Anyone who knows me knows that I am a Twitter addict. At any given time during the day, I am probably scrolling through the app. However, my Twitter is quite different from my friends’ Twitters. This is because I do not use a personal account, but rather a fan account dedicated to all things Marvel. I have made lots of online friends through my fan account, which is part of the reason why I use it so often. So, I decided to take a five day break from Twitter to see how I would spend my days in the absence of my favorite app and my online friends. It was definitely an interesting experience, and was very enlightening.
On the first day, I struggled quite a bit. It was hard for me to remember not to go on Twitter, because it was such a force of habit to click on that app any time I was bored. On average, I accidentally went on about 2-3 times per hour on this day before I realized what I was doing. After each slip up, I would try to figure out something else to do to combat my boredom. Most of the time, I ended up going on some other app on my phone. I’m not much of an Instagram user, but I did find myself going on there quite a few more times than usual.
By day two, I was starting to get used to not being able to use Twitter. There were only a handful of times I caught myself accidentally going on the app on this day. This may have been due to the fact that I was busier during the day, but even on my busy days I normally would find plenty of time to scroll through my feed. Nothing really eventful happened on this day, so I didn’t really feel the urge to tweet about anything. At the end of the day, I was pretty proud of myself for making it through the majority of the day without thinking about Twitter too much.
The third day had me itching to tweet again. I was getting antsy all day because it was a seemingly eventful day and I was not able to tweet about all the fun things happening. Looking back on it now, nothing very noteworthy even happened. But in the moment, I felt like lots of things that I would normally tell my followers about what was happening, and I felt extremely restricted by the fact that I could not tweet about these things. While my Twitter is a fan account, I also tweet about my everyday life as well for the few close friends from “real life” that I let follow me. Anything that was actually important enough to share, I was able to tell my friends in person, so I got over it eventually.
On day four, I was once again craving a dose of Twitter. I had thankfully made it through most of the day without slipping up even once. However, by that evening I had made my first real mistake of the week. Up until this point, I had realized immediately that I had accidentally clicked on the forbidden app and left right away. But on this night, I had mindlessly opened the app and did not realize what I had done until I had read through a couple of tweets. So, I decided to actively search for an app I almost never use to distract myself from accidentally going back on Twitter. I saw that I still had Pinterest on my phone, which I haven’t used in roughly five years. Since it had been so long, I got sucked in for hours making new boards and Twitter didn’t even cross my mind for the rest of the night.
The fifth day was definitely the hardest. All I could think about was that it was the last day I was restricted. While I was excited to be able to go back on Twitter the next day, this caused me to be thinking about it all day. Constantly thinking about it made it hard to not be on all day. However, I did make it through the day without a single slip up. This made me proud again, since even though it took me the whole week to not accidentally go on, I had made it through an entire day completely Twitter free.
By the end of my Twitter-free week, I felt pretty good about myself. Constantly going on social media can be mentally damaging and toxic. The fact that I was able to make it through a week without feeding my addiction made me really happy. I have been wanting to cut back from the toxic environment that stan twitter specifically creates, and this past week has allowed me to realize I have plenty of other options to pass my time that are just as entertaining and better for my mental health. While I don’t think I will ever be able to cut Twitter out entirely, I do hope that I will be able to continue using it less from now on.