
I recently caught a segment on NPR that revealed gripping reasons why giving up social media yields significant benefits for your mental health.
The pervasive effects of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on our day-to-day lives came into an audible focus over the radio on that colorful fall day.
In addition to Twitter getting trashed, I ditched ten other apps from my phone. Some social media-related, but mostly just crap I didn’t use much.
See, when the iPhone first came out, it was premised as a phone / iPod / camera multi-tool. Yeah, there was mention of it being a “Breakthrough Internet Communications Device”, but I don’t think Steve Jobs had Tinder in mind.
And so, my phone has re-emerged as it was intended: a true electronic multi-tool. One that I can bring with me everywhere for producing, rather than for flicking-away reality every five minutes by checking in on a Twitter Feed, Internet Forum, or WordPress.
Since ditching those dozen apps, I’ve been able to concentrate better at work, and at home. Before this long-overdue fix, I’d get halfway through a work email only to pick up my phone to check Twitter or by email. In the evening, I’d find myself distracted by the same devil, instead of paying attention to my family.
Why Should I Give Up Facebook?
Some people are learning hard lessons about the big-daddy devil, Facebook: Mainly that it’s much too easy to fall into the trap of lifestyle comparison.
This goes beyond the other annoying facet of Facebook we know as “humble-bragging”, where, for instance, you post about stubbing your toe while relaxing on the fine sandy beaches of Bali.
There’s the phenomenon of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that is causing social anxiety among many Facebook addicts. If you find yourself plotting your next excursion to outdo your friends on the beach in Bali, then you’ve got a FOMO problem. At some point, you just have to say enough is enough and shut that thing down.
I’d given up Facebook well over a year ago. I made the mistake of hopping back in just after the election to vent my frustrations. This only served to create deeper divides within my extended family. After a week of that nonsense, I gave up FB and haven’t looked back since.
Recently, a friend of ours surprised us when she declared she’d completely shut down her Facebook account. She was an avid user for many years.
With lots of family and friends overseas, I can imagine how difficult she decided to pull that plug. But she’s since happily recaptured a long-lost reading habit, made possible by putting Facebook behind her.
Think of this as a pregnancy test of sorts, to find out right away if Social Media addiction is helping or hurting you. This is a wonderful way to avoid waiting until much later in life to find out.
Who knows, things might’ve gone so far south that you didn’t realize it while it was happening. Like a frog in a pot of slowly warming water.
You read about this madness all the time (ironically from your smartphone); e.g., the babysitter losing track of the kids because her head was stuck so far up the Facebook Hole of Vapidity.
The Amazing No Regrets Home Test is simple to execute. All you have to do is imagine asking your future self, when you’re lying on your deathbed, whether you would regret not having spent more time on Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat throughout your life.
Odds are, if you’re like me, you’ll realize that you’d rather be spending your present time interacting with family and friends. Pick up the phone and talk. Face-time? How about engaging more with your spouse and kids???
The test is free and there are no affiliate links here to warn you about. Give it a shot and let me know in the comments how it works for you. If the results are strong, I might just get a patent.

