Update on Social Media Fasting

So it’s been about two weeks since I set up “App Nanny” on my phone to keep my social media use to only fifteen minut

es every four hours. I genuinely thought that I would find this “plenty of time.” I really didn’t know how much time I was spending on social media. I have been locked out of Facebook four times a day most days. I also sometimes “cheat” by using Facebook on my laptop when I get kicked off my phone.

However . . .

It is clear that I am using social media less. A lot less. It is clear that I am learning to pay more attention to my leisure activities. I don’t look at it on walks. I don’t look at it while watching television on my couch. And when I do look at it, I use it quickly because I don’t want to “waste” my fifteen minutes on casual browsing.

I think that I have more of an attention span. This may not be saying a lot because it was at rock bottom before. I have not read any books with my eyeballs in the last two weeks. I have not started painting in my free time. Or ballroom dancing. I may do those things at some point, but that point is not now.

I don’t know that I am watching more intense programs. I am not sure that it is necessarily a good thing to be paying more attention to the reality TV I have gravitated toward since the pandemic: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, How to Be Rich, Millionaire Matchmaker, for instance. But I am doing so.

I also sometimes (not often) walk or exercise in silence. Just because I decided I wanted to. (And because my phone stopped working with my hearing aids, as it does).

I think this is doing a good thing. I think that I am less enraged all the time, even though I honestly believed that social media wasn’t affecting me that way because I very rarely talk about politics on social media and I like to pride myself on having friends on either side of the spectrum of politics.

Weirdly, I am doing less crocheting. It is as if I am learning that I don’t need to be distracted all the time. I find myself thinking aloud—it’s not bad to wait or be bored, it’s not bad to feel this unpleasant emotion. Maybe I even will start to believe it.