Mindfulness
When a gratitude practice can become bittersweet
If you have pursued personal reflection activities or journaling, you may have come across some version of gratitude exercises. The idea being to focus and think of things to be grateful for in your life daily to help you appreciate what you have now. This can help in getting my mindset into a more positive space.
I’m prone to moving into a negative headspace really easily. Depression is something I have dealt with most of my adult life. Thankfully, I had access to counselling services very early on and started developing the tools to change my mindset and stop self sabotaging my own emotions with negative reinforcement.
One of those tools has been gratitude. Particularly in recent times, I’m always very conscious of how blessed I am in my life with a loving family, relative financial stability and minimal trauma in my life until now (I resisted even typing that last bit because I know it comes for all of us eventually).
But, I’ve noticed there are times when my gratitude mentality can also turn into a negative reinforcement.
If you are genuinely grateful yet still feeling down or even depressed; it’s very easy to get into a spiral of feeling down about feeling down. When you know your life is actually very blessed, so you should have no reason to feel down about any of it. When things in your life are beyond anything you could have imagined at your lowest point, so why do you now crave something beyond your happiness now?
For myself right now, it’s career. I’ve written about this previously if you are interested, but in short I find myself in a situation and career which is beyond what I ever imagined for myself and provides for my family and lifestyle; and yet I’m lacking any real fulfilment from it.
I read an article recently which referred to the “disease of more”. I won’t repeat some of the themes within it but encourage you to read it as well. In short, my takeaway was that our desire to achieve or seek fulfilment is a cycle that keeps us always wanting more instead of being truly happy with our scenarios now.
Or more more simply; how the act of seeking self improvement may actually make us feel worse.
It’s an interesting way to look at things. And while I’m not about to throw out looking at ways to make my work feel more valuable to me; I am going to add the lessons from the disease of more to my mental health toolbox.
To take some of the bitterness away from the gratitude.
Taking a proper break: A few days disconnect without social media
Recently I went with my wife on a 4 day mini break to one of our favourite places; Bunbury in Western Australia. On the lead up to the break, I increasingly craved one not just physically but mentally. My usual routine of sharing my photos on travels on various online platforms just didn’t feel like it would be helping that purpose.
So, the day before we left I decided to delete all the social apps off my phone. While I’m generally purposeful of my usage of these apps on my phone; I knew in a holiday mode with time on my hands, I would be more prone to increase my usage out of a desire to share cool things I’m doing, or just out of boredom.
This isn’t my first time of disconnecting from social media. Indeed I’m constantly attempting to be more mindful of my technology usage. As a result, a lot of what I’ve experienced I expected. So while I don’t have a list of lessons learned per se; here are some things that were reinforced as part of my mini-disconnect.
Social media moves on without you
It’s often said but it needs reinforcing here: while social media works off many people sharing content, isn’t reliant on your content specifically.
Only your closest friends may even notice that you aren’t online (and most won’t even know). Those few that do notice are most likely to contact you directly by other means if they have any concerns.
These networks do a great job in mimicking the connections of the physical world. While they can increasingly lead to very real friendships and more, the majority are confined to the online space they share.
While our online life might appear more integrated with our lives while we are knee-deep in commenting and posting; the volume of noise is so vast and constant that our presence no longer in a space just can’t be felt.
It’s not that our online connections may not care about us; but more likely they are so overwhelmed with the voices of everyone else that it’s less likely to notice when one goes silent.
This is probably easier to do when on a break outside of your normal life
For most of us, our lives are very routine. Get up, get ourselves and the kids (if you have them) ready, go to work and come home, maybe do some regular activities during the week and some catch ups with other loved ones on weekends. With the prevalence of smartphones and (virtually) unlimited connectivity, it’s been so easy for social networks to become integrated into those daily routines.
So those who have been trying to go without social media on their phones, or even restrict usage to certain times, may have experienced difficulty doing so as our brains have become accustomed to having those dopamine hits routinely throughout our day; I know I certainly have.
But breaks and times away from your usual location breaks that routine. Even if it’s a place you are lucky enough to visit often, you are doing different activities like taking time to enjoy a breakfast meal at a cafe or visiting local tourist sites.
At least for myself, breaking the social media cycle has seemed easier when on such a break from my regular routines compared to trying to do so otherwise.
Despite the change in routines, there will still be triggers
Our brains are wired to enjoy and look for the regular hits we get used to from social media usage. So when you stop completely, even in a scenario where your routines are disrupted and you are kept busy by other activities, there are always things that can trigger you into wanting to use social media.
