Last week was a bit challenging for me. I won’t go into details, but by the end of the week, I decided I had to do something different. I decided that would be taking a break from Facebook for the weekend.
I have this really bad habit of when I’m bored, I’ll check Facebook. It’s become this obsessive almost automatic response. Without thinking about it, I’ll pick up my phone and click on the app.
Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. Facebook has been amazing in connecting me with some absolutely amazing people, and I love that I can see what they’re up to with the click of a button.
But there’s also a lot of negativity too. I don’t know if was the analytics or what, but every time I scrolled through my feed, it made me sad. And I needed to get away from that for a while.
Honestly, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I thought about it several times through the weekend, wondering what people were up to or if I was missing something important. I even grabbed my phone a couple times, but I never clicked on the app. I didn’t get on on my computer, either.
It seems silly to me that I have to consciously tell myself to stay off Facebook. It’s just a place to hang out with friends. But it’s also so much more than that. It’s a time suck. Soon, I find myself on there for way longer than I expected, and things I was supposed to get done don’t get done. And, again, not everything is positive and uplifting.
I was also noticing the other day that I only see certain people in my feed. I’m well aware that this is because of Facebook’s analytics and my behaviors on the site, but I miss getting news from all of my friends.
I’m hoping this little experiment will help me limit the amount of time I actually spend on there. After this weekend, I may or may not avoid it completely again. But it was really nice to unplug. It was nice to not feel obligated to get on.
It was freeing.
