I'm always interested in the hidden impacts social media has on our lives, particularly the negative impacts which we don't realize are affecting us. A month ago, I decided that I was spending an unhealthy amount of time on social media and I needed to put it to a stop. My daily routine was to wake up, check twitter, check facebook, and maybe check the front page of reddit. By "checking" them, what it really means is I consume all of my news feeds. What's going on? who's doing what? What's the latest that's happening? etc etc. It's fine to want to know these things, but the problem comes when I realized that it took me an hour in the morning to do this, and then later on in the day, my news feeds would change, and then I'd spend another hour or two trying to keep up. In all, I could accidentally spend three hours of my day, spread across 15-30 minute intervals, trying to stay updated on social media news feeds. When you add up all that time, and then look at how much time that adds up to over a month, it's a LOT of time! 3 hours a day * 30 days a month = 90 hours! That's like two working weeks with some overtime added in. I was starting to feel mentally unhealthy, like "this isn't the kind of life I want to live or how I want to spend my precious lifes time."

The follow up question I had to ask myself: "Okay, does this make my life better or worse?", "Is this a habit or an addiction?", "what would I spend my time on if I got those hours back?"

I didn't know the answers, so I decided to conduct an experiment and find out. I would not log in to facebook, twitter, or reddit for a month straight. Completely cold turkey. Now, the results are in.

1) I read the entire Stormlight Archives book series by Brandon Sanderson. Each book was about 1000 pages, so I read 3000 pages in a month. I really enjoyed reading these books and found that it filled a need for me to find wisdom and enlightenment. If you look for it, you can find it sprinkled throughout the series. Here's a rough idea that resonated with me: "It's easy to not fail. If you never try to do anything, you can never fail. But people who never try anything aren't worth a damn, so to fail in life is to live a good life." There's a lot of very carefully thought out dilemmas in there as well, which I really enjoyed. When I was in my teens, I used to be quite a prolific reader and went through a book a week. I think I'm going to return to my love for reading good literature. My intuition says that fundamentally, writing improves with reading a lot.

2) I felt really off balance. Whether social media was a habit or an addiction, I don't know, but if you do something drastic to change your lifestyle, there's going to be some readjustment to the new life.

3) I felt a bit more isolated. Anytime something remarkable happened to me, or I had a profound thought, I couldn't write a social media post about it. In a way, I suppose that's better. It showed me that I need to find other outlets for self expression, like telling people in person. Or, keeping it to myself and just enjoying the moment before it fleets away.

4) I played a bit more video games.

5) My sleep schedule was relatively unaffected. I still hate waking up early and still love staying up until 2am.

6) I feel an order of magnitude less grumpy and irritated. I don't know if its caused by the lack of social media, but it does make me feel happier and my relationships feel a little less strained.

7) I got more work done while I was at work. Instead of habitually opening up social media while I was waiting for something to compile, I just wait for it to compile. I felt a lot more focused.

8) This month feels like it has been very, very long. It feels like 3 months, whereas the normal month feels like a week or two. It's interesting how the perception of life pacing changed.

9) I don't miss reddit at all. 

Anyways, I was reflecting on the state of my own mind without social media or news media. We are very careful about what sorts of food we consume because it directly affects our body. If you eat garbage, you feel like garbage. Likewise with the mind and what it consumes. Social media feeds are McDonalds for the mind.

I'm really curious about what would happen if I cut off all technology from my personal life? No cell phones, no video games, no television, no netflix, no laptop, etc. Cut out anything with a screen. I don't know if I'm brave enough for that right now, I would need other hobbies to fall on.

What is your relationship with technology, and do you feel its a healthy one?

Yes, social media can definitely be a huge time sink depending on how you use it, and it also often amplifies negative and toxic things.

I've been making a similar, but less extreme adjustment to your experiment lately.  I couldn't disconnect completely because part of my role here at GDNet involves social media, and one of my other jobs requires being on a private social network.

Because I couldn't disconnect, I instead worked on removing or reducing notifications, investigated ways to better curate my feeds, and set limits on when and for how long I log on to check.

I already had game invites/messages blocked on Facebook, and a lot of annoying pages blocked; basically anytime I see a "tag someone who" post or one of those posts with a list of names who will have something happen to them, the source page gets blocked.

Firstly, I turned off push notifications for basically everything. No flashing lights, phone vibration, or notification pop-ups when I'm tagged, someone comments on my stuff, etc.  Instead I see those things when I choose to check the apps/sites.  I did leave push notifications on for Facebook event invites, because I don't get many of those and I do like to respond as promptly as possible.

Next, better curation of my feeds. I went through my feed, and my friends lists, and did quite a bit of unfollowing, muting, etc. for accounts that weren't posting things that interest me. I left some groups that were no longer of interest, and adjusted notification settings for others. I used the "see first" options to make sure I get more content from people and groups I really value.

Then I set some limits for myself. 30 minutes in the morning. 15 minutes at lunch. 45 minutes at night. The minimum amount of time needed if I was required to share/post something outside of those times (i.e. just post it, check it was correct, and log off; no checking on other stuff, and leave follow-up until the next window).

Like you, it took some adjustment at first, and I had to stop myself from checking outside my times for the first few days.

My feeds are a lot more relevant after the additional curation, and I feel less compelled to try to get through everything than to just check in on the prominent stuff.

I definitely have more free time for other small tasks or activities.

I've noticed that social media tends to amplify things like FOMO and other toxic thoughts, especially with things like Facebook. My problem is that sometimes these platforms are also ways of organizing events or keeping in touch with people and/or networking as well, especially because of my current position, where I will be moving somewhat often for the next year and a half.

It's difficult to find a good balance really. Something I personally struggle with (amongst other things).