I Gave up Social Media for a Month, and Here’s What Happened [Episode 145]

Lauren Tingle [00:00:00]:
Hello. I am recording this podcast probably earlier than I plan on airing it just because it’s fresh in my mind. And then when I look at my calendar, I don’t actually know where it’s gonna fit in yet. If it’ll be close to when this actually happened or a little delayed. So we are gonna be talking about something a little more personal, I guess. But I would like to think that it might relate to some of you or that it would be something you might be inspired to think about, and that’s giving up social media for a month. So in this episode, I’m gonna chat about how I gave up social media for the month, kind of what came out of that. So good things, hard things, things I’m still thinking about.

Lauren Tingle [00:00:41]:
And I would love to connect with you after on social media and hear about what your thoughts were. Maybe if you’ve tried a challenge like this before and how that went for you. So let’s get into this week’s episode. You got into this profession to make a difference in your students’ lives, but you’re spread thin by all of the things that keep getting added to your to do list. I can’t create more hours in the day, but I can invite you into my counselor clique where you’ll finally catch your breath. Come with me as we unpack creative ideas and effective strategies that’ll help you be the counselor who leaves a lifelong impact on your students. I’m Lauren Tingle, your high school counseling hype girl, here to help you energize your school counseling program and remind you of how much you love your job. So the reason I wanted to do this as a challenge to myself, I was not doing it with my husband or no one said, hey, you should do this.

Lauren Tingle [00:01:40]:
I gave up social media for a month in the summertime, and I kind of was challenged to do this by a friend of mine who was also doing it. She did not tell me, I think you should do this. She was doing it herself, and I thought, you know what? I’m on my phone a lot. I’m on social media a lot. What would happen if I also tried this? So my goal was to give up social media for the month and let’s chat about what happened. When I say I gave up social media these are kind of the parameters I set for myself. I took Instagram and Facebook off of my phone. I didn’t delete the apps altogether because when you do that it says like you’ll delete all this data and I was afraid that it was gonna like delete my logins, and it would just be complicated.

Lauren Tingle [00:02:22]:
So an option that it has is to remove it from your home screen. So I did that. I couldn’t open my phone and just swipe swipe or have it on the front page of icons. I had to actually go in and search for it if I wanted to log in and get on Instagram or Facebook. So that was the first way I kind of, like, took it out of sight, out of mind. Because I use Instagram and Facebook for Counselor Clique, and that’s a big part of what I do in terms of sharing resources and content and podcasts and blog posts, all that kind of stuff. I didn’t want to just disappear altogether. Now I could have done that.

Lauren Tingle [00:02:58]:
I could have just not posted anything on there, but it’s easy enough for me to schedule things to be posted. So in my mind, I knew that stepping away from social media for counselor clique was gonna be a lot of not being on stories, not maybe responding to messages as quickly, maybe not sending links to people who ask for them. So I kinda knew there might be a lag in that, I don’t know what you call it, service time to people who are following or asking questions or needing something from me, quote, unquote. I realized that I am not needed all the time. I am a blip on your radar. I do not think that highly of myself that I could not disappear. So I thought they will get the answer from somewhere else. I can take a break and it will all be okay.

Lauren Tingle [00:03:45]:
So the only times I was getting on social media was from my desktop computer and I would respond to any messages or comments that I needed to. And then other than that, I was not going on my phone and opening it and checking it for notifications or checking it for messages.If you did receive a message from me, it was from my desktop. Now I did this and set this as a boundary because I knew that I wasn’t gonna be like scrolling on my computer. If you’ve ever gone on to the desktop version of Instagram, you would kinda see what I mean. Like, it’s not very, I don’t know, user friendly, because who does that? I don’t know. Scroll through, like, the Instagram stories at the top by clicking on it when you’re on your desktop computer. So that was really helpful.

