Why I’m Giving My Soul a Rest from Social Media for 365 Days

In this blog post, I explain why I want to give myself a break from social media for a long time. I offer both psychological and spiritual reasonings for completely stopping my current social media use—emphasizing how it has become both a source of distraction and an idol in my life. Saint Philip Neri once said, “Do not grieve over the temptations you suffer. When the Lord intends to bestow a particular virtue on us, He often permits us first to be tempted by the opposite vice. Therefore, look upon every temptation as an invitation to grow in a particular virtue and a promise by God that you will be successful, if only you stand fast.” 

Disclaimer: Before you read this, I do understand the irony of sharing this on a social media website. But I am sharing something that might help someone else live a better life and ease their own mind. 

I feel called to share this video with everyone that’s deeply inspired me… and forced me to be introspective.

This video is titled, “How deleting social media changed my life” by a girl who close to my age; her name is Rachel Stark.

Rachel claimed that by deleting social media, she achieved the greatest mental health in her life, looking forward to little things, spending time on old passions, and developing new passions! Hearing her say the words, “I now look forward to making myself coffee in the morning... I look forward to my daily tasks and routines…” made me curious. 

I want to have that exact sort of peace. Why don’t I?

I am productive, I have a meaningful social circle, I have passions that ignite my soul, educational goals that I am aspiring to reach, and a very strong love for Jesus Christ that surpasses my own understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

Ironically... despite all of these fulfilling parts of my life…. my strong passions and an immense desire for God, I don’t feel deep peace. No one knows this about me, but I guess people will now. It feels like, every day, I am getting further and further away from peace. It’s a weird, buzzing emptiness, combined with a high sense of urgency and inability to feel calm.  

And then I came face-to-face with a trap I had fallen into, and it was impossible to ignore. 

What is the trap I fell into, you ask? I have a true problem with overusing social media. 

The thing is, I always believed that my relationship with the internet was healthy. 

Without the internet and social media, I don’t think I would have discovered my passion for writing, or have had access to as much information that has helped me learn. My blog, Lockheart Arden Publishing, is very special to me. I share about God, religion, my thoughts, and meaningful things about my life. I do not follow accounts that make me feel insecure. I follow my friends, and accounts that correlate to my passions and interests. But… then I checked my screen time. 

Far too much of my day has not been spent on my writing, my passions or my faith. 

Instead, my screen time has indicated that I have been using it as an outlet that takes away from my life. 

Believe me when I say that I never thought I would would have to make a decision like this—but I do. This past fall semester, I have been dealing with the stress of an unknown future in graduate school, projects, finals, and long essays coming up... so that has been the perfect psychological condition for someone like me to give in to the emotional coping methods of avoidance and procrastination. (I am majoring in psychology, so I have a lot of introspective understanding and insight into my own self.) I gave in the instant relief of turning off my brain and procrastinating by going onto social media. 

So, yes, back to my harrowing discovery: I checked my screen time for the first time in a long time. It was a steady increase over the last few months—again, which I attribute to my avoidance and stress. I’m estimating that, a year ago today, I would be on my phone for about an hour day… but now, I discovered that my daily average is around 3 and a half hours each day. (The apps I use the most alternate between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube). That much screen time, even with everything else that I do to feel productive in my day. There was even a specific weekend day in November, in fact, when I spent nine hours on my phone, all on various social media sites. 

Nine hours. Wasted. 

Anyway, if I stick with my average amounts, 3 and a half hours a day, every day, is equivalent to spending 53 days of a year staring at a screen smaller than a box of M&Ms. That explains my lack of life fulfilment and internal sense of unease. 

“How did I get here?” I ask myself, when it is two in the morning, and the Instagram feed is glaring at me. “How did I get here?”  I ask myself, when I have spent hours avoiding an important assignment… never finding the motivation to start it. “How did I get here?”  I ask myself, when I’ve done nearly nothing productive for a whole weekend, my mind is running on overdrive, and the only solution I have is avoidance and excuses. 

On the outside, I have my life together… but it really makes sense as to why I do not feel that way. 

Before I try to continue any further, I must first have compassion for myself. Check. I need to understand that I am an imperfect human who makes mistakes. Check. Then, I can take steps to help improve my life and procrastination. Check. 

