use it again. It’s not about getting rid of it all forever, it’s about creating a healthy relationship with it and allowing myself to feel confident because I feel confident and not because someone else allows me to be.
If you can take a social media break, try to do it for a month and I promise you’ll be better off for it. Especially if you were glued to your phone like I was.