Lauren Tingle [00:04:28]:
I did not find myself mindlessly scrolling when I did the desktop. And I felt like that was a good boundary for myself to set, and I’m happy with how that turned out. So maybe you are sitting here saying, well, I set limits on my phone and I have more self control and it sounds like you have. And you would probably be right. I have tried to set time limits before and the notification comes and goes because I x out of it and I keep scrolling and staying on it. So I know myself enough to know that I’m not gonna have a TikTok account and I’m not even gonna touch that one. So Instagram and Facebook are addicting enough for me. I don’t know if I said this already, but I find myself to be like, an all or nothing type girl.

Lauren Tingle [00:05:09]:
I think I have an addictive personality. I think when I get hooked on something, I love it. I tell people about it. I wanna share it and tell the world, which can be a good thing for things like high school counseling or connecting with other people. But when it comes to having too much of something, like, it’s hard for me to step away and to see, okay, this is overtaking a portion of my life. So part of this was a personal challenge to see if I could do it. See if I give up social media, will I die? No, I didn’t think I would, but I learned and grew a lot. So here’s some things that I kind of noticed about myself and how I functioned when I gave up social media.

Lauren Tingle [00:05:48]:
At first, I was pretty thankful that I wasn’t having to dress up or put on makeup or tell myself, like, I need to go on Instagram stories today. And I am confident in who I am. I do not wear makeup every day, but, you know, part of me is like, I can’t show up looking like a troll on my Instagram stories. I cannot just literally roll out of bed in my pajamas. So there’s some part of that that I have to get dressed for the day. I have to brush my hair. I have to make sure I don’t have anything in my teeth before I go on Instagram stories and talk. And being able to step away and saying, I’m not going on Instagram stories, and I do not have any obligation to do that or to talk about something was really freeing.

Lauren Tingle [00:06:30]:
I just didn’t feel like, oh, I need to go make a reel or trick myself into thinking I need to go research some of the trending audio and scroll through the reels and see what the trends are and see what I need to be doing because that honestly is a big time suck for me. I can trick myself into thinking this is like research. I’m doing what I need to for my work, essentially. And it was nice to not think, oh, there’s always something on the back burner that I quote need to be doing. There were far more good things, I think, that came out of this than bad things. And I don’t know what I expected to feel or what I expected that ratio to be, but it was definitely a more positive experience than it was negative experience. I think we’ll talk about the negative things in a second, but I think those were just me desiring to be on social media. It was not like, all these negative repercussions of not being on it.

Lauren Tingle [00:07:27]:
So let’s talk about some of the good things. I could catch up with friends in real time. So I found myself when I wasn’t scrolling. I was catching up more with text messages with friends. I was sending more voice memo notes. I’m a big voice memo person because I feel like you can chat. You can hear someone’s tone of their voice. You can communicate more frequently and with some more connection there.

Lauren Tingle [00:07:52]:
I also use Marco Polo to check-in with friends. I feel like all of those things are things I already was doing, but I kind of turned to it more because I didn’t know what was going on in people’s lives. So, like, I was still able to connect with people not being near them, being away from them in terms of proximity, but still feeling connected to them where before I would use social media to feel that connection. This was like, I had to put some action behind it. I also really appreciated feeling the lesser clutter that was going on in my mind. I don’t know how to describe this. So I didn’t realize how obscenely cluttered my brain was until I came back onto social media after that month. I kind of scrolled, and I was like, oh my goodness.

Lauren Tingle [00:08:39]:
There is so much in my brain right now. And it all just, like, came flooding back really quickly, if that makes sense. I don’t know if I can describe that in any sort of way other than for you to experience that yourself. And I don’t I don’t know what it is. I think it’s when I see something political, and then I go to the comments, and I’m reading what people put in the comments. I don’t know these people. I don’t care about this. But for some reason, that’s the kind of stuff I’m filling my brain with.

Lauren Tingle [00:09:05]:
I’m like, no, I do not need that. It is a good thing to step away from that. And don’t get me wrong. There is a lot of value in being involved in politics or being involved in conversations that are greater than myself or my own little bubble. But I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t think social media is the place to do it, especially think about Facebook. Do you care about, like, your great aunt’s Facebook status that her friends are commenting on? Probably not. That’s probably, like, not the most newsworthy source that you should be getting your information from. So my brain was already cluttered having little kids, having just the mental load that I carry day to day in my own family life and friends and having a spouse, like, all of the things that are already cluttering my mind do enough of that.

