social media | HERO

Woke up this morning. Checked my emails and the feeds of my favorite social media channels Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Did my Headspace meditation and then checked the feeds again. And again. And again.

Posted a tweet honoring my wise 15-year old who only checks her social media feeds daily, vowing to do the same. And then I deleted my Twitter app from my IPhone. It used to be situated right next to Skype in my Oh no no! Really?-folder, where there is just a void now.

As I was doing that, I figured, why not go all the way? So I closed the Facebook-tab in Safari (haven’t used the app for a long time on my phone) and reorganized the app’s on my phone to show my shifted focus.

Instagrammed about it, making a public promise to check social media only once daily during the summer. To be clear what I mean about this:
*Check Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tinybeans at the most once daily.
*I’ll likely Instagram when a lovely photo opportunity comes a-knocking, but won’t check my feed more than once daily. And from Instagram I can post to Facebook and Twitter, which still doesn’t mean I check my feeds.
*I’ll use Buffer to schedule tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn-posts, pushing blog posts, because I’ll still be blogging on a (near) daily basis as well.
*Once my vacation starts for real (a few days to go), I’ll cut down on checking emails as well, likely not checking daily even, but definitely checking my work email at least weekly.
*I don’t include Messenger, iMessage and Viber in this challenge, so if you want to reach me, those are your best options.

There. Now I’m crystal clear what this challenge means for me. And since I posted my Instagram post, I believe a few people have already joined me in this challenge. So I’ll extend it to you as well – do you want to join us?

For three nights in a row I’ve been unable to sleep. At all. Total insomnia. It’s never ever happened to me before and I have no clue as to why it’s happening now.

I’ve been lousy at good winding down routines these past days though – and hence I’ve made myself a few promises:

1) to stop using social media and my computer at evenings after dinner – including work email etc
2) to get fresh air and exercise daily
3) to rejoin the ‘go to bed by 10 pm’-movement
4) to start to read fiction before turning off the lights, rather than facts – it gets my brain going! (I’ll have to incorporate a reading hour during the day for the other category.)

Now, I don’t drink anything with caffeine and barely any alcohol at all, I eat healthy food, my bedroom is dark, fairly cool and we have a no device-policy for the bedroom already. So that’s not something I need to include, just continue practicing.

What else do you suggest I do?