How Taking a Social Media Break Helped Me Sleep Better

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You know the feeling you have when you wake up and reach for your phone? I hate that feeling. I realized recently that I’d been reaching for my phone before my eyes were even really opened for the day. It was something I did to comfort myself and I had to ask the question, “What was I comforting myself about?” I hadn’t planned on taking a social media break recently, but when the unwanted weekly report showed up on my screen one day a few weeks ago, I realized, something had to give.

Getting the Dreaded Weekly Report on My iPhone

Like many people, I often find myself scrolling aimlessly on my iPhone. What starts out as a way to “kill” a few minutes while waiting for a pot to boil or to attend an appointment, turns into hours of my life. How do I know it turns into hours of my life? The frigging weekly report iPhone sends you on Sunday morning when you’re trying to sleep in.

Truthfully, most weeks I ignore it. I don’t even bother looking at the numbers. But the weekend wasn’t even over and I was already feeling crappy about the week ahead. How was I going to curb this phone enthusiasm? Did I need to? It’s not like the whole world isn’t living on their phones, right? But on this day, I looked at the report and I thought to myself, “Fuck.” I’d spent close to 5 hours a day on my phone the week before.

I couldn’t even comprehend those numbers. That’s 25 hours in a work week. And I’m not even working! I’m taking a creative sabbatical. While I’ve been putting my time away from running my consulting company to good use, I think I was really spending a lot of time doom scrolling online too.

It shook me. And then I looked at the calendar.

A Well-Timed Escape From Social Media

The weekly report from my phone couldn’t have come at a better time actually. I’d recently become single. Becoming single meant cancelled some planned trips that were meant to be shared by two people. I could have taken those trips by myself, but the truth was I didn’t want to just try to fill in the gap. I wanted to do something else.

But those dates still lingered on the calendar. I decided that I didn’t want to see what was going on at an event I was supposed to attend with my ex. For all I knew, he was still planning to attend the event and while I wasn’t following him online anymore, we’ve got enough people in common that I knew I’d see him or at least, see enough of the event to have a little FOMO. I decided to create a weekend someone else might have FOMO about and not worry about what was being showcased online.

What’s more though, is that I felt I’d been spending a lot of time on social media looking for something: an escape. People are often surprised to find that I’m a sensitive person because I’m a bit of a hard-ass, but the truth is that I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I’d have to manage my feelings when seeing updates about the event I was supposed to attend.

Instead, I decided it was a much better use of my time to not put myself in that situation at all. Imagine how much brain power I could free up if a) I didn’t spend 5 hours a day on my phone, and b) I didn’t have to try to be the bigger person online. I could just get off of it for a while.

A Project to Keep Life Moving Forward

While I considered my options to create a weekend that was all my own, I didn’t want to feel like I was escaping my thoughts. It’s so much easier to just scroll through your phone than feel your feelings. See: 5 hours a day on my phone. But in order to break these cycles and create different outcomes for ourselves, we have to actually do something different.

On Wednesday that week, I was still considering taking a road trip, maybe go camping. I was thinking about flying out west to see my best friend for a few days. I was thinking about going to the mountains and renting a cabin. But after a conversation with said best friend, I decided to overhaul the barn in my backyard and create a she shed for myself.

I didn’t have anything I needed to do that kind of project except time and money. Oh, and some mad building skills I’ve picked up over the years doing home renovations. But otherwise, I needed to buy some tools. That’s how I spent Thursday. I took myself to Home Depot and picked out a mitre saw. I priced nails and wood. I charged up my power drill in case I needed it. That was one of the first things I bought for myself when I bought my house. Every woman needs a power drill. And on Friday, I got up bright and early and started cleaning out the barn to create a she shed.

Get Ready. Build Shed.

I spend 3 full days turning that little barn into a work of art and I didn’t check social media once. My screen time was obliterated. I’d gone from spending 5 hours a day on my phone the week before to spending less than 2 hours per day on the phone and I can tell you that what I was doing on my phone was watching YouTube videos about how to measure and install Shiplap in the barn. Also, I watched some Van Life videos. But that’s another project for another day.

By the time Sunday rolled around, I was exhausted. I was dirty. I’d worn the same outfit all weekend not wanting to ruin any clothes in the barn. And I’d forgotten to eat several times, but I wasn’t hungry. I was fulfilled. And I was the proud owner of a mighty fine She Shed.

The Mind Fog Lifted By Focusing on a Cool Project Instead of the Noise Online

While I appreciate a good meme as much as the next person, the level of shitty I feel after spending any amount of timed scrolling social media is evident every time I turn my phone off. My brain doesn’t know where to focus. My eyes don’t know where to look. I feel worn out. I wish I could say that I felt worn out after 3 days of renovating a barn in my yard, but all I felt was satisfaction. It’s a different kind of work for my brain to sift through the noise on the internet looking for something to grab onto.