Lauren Tingle [00:09:54]:
I realized I don’t need that from social media and especially from, like, fringe people or people I don’t even know. And that’s on my own personal accounts or my counselor clique account. I often found myself like many of you probably realizing that I was spending a lot of time just scrolling. And now when I gave up social media, I wondered where was I finding that time to scroll? I think the easy answer for me with that is at nighttime when my kids are down and I’m watching TV, but I’m also scrolling. Giving up that scrolling time made me realize where was I fitting that in? What kind of pockets of time was I doing during the day? Because I’m gonna be honest with you. The amount of screen time that I had on my phone was embarrassing. I mean, it was embarrassing. I should have written down what the number was before I started this activity and what it turned out to be.

Lauren Tingle [00:10:47]:
But on average, when I would check the screen time at the end of the day or the end of the week, I was probably down 45 to 55%, which is wild. Right? My phone battery was lasting longer. I mentally felt better. I it was just wild the amount of screen time that was cut down when I stepped away from social media. And, you know, if you’ve ever been into the screen time section of your phone, if you have an iPhone, you can see what apps it’s broken down into, and it categorizes them by social or other things. And social was a big part of what I was doing before. Now that I am not spending all the time scrolling and adding up those tiny little minutes throughout the day, I found that I was actually doing the things that I really wanted to be doing in the 1st place, like taking care of my kids and engaging in some conversations with them or playing with them, engaging with my family, talking to my neighbors outside, working, getting stuff like this done, listening to podcasts, reading books. Like, I love to do all that stuff anyways, but the constant interruption as I pick up my phone and scroll for a little bit was kind of getting in the way of that stuff.

Lauren Tingle [00:11:54]:
I felt like when I was with friends, I was more engaged in group conversations. Like, it was just easier to leave my phone across the room or just in the other room altogether or go put it on the charger. I didn’t have this constant nagging feeling like I needed to be checking notifications. Once I stepped away from social media like that, it kinda felt the same way on all apps. Like, I didn’t need to check my text messages or check my email that I hate to say burden. Like, that feels so dramatic. But the nagging, the, like, weird connection, you feel like your phone is connected to your hand and you need to check it at all times. That was lessened.

Lauren Tingle [00:12:30]:
It was, like, alleviated from me. I really enjoyed being able to be present in those group conversations. I think, in particular, something that comes to my mind is having some friends over for dinner. I don’t even know where my phone was. I was so engaged in what was happening around our dinner table, and there was so much fun to be had there that I did not need to be near my phone. And it made for a really good night. And we did that a couple of times, and that was during that month. I wanted to let you know about my free editable starter scholarship spreadsheet to keep your high school students organized and motivated while pursuing financial aid for college.

Lauren Tingle [00:13:08]:
There’s an entire tab dedicated to the undocumented student resources as well as schools that meet a 100% need for students. Students and counselors can stay organized with this spreadsheet and upcoming scholarship deadlines with the month by month tabs. If you already own this, head back and redownload it because it’s been updated for this school year. Download your copy for free today by going to counselorclick.com/scholarship. Now back to the show. I told you that I deleted the apps from my screen. And so, technically, I could get to them if I searched. And, I mean, honestly, that alleviated a little bit of, like, anxiety around, like, needing to be on it.

Lauren Tingle [00:13:51]:
I guess I just knew that it was there, but it was good. I did not pick up my phone and, like, accidentally click on it. Like, it was just out of sight, out of mind, so I didn’t need to access it. I didn’t need to feel like I accidentally accessed it. Like, honestly, I could have done that because my brain and my hand and my movements are so just go to that naturally, which, again, that feels embarrassing to admit, but it did. And taking them off my phone was a good thing so that I wasn’t just mindlessly going to that. I’d like to think that I had deeper sleep. You know, I have little kids and so there isn’t always lots of deep sleep, but I wasn’t scrolling before I went to bed.

