I recently told myself that I needed to take a week vacation from Facebook (FB). I did it for a couple reasons:
1. It was on my 100 in 1,001 list.
2. I wanted to see how my life would be different without it. My thoughts all along were that there would be no way I could do it.
So now I can mark this off my list. Yay! But even more importantly, I realized that I can live without FB. In fact, I can live without it quite nicely. I found that my thoughts throughout the day many times revolved around thoughts like, “I can put that on FB.” or “Hmmm…what could I say about this on FB?” As time went and I continued to have these thoughts, the voice in my head responded with, “You’re on a FB vacation, so you don’t need to worry about!” And I liked that answer!
It’s human nature (or at least my nature) to think about what others think. I write about things on FB to see what others think. Sometimes it may be a quote that I find or something I find on pinterest. Then, I go post it and I wait, and I check back to see if anyone responded, and I think about it, “I wonder if anyone responded to my post?” It’s a vicious, vicious cycle! Like Thursday night, when I wrote that I was taking a break from FB. I still had about 20 minutes or so before I had to log off at work at midnight, which is when I said that I was starting my break. I used that time looking back to see if anyone wrote a response to it. Then, the next day I was still curious. Since I wasn’t checking FB, I didn’t have that to worry about.
I usually always have FB up on a tab in my browser and any downtime I have throughout my day, I click back and read, sometimes wasting hours at a time. A quick glance turns into “Oh, I wonder what so and so is doing?” or someone posts something and I don’t believe it so I go Google it see if it’s true. Again, wasting my day away. Last week when I was not on FB, I was able to be more productive with my time. I felt like my brain wasn’t cluttered with needless garbage. I think I actually felt less stress. It is really mind boggling how differently I felt.
So now that my week is over, I’ve resolved to:
– not always have a FB tab open.
– only check it periodically.
– not really post anything on it unless it’s just super-duper awesome.
– limit my visits to 10 minutes or less.
Are you on FB and do you find any of this to be true when you stop and think about it??