Now: to address my incessant questioning of, “How did I get here?” … the correct answer lies in neuroscience, behavior, and psychology. We are in an age of an over-consumption of information and content that provides instant gratification. I touched on this before when I talked about procrastination and avoidance, but this provides more detail about how our minds and technology can be a bad combination. For instance, Instagram (and most platforms) have aspects similar to TikTok, where there are short-form videos that are very easy to consume. If you get bored 15 seconds in (an eternity), you can just switch to a new video; this is addictive, very easy to access, low effort to understand, and highly stimulating. If you want to procrastinate (like me), get distracted on Instagram and increase your avoidant tendencies. If you want to shut off from the real world, go online for hours. 

Social media is also saturated with emotional content, only adding to the overstimulation and instant gratification. Whether it is a topic related to politics, a controversial subject, dating, a celebrity being criticized, new ideologies spreading, mental health, or really anything else… people’s entire lives are centered around this content. Every single day, there is a new societal issue to be aware about, causing people on all platforms to share their emotionally-charged opinions. Twitter, especially, is probably the home of information that triggers people’s anger or sadness; the content on Twitter is not in the format of short-form content, but it is very common for someone to share a strongly-worded Tweet about any given subject, and watch as the world falls tears itself apart over it. 

All of this is just another example of stimulation and instant gratification. 

During my time in university, I have learned in my psychology classes that gratification activates the mesolimbic pathway of the brain that is associated with immediate pleasure and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is released most when there is anticipation of something pleasurable, not when that thing is being consumed; the mesocortical pathway is much longer and is associated with delayed gratification. When people spend too much time with their mesolimbic pathway activated, that system overrides the mesocortical pathway. According to research from Hauser, “In summary, we show that simultaneous learning about effort and reward involves dissociable mesolimbic and mesocortical pathways, with ventral striatum encoding a reward learning signal and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encoding an effort learning signal” (Hauser, et al., 2017). This demonstrates the significance of both the mesocortical and mesolimbic pathways. There are significant factors in these short-term rewards (especially persistent use of social media) that affect decision-making and how people choose to live their lives. 

In addition, in research conducted by Matthew Johnson, he discovered that, “An individual’s motivation to pursue goals is determined by that individual’s relationship with their environment (Ross & Nisbett, 2011). It was predicted in the current study that decreased motivation to approach, or increased motivation to avoid the pursuit of a goal, would lead to decreased self-control. As hypothesised, low implicit self-esteem individuals exhibited significantly less self-control following the performance of academic study than with social media” (Johnson, 2018). 

Thus, carrying out “difficult” tasks, by comparison, is much less likely for someone to accomplish. Reading a book feels impossible. Having a good sleep schedule is impossible. Starting an essay, being creative, going out into the world, developing a new passion… or even just being bored for a while… it’s all too difficult. Why bother, when you have access to an endless amount of interesting (and possibly emotionally-charged) videos a touchscreen away?

The end result of social media and technology overuse is a society of people—especially young people—who are bereft of fulfillment, have an abysmal state of mental health, and possess hobbies that consist of nothing other than staring down at a digital screen… a screen that is smaller than a box of M&Ms. 

This intermittent reinforcement of social media, quite literally, is ruining people’s lives. People are addicted to the internet, and I think I can consider myself to fall into that category. Now, I still have wonderful grades, and I am doing well in my classes, but am I truly honoring myself? My mental health? My physical well-being? My full, human person? My dignity? 

Am I honoring what it means to be… human? 

I don’t think so. 

As I have mentioned, my life is in order on the outside, but my soul feels disorganized and heavy. There is nothing worse than doing nothing all day—scrolling through the internet—and then still, somehow, feeling drained… just like I said at the beginning: it’s a weird, buzzing emptiness, combined with a high sense of urgency and inability to feel calm.  

This is connected to God, too, in more ways than one. I think of Jesus, and I know that this world of toxic instant gratification is a spiritual poison. That heaviness in my soul is probably a minor form of hell. I know that I have time to pray a Rosary every day. I know I can read every day. I can go to Adoration every day. I know I can engage in meaningful self-care. And yet what happens? I never do. I always make excuses for the things that I do. I turn away… willingly.  

Now, I am at a point where I want to take more intentional control of my life, my soul, and my mind. I don’t want to lose 53 days of my year. I don’t want to look back on my life and not be able to remember any of it… because I spent most of it online. I want to read more, procrastinate less, and improve my mental well-being. 