Lauren Tingle [00:14:32]:
Now I did watch probably more TV. I don’t know. But I was engaged in watching TV. It was like, if we are gonna turn on the TV, my husband and I are gonna watch a show together. And it felt like something we were doing more together because I wasn’t sitting there scrolling on my phone. It was not the last thing I did before I went to bed at night. I would turn on the sleep setting on my phone and have my alarm set for the next day, and I would put it on my nightstand. And I definitely noticed that I didn’t have this need to, like, check it one more time before I went to bed because we all know how that works.

Lauren Tingle [00:15:04]:
You check it one more time, and then you’re scrolling some more. So I would find that when I would put it on my nightstand, maybe, like, before I went to take a shower and it was already on the charger, I just didn’t feel the need to go back to it. I felt really at peace and restful, like, I’m going to bed tonight. And I love that it was not the last thing that I would check before I went to bed. Here’s a big one. I bought less stuff that I did not need. Don’t get me wrong. I still shopped.

Lauren Tingle [00:15:31]:
I shopped from my email because I get lots of coupons and promotions there. But I found that I was not just aimlessly buying things that I didn’t need. You know, I was still buying things that I needed for my family, but I just wasn’t wandering the Internet aimlessly and spontaneously hitting add to cart or filling up my imaginary $1,000,000 Amazon cart. You know, you all have one of those. You’re either keeping it in your cart or you’re saving it for later. Now I love a sponsored ad. If someone wants to tell me that this is perfectly something that I need is something that’s going to fit into my life based on my interest and the other things I bought. I don’t hate it.

Lauren Tingle [00:16:12]:
I don’t hate a sponsored ad. So I will tell you, I did not have those because I was not scrolling. So I feel like I bought less of that. I also bought less that, like, mom influencers that I follow when they tell you, oh, this will be a handy gadget in your kitchen or your baby needs this. This is a new up and coming this, that consumerism mindset. It’s great. I know people make a living from it. And like I said, I love when someone tells me I vetted this.

Lauren Tingle [00:16:39]:
I’m giving it a good review. If you want it, here it is. I’m the 1st to buy it. I’m the 1st to jump on that. But because they didn’t have that, I won’t call it noise. I thought about calling it noise. But that feels like I can tell myself that’s helpful. Just because I didn’t have those voices telling me things, I feel like I cut down on my spending and my shopping.

Lauren Tingle [00:16:58]:
Now did I go in and look at what my spending was based on this? No, I did not. But it felt like I was not making spontaneous purchases, impulse purchases that I didn’t really need. I was able to finish tasks a bit easier. Now I think that I have a hard time now with 3 kids actually doing that executive functioning, starting a task, finishing it. That has just been hard in general, and I attribute that to some newborn fog. But having the app on my phone, I would find myself just blindly forgetting what I was doing. Like, hey. I saw this email, and I’m checking to see if this is a thing.

Lauren Tingle [00:17:38]:
I would used to. I used to go into my phone and look up something. I had a question in my mind. And I was like, oh, I wonder where that person’s up to. Or I wonder what that thing is that she recommended from Amazon. Let me go back to her stories and watch them. And then I would find myself in Instagram forgetting why I was even there. And this one feels fresh in my mind because this is something that I’ve noticed since coming back to Instagram that happens again and again to me.

Lauren Tingle [00:18:03]:
It’s like a lack of concentration combined with maybe I’m easily distractible combined with I still have some brain fog from having a newborn baby. It’s just hard for me to separate starting a task, finishing a task if I have social media that gets in the way of that. Okay. Let’s talk about the quote bad, because I’m gonna put it in quotes because I really don’t think a lot of this was bad. But if I had to separate some things into categories, this is what I would say. In terms of friendships, I felt a little on the outs of friendships that were frengy anyway. So I say that, like, people I only orbit in friendships. Like, I’m only connected to them really by social media.

