Social Media is like anything: if you use it in the right way, it can be awesome. If you use it in the wrong way, it can be awful. Unintentionally toggling between the two is easy-done. Here are some signs that might mean you should step the heck back:

Compulsive Checking

How often do you find yourself logging onto to your SM account/s? A couple of times a month. A couple of times a day? A couple of times since you started reading this sentence? Look, if part of your job is social media presence and drumming up engagement – you do need to dedicate some of your working day to SM management, but there’s a huge difference between legitimate work and looking at pictures of how Brad Pitt morphs into the woman he’s with. (And if that is your work. Good for you!)

Losing Yourself

We’ve all been there. You log on for five minutes and lose two hours. There’s literally no end to the amount of content we could consume. One thing seamlessly leads us to another and before we know it we’ve done a deep dive on Cleopatra’s eyebrows and the poor villagers of Pompei and it’s two in the morning and where the hell am I?

It’s how you get your news

I think we all know deep down that getting our current affairs from Kev in the comment section is not the way forward. Buy some reputable newspapers on a regular basis and sit down for a couple of hours with a cup of tea. Read about the issues of the day from around the world from superior sources.

You find yourself getting fired up

How much precious time have you spent arguing the toss with some anonymous troll online? (Even one minute doing this is too much time.) What are you’re doing? Seriously. That is not the way to make a positive difference to anything or anyone – least of all yourself. Stop it at once and never do it again. Take a deep breath. It’s going to be ok.

You’re bored

It’s so easy to hand your attention over to the online world when you’re bored. There will always, (always, always, always x infinity) be a few billion things that can be of interest to you on the internet. It is a boundless, bottomless (cess)pit of empty entertainment, if you allow it to be. But do you have any idea how dangerous it is to have your brain continuously hijacked like that? Do you have any clue how useful it is to let yourself sit in states of boredom from time to time? Do you know what can happen when you give yourself the gift of time and space? (Oh you don’t? Google it then – but only if you can trust yourself to stay on topic. You do not need to know every No.1 from the 1980’s.)

Your online personality is nothing like your offline personality

The level of inauthenticity on Social Media can be wild. The fake news. The fake smiles. The fake lives. The photoshop fails. The filters, dear God, the filters! Some, quite normal-looking, people I know in real life use face-tune to the point of looking like a different species altogether. ‘What in the ever-loving fuck are you doing?’ I’d think, as I watched on, grimacing but kinda gripped. I used to be friends with someone who wrote best-selling books extolling the surprising charms of being this, that and the other. Publicly, she claimed to be doing one thing. Privately, she was doing the exact opposite. Some people are shameless. Don’t be one of those people. Be who you are, wherever you are.

You’re aware of every trend

Pointing at those floating captions, is it? Lip-synching to the audio snippet-of-the-day, are you? Filming yourself doing that little Posh and Becks dance number? Come on. You’re better than that. You know you are. It’s okay not to jump on the latest bandwagon. You can let a few go by. There are much more important things to know about.

You’re too nosey for your own good

Why am I remotely invested in what the sister of a friend of an ex-girlfriend of an ex-boyfriend-from ten-years-ago is doing with their baking career? I don’t know, but I am. (She really does deserve to catch a break. She seems like SUCH a good baker.)

How we become interested is one thing. Another valid question might be: why do so many people document the details of their lives and then publicly upload it to billions of total strangers on the internet like it’s mandatory? Why are so many of us so desperate for attention and validation? Some might say it’s for connection – but is it? Is it really? How connected does it make us feel to post another mirror selfie? (I think my last post was a mirror selfie. Oh the shame of it.) Or when, otherwise sane, people do those posts as though they’re talking directly to a deceased relative – as though Facebook is an actual portal to the otherside – who are they actually addressing in those posts? It’s all so fucking weird. I used to share a lot more online than I do now. I shared most of it without thinking. Partly because when a lot of other people do something, it all seems so normal – but just because something is normalised or popular doesn’t make it cool, healthy or necessary. Look at alcohol. Look at smoking. Look at anything to do with any of the Kardashians.

So many little and big reasons led me to step back from social media in recent years, and they all amounted to the same thing:

It just cost me too much.

And I bet the same could be true for you too – whether you know it yet or not.

I still have an Instagram account – as you’ll know if you’ve got here from there – but I don’t use it like I used to, not even close. I rarely post anything and when I do it’s because I want to. It’s because I’ve thought about it. It’s because it feels worthwhile somehow. Not because I feel I should. Never because I’m doing it mindlessly. I get in and I get out. I hide likes and disable comments. I don’t engage and I don’t scroll. I don’t hang around in that sort of online space for no good reason anymore. I go for weeks at a time not looking at anything at all on Social Media. I don’t have the app on my phone. I cold-turkeyed a while back and after a few days, when your hand stops reaching for a fix that isn’t there, the cloud lifts and you see clearly again and it’s absolutely joyous. I urge you to try it for yourself. Get offline and get stuck into your real life instead.

I’ve been back and forth on whether I need to have any Social Media at all, but I’m reliably informed again and again by experts and advisors that “Yes. In today’s world, you have to have some kind of online presence if you ever want to promote anything at all ever again Jen, you fucking luddite.” 

So Instagram it is, but only Instagram. (I just cannot with anything else.) And only if I can use it sparingly and from a distinct and definite distance.

I know I will have something to promote again at some point (and like I said, it’s great for that, if you use it in the right way). I finished writing Book No.1 a few months ago. The manuscript has been proof read. The rewrites have been done. I have an interested Literary Agent and I’m ecstatic about all of that but whatever, no time to celebrate because I’m straight into writing Book No.2 – which has to be released before Book No.1 apparently – so that’s been superfun. For those who are into it, I will share more when I have the capacity to share more. In the meantime, however long that might be, I hope you know that how you show up in your real life is INFINITELY more important than how you show up online. And if you don’t want to show up online, don’t. 

Big love.x