Downtime Detox - Surrendering Social Media

Context

Junior College common tests are finally over, our results are out and post-mortems -as school likes to call it- of our papers have concluded. Reflecting on my performance, I have not done well enough to feel deserving of a huge gold star sticker and neither have I done so badly that I return on the brink of giving up and feeling thoroughly depressed. However, with time running out to prepare for the ominous final exams, the time has truly come to roll up my sleeves, rise up to the challenge and finally perform.

As a student, one of the most problematic things I've had to deal with is my distractions. Poor discipline coupled with the number of distractions available leave me desperately squirrelling for time all too late. With the stakes being so high and so many people making me realise things cannot remain at its state of motion if I truly want to ace my academics, the time has come to get my ducks in a row.

Initially, I tried to control and monitor my phone usage through simple, efficient applications (apps) such as self-control and RescueTime to gague how toxic my relationship with my phone was. So, these apps would ban me from certain apps or scare me into reducing the hours, minutes and seconds spent 'online'. However, the mere presence of the apps would make it difficult for me to not tap on them and squander precious time on them.

What I tried to do

It came to a point where I had to let it go... A friend of mine suggested the typical, habit forming 21-day practise where doing one thing consistently for 3 weeks supposedly ingrains the act and helps us do what we have to or want to do. However, going cold turkey was way too intimidating and felt like going on a crash diet where once you manage to lose all the water weight and whatever not, you'd spring back to your original ways and lose all the progress you've made. So I decided to temporarily eliminate my most addictive forms of social media. For me, this was Snapchat and Instagram. The amount of time and data usage clocked in my these two oh-so-convenient and entertaining apps had to go. So, in one week, I only allowed myself to install these apps once a week thereabout. Little did I know how big a difference it would make.

What Happened

A few days with a void empty of addiction was honestly an eye opening experience. When something stressful or uninteresting was happening, I couldn't just mindlessly scroll down my feeds to pass the time. Instead, I had to actively find alternatives which were of better use of my time and prevented me from ended off in a slump.

Evidently, when people feel down about themselves, they're more likely to use social media to check other people out, making them feel even worse. That was probably what was happening to me with my social media usage.

No one asked me why I wasn't replying to their snaps or liking their posts and I guess no one really cared. In social media, it seems like you're being involved and connected but because you're connecting with so many people and everyone reacts and interprets things differently, eventually, you start feeling as if the time you spend online is time you spend with no one at all (or might have been better spent with no one at all).  

Time spent offline forced me to think things through and come in terms with myself. I realised that I may not be very well liked in a few of my social circles but I had a hell of a good time in others. So instead of wallowing over the fact that no one liked me in certain settings, I could spend a few moments in self-compassion and move over to the bunch of people who actually seemed to care. 

However, the most remarkable part of this experience was how I had this constant feeling of liberating happiness began to surround me by the 4th or 5th day. When things did not go the way I wanted it to, I managed to step back and rationalise how I wanted to react to things happening around me. If I didn't like a song in my playlist, I wouldn't let inertia force me to sit through it. If I was scared of doing a certain physics question, I wouldn't give up and scroll through my updated feed, I'd get help as soon as possible and get things done. 

This detoxifying experience not only made me a happier person, it got me to be a positive force on the world - probably what I'm trying to be by sharing my experience through a very long blog post. No longer do I feel inclined to post everything that I was doing but when something really good or nice happened and I want to share it someone, I text someone close about it instead of my passive few followers. Getting a response and interacting, actually interacting with people felt so good that when I finally returned 'online' a week later, I didn't feel as bad surrendering social media.

Confessions of a Tech-a-holic

For longest time, I denied the notion that I was any bit addicted to technology, or for the matter - my phone. Having joined the technological era a little later than my peers, I thought that my affixation was not in as advanced a stage as many others. Yet, to my grief, I have very recently realised that I am not better than the rest of my generation, sucked into and living through technology.