Lauren Tingle [00:18:46]:
So maybe they live out of town. Maybe we just don’t cross paths a lot. I did feel sad to miss out on things or to know that I was potentially missing out on things like engagement announcements or baby announcements or, like, important things. And now I will say people I am truly close to, I knew about those things because we were talking in real life. But I’m talking about those friends that I really do, just from a periphery, keep in touch with via social media and see what’s going on in their lives. So they would not have reached out to me to tell me whatever this big news is. They would not text me about whatever this big news is because we’re not that close, but, like, I wanna celebrate from afar with them. So that felt a little like, oh, I’m kinda sad about that, that I missed it.

Lauren Tingle [00:19:31]:
And, you know, I don’t have the time nor do I want the time to go back and, like, scroll through all the things I missed because that would be pretty defeating in terms of this challenge. Right? I did miss connecting with all of you on the accounts that click Instagram. So I do think I’m gonna be slow till I get back into it. But I really did miss connecting with y’all. I feel like I would post something and not be able to respond to it or ask a question. And being in Instagram stories is, like, the most fun part of running an Instagram with a lot of high school counselor followers. Like, it is fun to engage in those conversations for me. And, honestly, that’s why I created the Clique Collaborative membership so everyone could benefit from that community aspect.

Lauren Tingle [00:20:12]:
That’s something that I love. I love to create that. I love to be a part of that. And so, honestly, I felt like I was, like, missing all of you when I wasn’t on there. I also was sad to miss out on just, like, the funny, like, laughter things that you get from being on Instagram. I realize I’m talking a lot about Instagram versus Facebook. Because Facebook is just kind of like it’s there, but Instagram is, like, my main thing. So, you know, when you’re scrolling through reels and you send one to a friend who you thought of when you watched it or a friend who you know would laugh at it, I came back onto my personal Instagram after being gone for a month, and I had a lot of messages from friends, and they were just filled with reels, which is fun and makes me feel loved.

Lauren Tingle [00:20:54]:
And at the same time, I’m like, oh, I like I love sending those to other people too, and I love watching those and getting that instead of dopamine hit from just, like, laughing at those things. Like, it made me feel good to laugh at those. So I did miss that. I also thought, wow. I don’t really know what’s going on in the news or current events or just, like, trending things. But I honestly didn’t think that was that bad of a thing. Like, maybe social media just perpetuates the noise I was feeling in terms of that being news. It’s more like opinions.

Lauren Tingle [00:21:26]:
I mean, what isn’t? You have to really search through your sources to get the news that you want to hear and learn about. But at least I, like, kinda know what’s going on really quickly. And maybe that’s where I’m landing with this, and we can go into the things I’m still figuring out kinda category or things that are still hard. I don’t know what the role of social media should play or, like, how will it continue to be a thing that I manage for my own mental health and for my family? I just struggle with, like, how much is too much, how much is not enough. Obviously, I think that is something that everybody can determine on their own, but I want to be able to have a good balance of that mostly for, like, the counselor clique side being able to balance that and be connected, but not being overpowered by it. Because I can scroll on there too just like I can my own account. Honestly, I probably scroll over there a little bit more than my own personal account. I also felt this, like, weird tension when we’re talking about what I’m still thinking about or figuring out.

Lauren Tingle [00:22:27]:
I felt this weird tension where I had to, like, say out loud to people. Well, I’m not on social media right now, or I’m off social media for a month. So and, like, use that almost as an excuse for not knowing things that are going on with them or just not knowing, like, what’s popular almost right now. Like, that sounds so silly to admit to, but I don’t think I felt left out of that stuff, but I felt like I wanted people to know, hey, I’m not just like out of your world and interacting with you because I have ignored you. I want you to know that I don’t know what’s going on with you because if you’ve just posted on social media, like that’s that’s not in my life right now. Something that I also thought about before I went into this, and I guess I’m still processing, is I thought, will I, like, replace social media with something in a good way or a bad way? Like, if I take that away, is my natural inclination gonna be to fill it with something else? And I’ll say I probably would, like, check my email more regularly than I would want to, or, honestly, I would go over to Goodreads. I don’t know if y’all are Goodreads people, but because I’m reading books and I wanna know what my next book is, I love to see what people are reading. So I’d find myself scrolling.

