I’ve come to realize that I need to fast from social media and news for about a week regularly now and I just completed my most recent fast this last week.
In recent months all this noise from our devices has been really building to a crescendo of discord inside me and it has even been affecting my work which is coaching.
I’ve also seen this in my clients. They show up talking about addiction to their apps and can’t stop scrolling through news and their feeds. Breaking free is such a difficult thing WHEN THESE APPS ARE DESIGNED TO ATTRACT AND HOLD YOUR ATTENTION.
What happens inside us? I bet you already know.
That lingering anxiety. Those fears. Uncertain thoughts of the future. Your own livelihood. Who you are. Especially compared to all those amazing, interesting people out there with those perfect bodies and lives.
And all the negativity from news. All designed too, to get you to click in. The wars. The shootings. The battle for control over our country.
Those feeds. Friends, were they? How could they be making such comments like that. Negative. Abrasive. Uncaring. Uncompassionate. Destructive. Post after post endless. Stuff that you might care about or not. Only building up the muscles in your thumb, definitely not in your brain.
We in this business like to compare things like this to the next smoking. We’ll probably realize in a few *more* decades that device/app/media addiction is really a THING and that we need much better control over these aspects of our lives than we thought.
It’s time to not rely on the next longitudinal, double blind, randomized controlled, epidemiological study that will run for decades and then get results that people will complain about for another few decades.
(By the way, I know that kind of study above doesn’t exist – dark science humor)
YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE NEWS ARE DOING TO YOU RIGHT NOW.
Try social media and news fasting. Just for a day. See what happens to you.
Observe internally. How different do you feel? What, if anything, has released?
Observe externally. Where is your attention now? What are you doing that is different? What is the hole that needs to be filled when you reflexively reach for your phone and you stop your finger from tapping that app like you’ve done every day prior?
If you like it, then go for another day. And another. What changes in your life happen as a result? Give it a try now!
(oops I guess if you do, you won’t be able to reply this to post – see you on the other side!)
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