You see, until the age of 12, I didn't have my own phone. My parents didn't buy into the idea that children needed phones and thus -thankfully- never succumbed to my pleas of giving me one. This meant that people who wanted to reach me had to call on my home phone or wait to meet me in person, something that was quite normal in the ancient days of 2009. This had its inherent benefits where I didn't get to make frivolous, unscheduled decisions out of the blue because it wasn't very easy to communicate to my parents where I was or wasn't going to go and I wasn't the only one without a phone attached to the hip so being accountable wasn't easy when there were changes in plans. Thus, my parents knew that if I wasn't home by a certain time on a given day, they had every right to worry and not have to hunt down some handphone or pager which might be beeping and giving me slack for my spontaneity. It also meant that I didn't have to wake up to glaring unnatural light or return to an overheated device with '437 messages from 8 conversations' in the span of an hour. In fact, being void of a phone probably deepened my relationships with the people who mattered in my life and so, as much as I wanted a shiny flip phone or sleek device to listen to music and carry around, that experienced was postponed for me and I can't be more grateful today that it was.

That being said, I wasn't privy to other forms of technology like the blessed laptops, ever portable radios and the addictive TV. But, my use of technology wasn't as bad as those around me and thus, I was pretty much under the radar. It was only when I got my smartphone that things began to change, slowly at first, but eventually spiralling out of control. With Instagram, Snapchat and Whatsapp, my phone was my wingman who literally held my hand through it all.

Initially, my parents and I had an agreement when I got me my first phone that I was to use it as an aid to my work and not a distraction. Thus, every time my phone was with me, it was either for work or for 'breaks'  (pretty much summing up the life of a first world teenage student). If I was listening to music, I was using using my phone to 'motivate' myself to study. If I was using the internet, I was 'researching' or 'gaining general knowledge'. While technically true, in reality, I was steadily falling into the clutches technology's open arms and I clearly didn't mind or simply didn't care. So there went the agreement. However, the failings of said agreement were not noticeable until I began Junior College, where the use of technology was allowed and even expected.  Since you didn't get into any blacklists for being seen texting, many of us jumped on the bandwagon and freely enjoyed what technology had to offer. That's when things began falling apart.

Having gotten accustomed to using technology for taking notes, sharing information and collecting memories, my entire life began to reside within my 5'5 inch screen. This unsurprisingly, makes separation from my phone uncomfortable at best, and downright unbearable at worst. Now before you mark this confession off as my maiden voyage in the land of tech breakdowns, I must mention that I have gone through numerous break ups with technology in the past. My first phone and iPod got soaked with clothes on two different occasions and countries, while my first smartphone mysteriously ended up lost/stolen on a long journey to school. However, beyond the guilt of my tardiness and the cost incurred from its loss, I never felt any emotional withdrawal on distancing from technology... Who am I kidding?! It's always been outright painful and difficult to come back from and this was no exception.

Yesterday, I dropped my young Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the screen malfunctioned. Having dropped it a few times before, I was initially quite unaffected by the fall. However, when the screen remained blank, worry began to seep in and the feeling of guilt resurfaced on possibly having damaged yet another lifeline. When the little wingman of mine finally showed signs of light, I realised that something was really wrong seeing miniature dust particles scattered over half the screen and steadily increasing. So, it was with a heavy heart that I got home with a translucent phone screen and confessed my loss to my presumably upset parents.

To bring it back to life, my mother took the liberty of bringing my phone to a service centre today. However, at that time, I was 'expecting' messages and information on my near unreadable device and couldn't wait for her to get it back, fixed. The anxiety of waiting for a response was so exhausting that I probably would have been unable to do little else until my mother returned had I not been occupied by my laptop. The emotional turmoil I went through was the tip of the proverbial iceberg which finally convinced me that I have grown overly and unhealthily attached to my phone. So you see, I finally had no way of denying my addiction to technology.

Having come clean, I now need to find ways of fixing this mess I've made. The path of cold turkey is no easy one and neither is everything else that the internet suggests with discipline like mine and a soft spot for frequently switching to possible alternatives. While I actively attempt to fix my unhealthy fixation one step at a time,  suggestions and advice will be greatly appreciated. My addiction to technology has not only been an emotionally unhealthy one, but one which has affected my relationships, academics and possibly my health. Hopefully, things get better and all will be well.

As for now though, this has been my confession or rather the confessions of a tech-a-holic.