Social Media is Making Me Sad
Doug & I have been talking about giving up social media for a long time. In fact, the negative aspects of social media are what spawned the idea for “Unfriend Friday” (a segment we do every Friday at 8:25). As oftoday, I’ve accepted the “challenge” and decided to leave social media for 30 days.
When I honestly stopped and monitored my feelings on how I felt during or after scrolling through social media (mainly Facebook and Instagram because I don’t often use Twitter TBH) I felt bad. And that feeling could be triggered from seeing something that was a photo of someone who had been fat-shamed at WalMart or a political post that was so opposed to my beliefs and morals that I wanted to unleash hell upon the author. Or even worse…an unflattering photo that I was tagged in followed with the obligatory “how in the hell did they think THAT photo of me was good idea?”.
If you take a step back and really look at this, I was self-inflicting suffering in one form or another by choosing to engage in social media. Real life relationships that I have with friends and close family members were suffering. These are people that I know and love, some of them for my whole life. Our person-to-person contact was never adversarial but my negative feelings towards them were building while perusing social media.
Experts say that am elimination diet will never work because you’ll starve yourself from what you actually crave and that will eventually backfire with bingeing in the end. So what do I hope this will accomplish? I’m not 100% sure as of yet. But hitting the “reset” switch will hopefully give me some clarity in my relationship with social media in general. Maybe I’ll even be strong enough to quit for good.
I’ll let you know.