Tag Archives: social media addiction

Detoxing from Facebook

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Eric Frazier of the Charlotte Observer told the story of Alyssa Rushing this week – a 20 year old student at the University of South Carolina whose mother has offered her $300 to “detox from Facebook” for a month. Alyssa’s mother, Melynda, wanted her daughter to focus on studying instead of social media – and viewed the challenge as a way to help Alyssa recoup the time she was wasting online:

Her mom, with just 40 Facebook friends, said she got on the network solely because she wanted to keep up with her children on it. Her idea for the $300 challenge came from her own past. As a busy mom trying to raise children, she once swore off TV and gained extra time to get things done.

She’s sure the same will be true for her daughter, especially given how distracting Facebook can be.

Next Tuesday, we’ll know if Alyssa was able to meet the challenge, because her month will be up. The question that I’m most interested in, though, is whether the one month pay-for-performance will lead to any long-term shifts in behavior. For a change to be permanent, the motivation must come from within. Although external motivators (like $300) might provide the impetus to get off Facebook now, what happens when the cash is no longer flowing? In 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported a higher success rate among smokers who were paid to quit, versus those who were not. However, there are no long-term indicators available. And besides, research shows that carrots and sticks don’t always work, anyway.

When I did my 42-day social media detox in the summer of 2010, all I was looking for was relief from the incessant online chatter – the anxiety and exhaustion that came from being frenetically, perpetually, and continuously distracted by status updates. As I peeled back the layers covering my anxiety, I realized there was a whole Pandora’s box of twisted emotions and my online habits were actually distracting me from dealing with the real issues all around me.

I check Facebook and other social media much less now – but my motivation is purely intrinsic: if I don’t keep a healthy distance, the anxiety will start to enshroud me again, and who knows where I’ll end up then. For me, it’s a matter of preserving mental and emotional happiness.

It’s kind of like dealing with an eating disorder. You can’t exactly swear off food since you need to eat to live – you just need to set very good boundaries detailing how you interact with food, and avoid putting yourself in situations that will threaten your health and well-being.

The game is all about devising effective structures to help you deal with your obsessions. And I think this is a huge issue for ensuring your own quality of life – at least in the very personal world inside your head.

Zen and the Art of Social Media Blackout

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In May, when I decided to disconnect from checking social media and email over 500 times a day to write Disconnected: Technology Addiction & the Search for Authenticity in Virtual Life, I had no idea how contemporary the idea of disconnecting from social media would become.

Give me your Droids, your iPhones, your Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, your text messages, your Google Chats! Let’s see what happens to life as we know it if we take a time capsule way back into the mid-1990’s, stop clicking on our mobile devices, and start engaging more with the real world and real people around us. It sounds like such a trite experiment, and yet it’s one of those compelling exercises that can really help us understand the concept of mindfulness – the ability to live in the moment, slow down, and appreciate all that is for what it is. At least that’s what it did for me (as soon as I could compel myself to actually follow through to see what would happen – technology detox is NOT easy and I am a self-admitted addictive multitasker).

Like the experiment being run at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania university that’s garnered so much press this month, my personal exercise was more of a brownout than a blackout. Face it – life totally without technology can be impractical and unproductive in many ways, especially when you have a job that relies on it. But how much is too much? That’s the trick I wrote about in my book… avoiding technology asceticism (blackout) while setting pertinent Rules of Engagement that limit social media technology use (brownout) to promote mindfulness. It results in you using technology rather than it using you.

So what’s going on in Harrisburg? According to Paige Chapman at the Chronicle on September 9, 2010:

Professors have experimented with assigning technology fasts for their students—by discouraging gadget use for five days, for example, or rewarding extra credit for a semester without Facebook.

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is going one step further with a “social-media blackout.” Starting Monday, the Pennsylvania institution will block Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace on the campus network for a week. Faculty and staff members will be affected as well as students.

“Telling students to imagine a time before Facebook is like telling them to imagine living in a world with dinosaurs,” said Eric D. Darr, Harrisburg’s executive vice president and provost. “It’s not real. What we’re doing is trying to make it real.”

Here are some more of the links I’ve found over the past few days on the social media blackout concept. I’m listing them here for personal reference, and plan to grow it as I find more interesting links on the topic, but you might find the list useful too.

By the way. many people have asked whether my 42-day experiment resulted in a long term behavior shift… and the answer is YES, it did. Now, I only check my Droid, Facebook, Twitter, email and the rest about 50 to 75 times a day. This might still be considered a problem, but I’m pretty happy that I reduced my habit by a factor of 10. So are most of the people who have to interact with me on a daily basis.