Lauren Tingle [00:23:39]:
But I will say both of those things, email or Goodreads or, like, things that I would kinda put in place with social media do not have a grip on me like Instagram does. So what’s my plan moving forward? I think my plan moving forward is to still leave it off of my phone. It helps me create a really healthy boundary where, okay, I know it’s there. I can go to it, but I’m not going to reach for my phone and go to it 24/7. When I’m heating something up in the microwave for 30 seconds or when I have my smoothie blending for a minute, I don’t need to be checking out what’s going on on Instagram. I can have a conversation with one of my kids. I can pick up my Kindle and read a couple pages of my book. I can just be okay with being quiet for a little bit and being in my own thoughts.

Lauren Tingle [00:24:28]:
I’ll speak for you too. We are so afraid of being in our own thoughts and processing things or reaching out and having an in person conversation because it’s easier just to pick up your phone and scroll. I say you, I say me, I say all of us. I’m just gonna speak for all of us right now. I think we can all improve on our social media boundaries and habits. And maybe this is not a struggle for you, in which case, props to you for making it through this whole episode. But I did this little experiment of giving up social media for a month, and I think I’m okay with how it all went down. I will link in the show notes a book called 12 ways your phone is changing you by Tony Reinke.

Lauren Tingle [00:25:08]:
I think that’s how you say his last name. I read that a long time ago, and he gives some practical strategies to step away from the addiction that your phone might be presenting to you or the way that you ignore people or crave approval. I think it’s a good thing to think about those things, and it gives us a lot of things to think about and also some strategies to implement. Like, I remember this was years ago that I read this, but I remember him saying, turn your phone to grayscale, like black and white, and it will all of a sudden become way less attractive to you. You just naturally, for some reason, our brain does not really wanna scroll through pictures that are black and white. It just like doesn’t feel as fun. And he has lots of just different strategies for doing that. I honestly should go back and read that, but that was, like, an inspirational book for me around this topic a while ago.

Lauren Tingle [00:25:55]:
But I feel like this is the first time I actually did something about it. So I’ll link that in the show notes. And my plan from here on out is to continue approaching social media with healthy boundaries, checking my screen time, asking my husband or others to hold me accountable. I feel confident that I can do a challenge like this for 30 days and come back, and the world is still turning. Obviously, I want to say that I firmly believe that down deep in my heart, but, you know, there’s a little bit of fear that thinks, what if I’m irrelevant? What if I don’t know what’s going on afterwards? So thank you for indulging this more personal episode. And I think that there are a lot of implications for us as humans, as adults, and especially as humans and adults who work with high schoolers who maybe aren’t having those hard sit down boundary setting come to Jesus meetings with themselves if they’re not doing that or they’re not having people challenge them on that. What are ways that we can be doing that as counselors to help them realize what is important without their phone? So having those healthy relationships, healthy communication with other people, like, they maybe don’t have those skills. And us as counselors get to be the ones who help them gain those skills and develop those soft skills. So I think that either if you listen to this episode or you read that book, 12 ways your phone is changing you, you might come up with some ideas for how to make your relationship with social media or technology healthier.

Lauren Tingle [00:27:26]:
And I would love to hear about how that has been for you. So feel free to shoot me an email. I am always on my emails in terms of counselor clique, [email protected]. Or you can send me a DM because I am still answering. I’m just really taking the slow route these days on social media. Thank you for listening and I will see you next week.Thanks for listening to today’s episode of High School Counseling Conversations. All the links I talked about today can be found in the show notes and also at counselorclique.com/podcast.

Lauren Tingle [00:27:58]:
Be sure to hit follow wherever you listen to your podcast so that you never miss a new episode. Connect with me over on Instagram. Feel free to send me a DM @counselorclique. That’s c-l-i-q-u-e. I’ll see you next week.