For myself, I like to take photos. I enjoy the process of making them, but I also enjoy sharing them. Most of my photos shared are for the close family and friends on Facebook (I have less than 40 connections, so it is very much limited to those close connections), but I also like sharing wider on such platforms such as Instagram.
While I’d like to say I do my photography for my own needs and wants; it’s hard to deny that reactions to photos posted hit that reward centre. It’s all so easy to get into the trap of posting something and waiting for the likes or possibly comments indicating what you have posted has attention, and therefore value.
So times during my break when I have visited a nice cafe with some appealingly presented food and drink, or a local lake with beautiful scenery; I’ve taken my photos then felt the trigger to find somewhere to post them.
Some things have helped with these triggers. The main one is that I’ve always treated this as a break from social media; not a break up. There is value I still find in online communities that I want to experience without it negatively impacting my life. So those triggers have been followed by a realisation that I will post some of those photos at a later stage.
What I hope to get out of this moving forward
There’s probably a bit of hesitation or scepticism of such a social media break. That’s a bit understandable; why go through a cold turkey state just to pick up exactly where you left off once the break is over.
Indeed, if the plan is to not learn and adapt how you use these services moving forward; going cold turkey may not only have minimal benefit in the short term, but may also exaggerate your usage once you get back online (like someone consuming extra amounts of unhealthy food after a forced diet which they have not enjoyed).
As such, here’s some of the things I hope to take with me in my usage of social media moving forward.
Breaking the real time nature of my social usage
One of the things of noticing those triggers to share my photos on my break was the feeling that I needed to share those experiences as close as possible to when I was having them. Social media has been increasingly used like a real-time telling of our daily stories, even when the reality has always been carefully curated, small parts of ourselves and our lives that we want the world to perceive.
So while I still wish to share my experiences online in various forms; I want to be more mindful of when I share and interact with social media and move away from the desire to post about things in the moment.
Social media when it is best for my life, not for when it’s best for the networks themselves.
Continuing to keep my phone with minimal social media applications installed
I still hope to have the majority of social apps off my phone and accessing them on my personal laptop; where I’m not tempted to quickly check things when I’m out or at work.
Not only is this a great way to control your usage it’s actually a great way to improve the battery life of your phone; as apps try the best they can to funnel as much data as they can from our device to their service, with minimal care about how much battery that processing is using.
Re-review of which social media services I use and provide value to me
The reality is that we should be constantly evaluating the services we use and whether they are valuable to us or take our attention and time from more important things. A break is a chance to think about which services you may want to reduce the use of, or even remove completely if it no longer fits your needs.
I mentioned Instagram earlier because that’s the easiest one to mention when it comes to photo sharing social media services; but the reality is I stopped investing a lot of time into Instagram a long time ago. The reality is that modern Instagram no longer suits my needs from a photo sharing social service.
After the past few days, it has reinforced how little I actually use Facebook but it’s still my primary method of social sharing with friends and family. Even more revealing however is how Twitter-like microblogging services such as Threads and Mastodon are probably not as important to me as I thought previously.
While I will continue to use them and get value, my move away from the real-time nature of modern social media moves away from the strengths of microblogging platforms. Although this is more accurate with the Threads service and its algorithm based feed, Mastodon is less troublesome here and more aligned with how I’m wishing to use these services in the future.
Disconnection is beneficial even in smaller doses
When reading or hearing about people disconnecting from their mobile devices, you most likely are imagining someone going completely without their phone or even moving their service to a dumb phone temporarily.
As you’ve read above, my disconnection has been purely focused on the social media services. I still used my smartphone as normal for other services such as a communicator via calls or messages, music and podcasts, GPS navigation via Google Maps and even the occasional YouTube during quieter times.
Removing the social apps that can occasionally pull my focus from whats in front of me enabled the use of my phone for other purposes without guilt or distraction. It allowed my phone to work for me and add value without needing to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
I’m sure at some point in the future I will have some social apps on my phone. Sometimes they will add value, other times they won’t. I just have to b aware of each and take the actions necessary to ensure the technology is working for me as much as possible.
As such, my final learning from the past few days is it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. We can choose to use social media when and where it suits us, but we can also disconnect and remove the distractions at times when we need it.
I think we need to normalise disconnecting occasionally when suited and not see it as a drastic action or anti-technology thing it’s always perceived as.
We can do so periodically, either in a planned or unplanned way, without feeling like we compromise part of ourselves in the process. While there are a subset of users who make their living off social media which will need further consideration; most are not going to experience a radical downgrade in their social media experience by disconnecting every so often.
Indeed by disconnecting from it occasionally, we may even develop a healthier relationship with our technology moving forward and maximise the benefits from these services more than we currently do as constant consumers.