And I can’t help wonder why I continue to do it, especially after seeing how much better I felt after taking a break.

Not only had I avoided making myself feel shitty about a missed event and break-up, but I also created a situation where I created something new in the world, exhausted myself in a new, different and better way, and slept like I’d been given anaesthetic. It was glorious.

Being Tired is Kind of Awesome

The best part about being so tired from doing manual labour was that my brain had nowhere else to search. It wanted to rest. When I went to bed, I didn’t watch Netflix. I didn’t scroll my phone. Turning the light off, I rolled over and passed out. I usually wake up a few times a night, but not this weekend.

No, this weekend, I slept until the alarm went off the next morning and I had to get up and continue my creative project. Instead of thinking about everything under the sun throughout the day, my brain had a fun little process to focus on: hammer nails. Measure boards. It was a nice break from the constant noise in there, if I’m being honest. And when I woke up in the morning, my mind focused on the work to be done, not the lives of other people I was missing out on social media.

Taking a Break From Social Media Helped Me Sleep Better

I’ve tried many things to improve my sleep over the years. I have a chronic pain condition and when it’s in flare-up mode, one of the only ways I know how to heal myself is to sleep. In some cases, I have no choice but to sleep. I can’t keep my eyes open. That happened a month ago when I slammed my hand in the car door while camping.

On day one, it hurt like a mother. On day two, I fell asleep on the couch against my will. My body needed to sleep. So when I can’t sleep, everything in my life suffers. I don’t care about anything. I don’t want to do anything. It’s tough. And well, I’m tired on top of that, so it really sucks.

But when I took a break from social media, I wanted to bottle that feeling and keep it going forever. I’d given credit to the physical work I’d done to make me tired, and that certainly helped, but what really made the difference was forgetting social media existed. I went long hours without thinking about it, worrying about it or checking it.

What is All the Fuss About Anyway?

After the first day, I didn’t think about it at all. And I didn’t think about that event I was missing either. I was thinking about the next steps to bring my she shed to life. I was living my own life in the moment. And sure, I was also taking loads of videos and photos for the blog and I planned to share it on social media, but it wasn’t the point of doing the project.

After the second day of not being on social media, I went to bed thinking about how great my day had been. I thought about all I had done and made with my own hands. I thought about decorating decisions I needed to make…and that’s about it because I passed out again hard.

What I realized after the second full night of sleep was that social media was playing over and over again in my brain like I was watching television. It has always felt like a time suck to me because it is a time suck. I just kept searching it for something else. One more bit of information. Another ah-ha moment that must be there if I just keep searching.

And then without realizing it, 5 hours has gone by and I’m tired for a different reason.

Cutting Back on Social Media As a Rule Now

I wish I could tell you that discovering the negative effects social media has had on my sleeping patterns made it easy to quit. But I didn’t quit. In fact, after I decided to take a break from social media and did, I went right back to using it on full-blast again. As you can imagine, I was tired from spending 3 days doing manual labour in my shed by myself.

Did I mention I did the work by myself? I did. And 3 days of hammering nails by yourself is exhausting. Instead of doing things that made me feel better, like taking a bath or reading a book or going for a drive, I sat on the couch for 3 more days and scrolled social media like it was a lifeline to the world.

Why Would Someone Do That to Themselves?

I couldn’t understand why I’d done that. So I sat with it for a while and realized that I was experiencing a thing that Gay Hendricks refers to as an upper-limit problem. An upper-limit problem occurs when you do something awesome and then let yourself fizzle out or sabotage further efforts for success because you feel like you don’t deserve it or can’t handle it. It’s a sneaky little bastard that keeps popping up even after years of engaging in self-improvement and personal development.

I recognized it after 3 days of doing nothing but scrolling the internet while watching crappy TV shows on Netflix. I don’t even like watching TV so when I catch myself doing it, I know something is wrong.

Once I caught the upper-limit problem, it was easy enough to fix. I got off the couch. I put my phone down. I worked on my seventh novel. Turning to a practical project in my house, I decided to overhaul my wardrobe. I took an impromptu camping trip for one night. And I left my phone off for most of it. Sure, I’m documenting a lot of the creative sabbatical projects I’m engaging in online, but otherwise, I don’t need to be there. I don’t need to be consuming more than I create.

Refocusing How I Spend My Time

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that being on social media isn’t fun. It is fun. There’s so many cool things online that I get caught up in and love to return to again and again. I find it inspirational in a lot of ways and I find it fucking depressing as hell in a lot of ways. But either way, the fact that we have a device in our pockets that provides us with instant, endless content to mindlessly consume worries me. It worries me because I’d lost over 30 hours in one week to this little device. And for what?

