A Prescription for Social Media Use
…Or how to stay connected without suffering
A friend and fellow artist wrote to me about my relationship with social media. She said:
“write me a prescription for social media/briefly explain your own relationship to it?”
After writing her a “prescription” I thought I’d share it with you along with some of my thoughts on social media. Let me know if it resonates with you.
General thoughts on social media (SM)
I think SM is a slippery fish. It can be a great way to promote your work, connect with audiences or fellow creators, but it is also the source of MUCH suffering!
The suffering takes many forms:
Constant comparison can leave you feeling like you’ll never be as good as this person or that one.
It can give you FOMO, breed professional jealousy and resentment, leave you feel like a loser, ugly, small, insignificant.
The popularity contest element to it is depressing, tiring and maddeningly addictive.
It can rob you of time that would be productive or just plain restful.
It can get in the way of your creativity by vampirically sucking your time and your self-esteem, drawing you into some internal drama.
You can lose swaths of time, each day, scrolling and trawling. And this can add up to hours each week and days, weeks even of your entire year.
I did a bit of research
The average person touches their phone 2,617 times a day and an average user spends 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social media in 2020. Imagine if even half that time went into reading a book or working on a creative project, or SLEEPING.
The Week says, "a number of studies have found an association between social media use and depression, anxiety, sleep problems, eating issues, and increased suicide risk, warn researchers from the University of Melbourne’s National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, in an article on The Conversation."
We know social media is bad for us. And we know that we know. And yet, prying ourselves away from it is so challenging.
I watched The Social Dilemma a couple months ago. If you need an inspiring jolt to shift your relationship with SM, I recommend it. You can also read the NY Times’ review for a sense of what it covers.
Where I’m now at with social media
I now use my various SM profiles primarily for work related posts. I changed my Instagram profile to a business one over a year ago. I wanted to put it at arms length.
When I had the IG and Twitter apps on my phone (I’ve never had the FB app), I had all notifications turned off. They bugged me.
For various health reasons, I’ve taken great pains over the last 18 months to NOT sleep with my phone. I got a battery operated alarm clock for £8 and keep my phone in the kitchen over night.
HOWEVER, every morning my routine involves retrieving my phone from the kitchen, bringing it to my bedroom and using headspace to meditate. I can't give up headspace. I love being guided through a meditation.
But to my dismay, often before meditating I was noodling around on Instagram. One morning in a moment of tough love with myself, I deleted the app from my phone. And then I chucked the Twitter app too.
I have so enjoyed NOT being able to lose time mindlessly scrolling the apps in the last month.
I still look at them on my desktop, but it's way more intentional and far less frequent this way.
I have been posting less too. The budding entrepreneur in me knows that my lack of consistency is bad for business. But the entrepreneur also knows the average social media post will only be seen by 6% of our followers.
My approach is to post when I feel like it. And I use free scheduling services like Hootsuite and Later to post from my desktop and plan a whole bunch of posts at once. My goal is to use my SM to bring people to my email list!
My approach with this email list is to offer you honest and helpful morsels on a consistent basis. Mailing lists have an open rate of 30-40% so are a much more effective communication avenue than SM.
My prescription for my friend
(Take whatever works for you)
GET THE APPS OFF YOUR PHONE.
Get your phone out of your bedroom, esp overnight.
Keep your phone on silent unless waiting for a call.
When you’re writing/working, put your phone in another room (this is scientifically proven to help it be less of a distraction).
Shift your brain to USE social media as a business tool only — to raise your profile, build contacts, audience, or whatever it is you’re after.
Use Hootsuite and Later to strategically plan out your posts each month (3-5 per week). Cycle through 3-5 topics (i.e. Mondays I talk about books I like, Wednesdays I talk about financial literacy, Fridays I post a picture of a person I love – you get the idea) each week. I
If you want to have an audience that you’re in conversation with, start a mailing list! Use Mailchimp to get started for free.
But more than anything, RUN TOWARDS WHAT FEELS GOOD. Fuck social media and don’t post for ages if you don’t want to. Let your instincts guide you towards what feels right. You don’t NEED social media.
I hope this helps to alleviate any anxiety, stress or suffering you may be experiencing around social media. You are so much more than your virtual shop window. You deserve to feel good.
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