Digital Detox Challenge - 1 Week Without Facebook

If you are anything like everybody else (okay, I am making a very broad generalization here) chances are pretty good that you have a Facebook account – and you check it daily.

Am I right? Digital Detox Challenge.

After a restful night’s sleep, hopefully with the Wi-Fi turned off, one of the first things you do is “check in” to see what you missed. After all, your many friends and family members are in different time zones, doing different things all hours of the day…

And if you want them to like what you post, well, then you better be there for them when they have news/photos/stories to share – the sooner the better!

All too quickly we have become conditioned to the likes, the hearts, the wows – we are craving a response!

We want to be noticed and seen, demanding that our message is heard, or at least we want to know that we aren’t just sharing our private lives without a soul to care about us. Someone must surely have something to say…

Dutifully, each day we log in, ready to check our “personal news feed”. In fact, some of us never log out at all, making it far easier to pop in for a quick check multiple times a day.

It is fun to keep up with what others are doing, yet Facebook can be a bellyful of redundancy. How many pages do you follow, that you never see anything from? How many groups do you belong to, that you never take the time to connect in? You just read and read and read, scrolling from one image to the next video, to the next Feeling/Activity. Scrolling to find something worth commenting on.

And a gentle reminder here: just because you “Like” a page, and share the occasional post, it does not mean that that small business/blog/website owner has made a cent. At the end of the day, likes and shares do not put food on someone’s table. So, if you really want to support an individual, a family, a homesteader, a self-employed business owner, then consider other ways of helping them out. Send them a personal email (or snail mail letter!), every now and again, to let them know that you love what they are doing, sponsor them on Patreon, if they are creating useful, interesting things. Buy from them, if they have something to sell.

Back to the digital detox challenge – 1 week without Facebook…

If you are guilty of spending too much time on Facebook or any other social media site (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) and the hours per week you scroll there are adding up, even if it only takes up an hour of your day, then it is certainly time for a digital detox.

For the sake of your sanity, and your health, just let go of Facebook – for an entire week.

It’s easy.

Log out.
Don’t log back in till the week is over.

Now, the tricky part? Sticking to the plan.

You may think that you are missing out, in reality you aren’t missing out on much at all. There is plenty of fluff out there: cat and dog pictures, tutorials that you will never complete to the end, recipes with ingredients you cannot eat or afford, quotations galore…

The real-ity is that you can catch up with your family and friends when you return to your online presence, checking up on those special people in your life. If any major event occurred while you were away, your closest, nearest and dearest friends would have called you, emailed you, or notified you about it anyway.

When you spend too much time on social media, you are taking away energy from other activities that can productively fill your time. Gardening, cooking, spending meaningful time with like-minded others (in person) come immediately to mind.