How moderating social media brought me newfound peace

A little over a year ago, introverts alike echoed the same anticipation: Lockdown would be bliss. As a socially-anxious introvert, having an excuse to forgo social gatherings and stay at home sounded like the perfect peaceful solitude.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Not knowing what to do with my excess free time, I diverted my attention to the curated updates from my online friends, many of whom were mere acquaintances to whom I’ll probably never speak again.

Social media intruded into my home-ridden days and intensified my social anxiety. I couldn’t find the motivation to pursue any of my hobbies and I was unable to focus on anything other than the hypnotic glow of my newsfeed.

This prolonged exposure to social media made me realize it wasn’t benefiting me at all to live in this online world, and that I needed to make a permanent change. Adjusting and moderating my social media use has helped tremendously to rekindle both my relationships with other people and with myself.

For most of my life, socializing has felt like a performance. I’ve always been reserved and I dread small talk. It’s not that I dislike people, it’s just that I’ve always been plagued with concern about other peoples’ opinions of me. This makes it hard to relax and be myself in most social settings.

Social media only exacerbated this problem.

It was on Facebook — and later, Instagram — where I carefully crafted a facade that exuded confidence, attempting to portray myself as an outgoing person with an exciting social life and a knack for witty captions that I totally didn’t search for on Google. It was also where I could see the “likes” I received, which offered a slight— albeit, short-lived— reassurance that I was “performing” well.

With every post and comment I made online, I wrestled between needing to validate myself and fearing being judged. The person I presented online was not me, but who I thought I needed to be. As a result, social media came to be a place where I felt anxious and alienated from myself and other people.

But it was a place I nonetheless kept visiting.

Quality Human Connection

Every person needs some amount of quality human connection. In some ways, lockdown might have been more challenging in this regard for introverts than extroverts, and the culprit was right under their thumb.

I witnessed the extroverts in my life easily arrange daily, lengthy calls with friends. As I got used to not seeing people, however, the thought of picking up a phone or starting a Zoom meeting was enough to make me tense, so I stuck to texting as much as possible. My social life outside of my bubble came to be much more impersonal than before, consisting mainly of texts, clicks, and emojis.

As my anxiety mounted, I became a passive observer. I was more withdrawn from my interactions with other people than I’ve ever been. Once pandemic restrictions started to lift, and we were allowed to see friends, I didn’t know how I was going to have normal conversations with people again.

And then, I read a book.

Savouring Solitude

Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism was pivotal in inspiring me to replace social media use with quality solitude. He defines solitude as the “subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.” “Digital Minimalism” taught me that social media consists of a constant bombardment of trivial information from a vast amount of other minds, and therefore does not remotely qualify as solitude.

I realized the reason I was feeling so nervous about socializing again was because I wasn’t spending time alone with my thoughts. Instead of confronting my anxieties and working through them, I was distracting myself with trivial entertainment. As introverts need regular doses of solitude to recharge, constant social media left me feeling depleted.

While one might conceive solitude to be lonely, Thoreau famously reframed solitude as “self-communion”. This is exactly how I’d describe the act of journaling.

Spending time writing about my feelings has always helped keep me grounded to discover the root cause of my emotions. It had been months since I journaled and as soon as I got back to it, I felt a newfound sense of mental clarity and self-acceptance. I confronted my social anxiety and realized that social media was degrading my personal connections, making me feel anxiously intimidated and fearful of the social world.

Realizing the root cause of my problems always helps me work through them and find a solution.

Going off the grid entirely was never my plan. There are certain aspects of social media I value, like being able to stay in touch with my friends and family around the world.

Following some of the advice from the aforementioned book, I deleted all social media apps from my phone to make them less frequently accessible. Not having social media under my thumb and notifications to reel me in so often was a game-changer. But it wasn’t easy.

In the beginning, I migrated to my laptop to get my lengthy social media fix. But I couldn’t bring my laptop everywhere with me, and when I was on the go, I had nothing on my phone to look at and had to occupy my mind with my uninterrupted thoughts. Everyday things like commuting to work were hard to do without entertaining my eyeballs. But without much choice, I quickly learned to find serenity in my bus rides, simply breathing, looking out the window, and making a mental list of things to be grateful for.

After two months, I barely spend a quarter of the time I used to spend on social media, and when I do choose to visit Instagram occasionally for messages, I find myself bored after 5 minutes. I am still in shock about how long I used to spend shuffling through stories of food photographs, memes, and selfies.

I’ve been tweaking my habits even further. I Marie-Kondo’d my friend and follower lists, which helped me filter out all the unimportant updates I was tuning into and allowed me to focus on the people I cared about. I can now do a quick scroll through my newsfeed every few days to keep up with a select few.

I’ve also decided to no longer click “like” whenever I feel compelled to do so on a friend’s post. Instead, I ask myself if I have any substantial observations or responses to the post. If I do, I send them a personal message. If I don’t, then I move on.

Finally, I do not share or post anymore. When I feel the need to do so, I journal instead. This way, I don’t share my opinions and feelings to gain validation, and without that concern, I’ve been a lot more honest and genuine with myself and with other people.

Social media was leading me down a very dark and dangerous hole, and I was lucky to have dug myself out of it before I got stuck. Everyone has a different experience on social media, however, the most important thing is understanding how social media truly makes you feel and making intentional decisions in tune with your personal needs and values.