Taking an Intentional Break From Social Media

Do you have a love-hate relationship with social media? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. Social media can serve as a fun outlet to help you check out after a hard day’s work…until you start an online business. Then what was once just silly cat videos or fun travel inspiration turns into an endless business building hamster wheel. After all, it can be hard to stop the scroll – and the wheels that are turning in your mind –  when you’re busy searching for content ideas or peeping at your competitor’s profiles. Talk about a one-way ticket to burnout city. 

So, the question is, how can we actually unplug from social media, while still maintaining an online presence and moving the needle forward in our businesses? And is that even possible in today’s social media-centric society? 

The answer is yes, and today we’re breaking down how! Listen in for practical tips on how to unplug from social media so you can proactively protect your energy and avoid burnout down the road. 

[4:03] Elisabeth 

My first instinct when I was starting to get sick of social media was to just delete all of the apps and quit using social media cold turkey.  But now I feel   my mentality towards it is has changed for the better. 

Today, I want to walk through how to take a break from social media, whether it’s just stepping away for a week or a month at a time, not how to get rid of it completely because I know that’s not going to be practical for most people. 

The important thing to remember is that you can decide what this break looks   for you. Do you want to step away for a few hours? A day? A week? A few weeks? Etc. 

[5:35] Elisabeth  

Let’s start with the who, as in who are you taking a break from? Which platform are you stepping away from? Is it all of them? Is it specifically just Instagram? Just TikTok? Or Just Facebook?  

I know my relationship with Facebook is so different now than it used to be, partly because I went through and did a huge, huge cleansing of friends. I only have   120 friends on Facebook now, and those are pretty much people I literally actually talk to.

So that made that platform more manageable to me. But to come back to the who just define at the beginning,   which app specifically, you’re taking a break from, and which one is sucking the most of your time? Which one do you feel needs to go?

And then obviously your why is a really big one. Why do you feel the need to step away? Is it simply just because you are taking way too much time out of your day with these apps,   you’re spending hours on Instagram?

Are you deciding to take a break from social media because you feel you can’t be present with your kids? Is it because you are feeling that comparison kind of rear its ugly head? It’s really important to define your why, because that is going to be your motivator in doing all of this. Otherwise, there’s not really a point in putting in the effort it takes to step away.

[7:45] Cami 

I feel like my why would just be that social media is simply taking up too much time. You know, my time is very limited as it is these days with my little baby girl. So it’s just like, okay, well scrolling on social media is a waste of time let’s get rid of it. 

And also,I don’t know about you guys, but, my brain is always going 175 miles an hour and there are like 87 tabs open. And so sometimes social media is just another portal for having 552 tabs open. And it’s just a lot of noise. And so in order to focus on what I want to do next in my business, I have to just relax and go into my own brain of chaos because I already have my own things going on. I don’t need everyone else’s things too. So shutting out that noise for a little bit, just so you can refocus and take time to just be still and just be, and not looking at what everyone else is doing is super beneficial. 

I can definitely start getting caught up in what everyone else is doing and feeling pressure to keep up.  , oh crap, this person is launching their Halloween collection, and I haven’t even done that yet and then I’ll just go into a tizzy for no real reason. So I think it’s better to just step away and just think and enjoy the creative process instead of trying to just slam something together really quickly, because you know, everything is going so fast and so quickly. 

[11:09] Elisabeth

So the next thing that Cami and I talked about a little bit already is the, what so define what you are actually doing.

First of all, what do you hope this will accomplish? And it kind of goes that kind of ties into your why, but second of all, What exactly are you doing? Is it a full break? Does this mean you’re getting rid of every single thing on your phone? You’re logging out of everything on Chrome and Safari on your computer.

Are you having a friend change your passwords. Are you going hardcore? Some people go hardcore and they do things like deactivate Facebook. You know, you need to define what this is for you, because it can be as little as removing the apps from your phone and still staying logged in elsewhere, which is pretty much my strategy now, or it can be you are you’re nuking everything for a month.

Elisabeth 13:29

So the next thing is the, how, how are you actually gonna go about this? So let’s think about a couple of things. First of all, is there anybody you need to notify? In my opinion, No, not really.  , it always kind of cracks me up when people are, I’m gonna be gone or I’m leaving social media for a month.

Personally, making a big go away announcement is not my style. I don’t think it’s necessary. If you wanna flex that muscle, go for it. I’m not gonna prevent you from doing that. But sometimes there are close friends on social media who will genuinely notice you’re not active on the platform anymore, so it could be nice to tell some of those people, right? Or maybe it’s wedding planners, you have a really good relationship with, and they’re used to seeing your comments and your posts, and then all of a sudden you’re gone. It might be helpful for some of those people to know that if you’re interacting with them very heavily.

Elisabeth 16:44

How will you communicate with your audience when you’re not on social media? And to be honest, this is something you need to be thinking about anyways because social media can literally implode and be gone overnight.

Okay.   , what if something happens to one of the apps and they. I don’t know,   Instagram, we said, we feel is already kind of changing so much. Facebook has changed so much.   you can’t have all of your marketing efforts consolidated on just one platform. Anyways. It’s just not really a good strategy.

So how are you gonna communicate with your audience while you are not on social media? Is this through email campaigns? Is it through blog posts? Do you maybe have a podcast? Part of the reason? 