When I was camping, I didn’t feel like I needed to check social media. I felt like I was living my life in the moment and wasn’t missing anything. But then I did check it and you know what I saw that was like a lighting bolt from the sky? I saw a post that said, “If you spend 3 hours a day on social media, you’ll have spent 9 years of your life online.” Umm, what? I need to hit pause here and fact check the shit out of this claim right now.

Doing the Math of Social Media’s Influence on Our Lives

Now, I need you to know that I can’t wrap my head around the math of that statement, so I did some of my own math. If if spent 3 hours a day on social media, which I certainly have done before, and I did that every day for a year, I’d have spent 1095 hours living outside my life. Numbing. Avoiding. Calling it entertainment.

To put that number into perspective, it equals 27 work weeks. That’s HALF of the year. That’s like having a full-time job six months of the year. I could see how the author of that Instagram post got to 9 years pretty quickly. If I did that for 10 years, I’d have accumulated enough hours online to have become an expert: 10, 950 hours over 10 years. Do you know that in that time, I would have spent 5 years online? Here’s the math:

10,950 hours / 40 hours in a work week = 273.75 weeks

274.75 weeks / 52 weeks in a year = 5 fucking years

5 years. Online.

In that time, I could have gotten another degree. Hell, I could literally have become a doctor. I could have learned any number of skills. I could have read any number of books. Oh my God, the things I could have seen while traveling. The sleep I could have gotten.

Back to Refocusing My Energy to Sleep Better

If I approach reducing the time I spend on social media purely from the perspective of wanting to improve my sleep, I’ve just found several hours a day where I can do things to busy my brain long enough so that when I get into bed at night, I’m ready to sleep. Instead, what’s mostly happening is I’m lying in bed trying to solve world hunger and not readying myself for sleep.

I’ve tried the routines and bedtime practices. I’ve tried yoga, massage, and literally running around the block to make myself tired. But it’s not a physical tired I need to be in order to sleep. I need to be quiet. I need my brain to turn off. And so this creative sabbatical is doing a lot of things for me, including providing plenty of time, space and energy to keep my brain busy. I’m just not leveraging it the way I need to improve my sleep.

This isn’t just about having ADHD, which I do. It’s about using the time I have to focus on things I actually want to focus on. And what came from the decision to take a break from social media was this: when I go to bed satisfied with how I’ve spent my day, I sleep better. That’s it. It’s not rocket science. It’s knowing I didn’t waste it. I didn’t spend all day trying to avoid something: a feeling, a chore, a hard conversation. If I focus on things that make me feel good, then I go to bed feeling good. And I sleep.

What a concept.

What are The Rules for Social Media Now That I Know it Impacts My Sleep?

The rules are simple: there’s just one. If I pick up my phone and find that I’m scrolling through social media for more than a few minutes, I ask myself what I really want to be doing right now. Or if I catch myself form-fitting into the couch watching another crappy TV show on Netflix, I ask what else I could do with my time.

This isn’t about always being “on” or productive. It’s about spending more of the time I have (and have left) doing what I actually want to do. And if that is scroll social media (which is almost never is), then that’s fine. But it’s more likely, if I interrupt the pattern and ask the question, I’ll find I’d rather be doing anything else than sitting on my phone.

Live the Highlight Reel

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and especially in light of the realization that social media is literally sucking the life out of me and my days on earth, is that I have the privilege to be living a highlight reel. I don’t just live a life on repeat. I’ve been curating and creating things in my life for years so they are exactly the way I want them to be.

And while I have as much responsibility as the next person, I also have time and space to do the things I love. So I’ve become even more mindful as of late just how much more time I could be spending doing exactly what I want. Can you imagine that for yourself? Can you imagine doing something you actually want to do?

You might tell yourself you don’t have time, but I’m going to ask you check that little annoying weekly report that gets sent to your phone this week. I’m going to ask you to be honest with yourself about whether or not you’ve spent the week doing the things you want to do, or did you spend hours a day on social media wishing you had a different life or trying to numb out of the life you had?

Shift the Focus with a Creative Challenge

No judgment. You’ll recall I just confessed to 30 hours of social media time in one week. I’m just calling it out so we can explore it. Challenge it. And then maybe do something about it if we want to. And I definitely want to take a social media break more often.

I want to live the highlight reel before I ever worry about sharing the highlight reel with anyone. And I want my days to be filled with the things I love to do, see and engage with, not with the noise of other people’s lives.

If you’re looking for a reason to take a social media break, the good news is that you don’t need one. I leveraged an uncomfortable situation in my life into a cool she shed, a new wardrobe and a camping trip, but you don’t need a reason to take a break from social media. However, if you’re not sure what to do with your time, consider enrolling in my 5-day Creative Challenge or taking my course, Go Anyway: The Solo Adventure Course for Women. Try something new. See a different perspective. Live a different life.