Beginning Monday Morning to no new notifications was a big “wakeup call” to change how I spend my energy throughout the day.
Wake up. Scroll through email, texts, and Instagram feeds before even leaving the bed. Spend much of the morning scrolling through socials as you make your coffee. Taking Twitter and Facebook meme breaks to get you through the day. Even checking WhatsApp and Messenger for work sometimes.
Can you relate?
If so, maybe you felt as strange as I did during Monday’s #SocialMediaShutdown of multibillion-dollar social giant Facebook. The over 7-hour outage that we now know was caused by a glitch in the system isolated almost 3 billion users around the world. In hindsight, I realize the position of privilege I sit in as the outage cut people around the world off from critical communication channels for jobs, school, and even family. Half a day of missing some mindless scrolling shouldn’t impact much right?
You would think having a totally distraction-free day from my phone would increase my productivity exponentially. The reality is that though I was able to get a lot done, I couldn’t help but retain an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach as I went through the day. Instagram and Facebook came back online around 3 PM PDT, as revealed by the plethora of notifications lighting up my phone in the afternoon. Yet the initial detachment and isolation from social media made me reminisce other times in my life I felt cut off from the world, the most recent being at the height of the pandemic. The memories it brought back made me feel a bit anxious, yet the good thing about this event was that, unlike before, I had the freedom to make choices about my day early on to make the most of the circumstances.
As jarring as the beginning of the day was, I was able to go through the day with three goals in mind.
- Reach out to the friends I had nearby and do more to interact in person. I think this especially helped me mitigate the loneliness at the beginning.
- Use the extra energy I had during my off times to do something nice for myself. Whether that’s putting a little more effort into my lunch or using the time to take a walk, it was really refreshing to do other activities during down time.
- Do some mindfulness exercises to check in with myself. I personally love to meditate, especially during some down time, so I literally put calendar holds on my schedule to do that whenever I took a break.
Even though spending half the day off my phone felt strange at first, I started feeling much better by the end of the day. Taking a closer look at my phone habits made me realize that I didn’t have to be reliant on my phone to feel refreshed during breaks and downtime. I might still be scrolling through Instagram periodically even after writing this, but the fact that I can be content without social media is a pretty powerful feeling. Anyways, how was your Monday?