I honestly don’t fee bad at all about not being on social media because you guys listen to me jabber on on the podcast for an hour every week. Who needs more of me on social media when you get to listen to my voice talking to you guys directly. Podcasting is just once example. There are so many other ways that we can communicate with our audience, with our people. Email, direct connections, networking, whatever it is.

You have to remember people build businesses before the internet existed.  So you have to think old school, you know, you gotta get in that mindset of what did people do during that time and what can I do that’ll allow me to take a step back?

So. That leads me to my next point, using a scheduling platform to create content that you have and post it that way. I don’t know how scheduling platforms do with video at this point, because everything’s becoming so video-heavy, but I know that Planoly is one of  Cami and my favorites that we have both used before. That’s actually what the podcast post on the Biz Birthday Bash Instagram get pushed through our podcast manager helps set that up and push it through that way.

So are you either scheduling them or do you have someone else, maybe a virtual assistant helping you schedule some posts if you’re taking photos of your work and you can offboard that to somebody else to post and create cute little captions or whatever needs to happen.  That’s something you could easily give to someone else to do.

So I was also gonna say, we freaking love flow desk.If you guys don’t have email marketing yet now is the time to start thinking about it. If you haven’t. I know people harp on that a lot, but truly if you go to Bizbirthdaybash.com/favorites we have a flow desk link there. If you guys wanna sign up, flow desk is very easy to use. It’s very pretty. I would start brainstorming some ideas for marketing emails because I’m confident that email is not going away. For one, wxhat the heck would we replace it with? I don’t freaking know so people are gonna get emails for forever. Go to bizbirthdaybash.com/favorites to get our Flodesk link if you’re interested in trying it out. 

Elisabeth 21:02

The when is all about, when will you return to social media  if at all. And when you do return, what will that look like? Does that mean you have new, healthy boundaries in place? Does it mean me that you cleaned  a ton of people from your Facebook friends list? Does it mean you muted a lot of people on Instagram? 

I cleansed a ton of people from Instagram, and unfollowed, so many accounts to really narrow it down. I hid so many people’s stories because that was a big time suck for me, was clicking through people’s stories. So at one point, I hid everyone’s stories. It was pretty insane except for literally Cami and one other person.And so that was really good. 

And then I slowly started unhiding people if I thought of them and I was, oh, I wonder what so, and so is up to then I would go find their bubble in the stories and unhiding them because that was my natural brain being curious about them rather than having something thrown at me.

So there are all these ways you can reintroduce social media into your life in a way that feels better to you because I still use social media. Now, t just looks so different because I browse Instagram on safari or on Chrome. I think I’m logged into my business, Instagram through Chrome, on my computer, and I’m logged into my personal Instagram on safari, on my phone.

So in the evening, if I wanna see what actual friends, like literal real-life friends are up to, and my personal account is private. Then I can go on my phone and look, and if I wanna look at business accounts, I have to be on my computer. And so that’s a good boundary for me. So there are all these clever ways you can go about it.

Elisabeth 25:17

Talking real quick about muscle memory, because this is gonna be the hardest thing. If you get rid of these apps on your phone and delete them. I don’t know if you if you log out of them from all your browsers, you’re taking a hardcore break. That muscle memory still exists. You’re still gonna pick up your phone.

You’re gonna scroll through your apps, looking for Instagram, looking for an app, whatever it is that you want to get on, cuz your brain just has that muscle memory. And so that’s gonna be, it’s literally, almost. Withdrawal for the first two days.  I noticed it all the time that I would pick up my phone and I would be going to the same spot because I would be trying to look at Instagram or trying to do, you know, whatever my brain is used to doing our brains, get used to us taking up time in our day with the apps that we’re using.

 Because this happens, you need to have a visual list of to-do items, somewhere, whether this is on your fridge or on your computer, in your office, or wherever you need to hang it up. Because when you have a moment that you’re, I wanted to scroll social media and now I’m having a mental blank and I don’t know what to do next.

You literally need to have something in front of you that can remind you of things to do. And this includes evenings, right? Because in the evening we spend a lot of downtime scrolling on our phones, it could be reading a book and going on a walk,  simple things like that. 

Elisabeth 21:49

So let’s chat about the benefits I’ve seenas a result of stepping away from social media in my own life because Cami did ask that earlier. The first benefit is that I feel like my brain is clearer.

 I will say for me, TikTok is was the most addicting because it had the best algorithm by far. It was the most fun social media app I have ever used. I had it in December. I, I would say six weeks in December 2021 and a little bit in January 2022 and  I had to delete it and step away from it completely because I felt like  it was changing my brain. It was scary, I felt like I couldn’t even think about, what else I wanted to do, or doing other things that I loved didn’t even sound fun to me because I just wanted to be on TikTok because it was more fun.

So beyond being more focused on things I actually want to do in real life, I also find that since I limited my social media consumption that I feel a better sense of security in who I am as a person.There’s not that comparison trap. I have completely let go of trying to, achieve those vanity metrics of kind of stepping back from the rat race that we all feel the discouragement of the algorithm continuing to crush all of us.. So I, I know that it’s happening cuz I hear it from people, but I’m not experiencing it myself.

if that makes sense, cuz I’m not posting stuff on social media and doing stuff on there. And then   Facebook now has been just more about my gardening group and the a Z directory Facebook group. And so  I will check it for that. That’s pretty much it.  Like I said, I don’t have many friends on there, so I feel it’s just been a very overall beneficial thing for me in my life to step away in a different way.