I am going to spend the next 365 days without social media. I do plan on keeping my accounts since I want to continue sharing my writing in the future on there, but I will be completely deleting the apps from my phone for this amount of time. I hope that, when I come back to using these apps, I will have a much more productive relationship with how I use my time on them. And before you ask: I tried limiting my use to one hour a day. I tried apps that controlled screen time. I have an app called Opal that I will keep on my phone for other reasons. I tried everything…. nothing actually was a permanent help for me. This is a habit that I am convicted to fix in an extreme way. 

At the end of all of this, I wonder how much I will have changed. 

Not only will I not be consuming all of this content, but I won’t be sharing anything of myself. No one will be seeing my thoughts, ideas, or feelings. I won’t be as attentive to how others perceive me. There’s that aspect of everything, too—the self-image aspect. Social platforms influence our self-image, for better or for worse. For me, I definitely think that there have been moments in my life where I idolized my online presence… entirely forgetting about God, the people directly in my life, and the importance of building deep relationships. When using these sorts of platforms, it is very easy to fall into the trap of feeling like your profiles are the centre of the internet. I know I have experienced this sort of feeling, but I think God wants me to be free from that. I am now feeling very determined to de-center myself from a mindset I had for so many years and exchange it for a much more broad view of the world that is hopefully clearer. 

However, because social media has been such a great way to share my life with family and friends, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the day when I would be sharing a life update after taking so much intentional time away from the internet. I’m not used to that. I usually update my friends and family with something, small or large, every few days. 

Now… it is going to be 365 days… sharing nothing. In a way, this is going to be 365 days of delayed gratification—something I have never experienced or done before. 

A year sounds like a long time, but I don’t remember the last time I went longer than maybe six hours (in the daytime) without opening a social-media-related app. Realistically, I probably go around 3 hours… and then I just instinctively… go on my phone. And over the years of using social media, I think that threshold just gets lower and lower. When I first got social media, I never had this sort of problem. I had boundaries with it. But, when it comes to psychology, neuroscience, and behavior, it makes sense that social media has become a true distraction for me, given all of the reasons I have expressed.

Maybe for you, reading this, it would be best to try quitting for two weeks, or a month. Or four months… or possibly six. Those amounts of time might be much more productive for you. But for me… I don’t think I can afford to continue living with the social media habits that I have. I’m so thankful that I came across Rachel Stark’s video. She helped me realize and finally confront this issue that I have subconsciously been ignoring, for such a long time. 

I feel like the difference between who I am now, versus who I am going to be then, will be immense. After all, I am going to be experiencing some really important changes in my life throughout this time period. During Easter 2024, I will be entering the Catholic Church—and March 31st, 2024 is my birthday, which I think is an act of Divine Providence. I will be graduating from St. Thomas with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, with a minor in Theology in May of 2024. I will possibly be moving outside of Minnesota to obtain my graduate degree in Counseling in August of 2024. Who else knows what will happen during this time? There is just going to be so much beautiful change… and again, I look forward to going through all of it without the pressure of sharing all of those moments online, in real-time. I look forward to not always preparing Instagram posts, or coming up with things to say at random. 

I look forward to meaningful time with God, and being in prayer. 

Again… I just wonder how much I will have changed… a year from now.

Maybe my mind and soul will feel more at rest. 

Maybe I will have discovered new passions, along with writing and reading more intentionally.  

But most of all… maybe making myself a bagel in the morning will be a simple and sweet pleasure.

I’m looking forward to it. 

Saint Philip Neri once said, “Do not grieve over the temptations you suffer. When the Lord intends to bestow a particular virtue on us, He often permits us first to be tempted by the opposite vice. Therefore, look upon every temptation as an invitation to grow in a particular virtue and a promise by God that you will be successful, if only you stand fast.” 

References 

Hauser, T. U., Eldar, E., & Dolan, R. J. (2017). Separate mesocortical and mesolimbic pathways encode effort and reward learning signals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(35), E7395–E7404. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1705643114

Johnston, M. (2018). Instant gratification for the internet generation: goal motivation affects self-control as a function of self-esteem. UC Research Repository. https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/items/4ffdd8d8-6e83-4e3c-b86d-65e0667510ec

—Research Essay by Samantha Fuchsgruber 

Date // 05. December 2023

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