A Life Without Screen Distractions
Since I no longer have Facebook, Twitter, or much anything else on my cell phone that’s “social”, it’ll be an interesting challenge to keep up with my friends in the blogging community. I plan to check in on Twitter for 5 minutes via my desktop each morning, during my writing window of 5 AM to 6:30 AM.
My personal Facebook account is getting ready for Halloween, all covered in cobwebs by now; eerily abandoned, like one’s future cubicle. The blog’s Facebook account is simply on auto-pilot. For all the hoopla about Facebook’s success, I’m still amazed at how clunky and non-intuitive that mess is. Won’t miss ya!
Aziz Ansari has given up a lot more than I have apparently: No browser or email on his phone. Man. There’s always a better monk out there. For a Hollywood actor with a seemingly huge ego to feed (not of his own making – it’s just how Hollywood works), giving up social media has to be like going cold turkey for a drug addict.
Here’s a potent excerpt courtesy of a recent interview by GQ Magazine:
I heard you deleted the Internet from your phone. And that you deleted Twitter and Instagram and e-mail. No way that’s true, right?
It is! Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on The New York Times to see if there’s a new thing, it’s not even about the content. It’s just about seeing a new thing. You get addicted to that feeling. You’re not going to be able to control yourself. So the only way to fight that is to take yourself out of the equation and remove all these things.
What happens is, eventually you forget about it. You don’t care anymore. When I first took the browser off my phone, I’m like, [gasp] How am I gonna look stuff up? But most of the sh*t you look up, it’s not stuff you need to know. All those websites you read while you’re in a cab, you don’t need to look at any of that stuff. It’s better to just sit and be in your head for a minute.
I wanted to stop that thing when I get home and look at websites for an hour and a half, checking to see if there’s a new thing. And read a book instead. I’ve been doing it for a couple of months, and it’s worked. I’m reading, like, three books right now. I’m putting something in my mind. It feels so much better than just reading the Internet and not remembering anything.
Let’s just see how long I can go before I just can’t take it anymore, and I reinstall those apps in a flurry of indulgence. Hmmm… Nah, that won’t happen. I hope not anyway.
I can’t fathom spending more than two minutes scrolling through other people’s random thoughts and amateur entrée photos before realizing I could be creating, learning, or engaging with REAL PEOPLE.
Yes, it’ll be challenging with the blogger side of the equation, but I’m not about to sacrifice the here and now and the precious gift of “present time” to socially cajole greater readership for www.abandonedcubicle.com.
Next stop: Smart Phone, get behind me.
Progress Report
I posted about my attempt to purge social media from my life back in early October. The idea was to limit the amount of noise and distractions. With Twitter especially, my attention span was turning to mush. Every few minutes it seemed, I had to check-in. Let’s dig in more on how to kick an addiction to social media…
Being a fairly attentive student of life, I’ve got a track record for applying research findings in my daily life. Before social media, I read printed material. I’m aging myself here.
In my bachelor days, I’d rely on Men’s Health magazine to help me dress better and learn how to cook, all while holding a shake-weight. You know, stuff that chicks dig?
The good news for me is that I tend to stick with habits that seem to make life exemplified. Think of things like exercise, sleep, limited screen time, eating healthy, flossing, etc., etc. With my “social media diet”, I can chalk up another new habit. And share with you fine readers all of the glorious benefits of leaving that noise behind.
Twitter In the Sh*tter
That’s right. I said it. That app hasn’t made a reappearance on my phone. Now I will admit, however, that I might have snuck a few sessions via Safari here and there.
But I can count on one hand how many times that occurred. And most of those times were while waiting for American Airlines to get their sh*t together while I was stuck at the O’Hare International Airport terminal (my second home, not by choice.)
My initial strategy has worked out pretty well. I’ll check in on Twitter for a few minutes each day from my desktop while working on blog stuff. No fuss, no muss.
The trade-offs are this: I lose out on all the traffic-generating cat litter trivia that one must relentlessly post, but I gain in concentration and thereby avoid upsetting my wife for not listening to her because of Twitter. Guess which trade-off yields the most REAL benefit?
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy checking in on Twitter each day on my desktop for those precious few minutes. I enjoy the community exchange with my friends in the blogosphere.
But I have to limit my engagement to those precious few minutes. It seems to be working out quite well. I have no twitching or other side effects of Twitter withdrawal.
Even better, I have to think my “exceeds expectations” review this year at work had a little something to do with improved concentration and an ability to get sh*t done down the home stretch.
Think a constant Twitter check-in would’ve helped me along those lines? I don’t think so.

Giving up Facebook for Good
Here’s a little Mr. Money Mustache cartoon violence for ya. Bap! In ya face, Facebook! Bloody nose? Sorry. Violence is bad. Let’s just give you the middle finger and call it good, okay? No need to be Cro-Magnon Philadelphia Eagles fans here…
I sure as hell don’t miss Facebook. It’s become an orgy of conflict and nonsense all rolled up into a big digital ball of sh*t. The last time I tried to engage I let gravity pull me into some political battles with family and friends. That was all I needed in my life, right?!?
Besides, we all know now how the Ruskies have used Facebook to court the millions of gullible fools who can’t discern information from garbage. There’s an interesting thread out there challenging Zuckerberg’s notion of bringing the world together. Facebook instead seems to be creating more vitriolic divisions among society: friends and families included.
My interaction with Facebook is limited to automatically posting new posts. I may pop in to promote Airbnb with friends and family from time to time, but that’s about it. No Facebook in my life is about as close to Heaven as I think I’ll ever get. Well, next to being in the Swiss Alps with Mrs. Cubert… 🙂

The Airbnb Experiment required me to add more apps to my phone. Among them, are Airbnb of course, but also Google’s Wi-Fi station monitoring app, and a smart-lock app (look Ma, no keys!) Needless to say, I’ve got my hands full responding to booking requests and making on-the-fly pricing adjustments.
I don’t mind that at all since it’s part of the big-picture real estate side gig. Maybe the point of mentioning all this is that I now have even less time and wherewithal to bother with social media. I’ve got to stay focused on my day job, while also maintaining the real estate businesses.
Whew. (Did I mention I’ve also installed Venmo, to receive rent payments? It’s super-duper convenient!)
Reflections and Inspiration on Ditching Social Media
Admittedly, I was looking for a reason to be less tied to my phone. I’d read enough and experienced first-hand the lousy trade-offs of social media before I stumbled onto that NPR piece in October. So it’s not anything anywhere near quitting smoking or other terrible addictions.
Still, I look back over the past four months with a sense of greater freedom from the constant barrage of updates and miscellany. There’s still work to do, to be sure. My next potential target is to get back to a low-information diet. I seem to have replaced an old social media habit with a new “got to check the news” one.
The Washington Post gets visited probably a half-dozen times throughout the day from my phone. Maybe if it weren’t for the fact we have a Mel Brooks version of Game of Thrones happening in D.C. every day, I wouldn’t feel so compelled to tune in. If only our politicians could get back to being boring and slightly effective.
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I totally agree with you about other people’s posts (what they had for dinner, amateur photos, etc.) however, living in a very small town with only a weekly “newspaper”, I find that being connected on Facebook to my little berg gives me information about things like who the speaker will be at the library this week, street construction that includes maddening detours, etc. If one can be disciplined about what they look at and for what time frame, life can be enhanced and not stolen. Sadly, too many are just as you described. Nothing more disheartening than the family out to dinner with all the kids (even a toddler) with their noses in a phone!
That’s a great point, Susan. If you can limit your consumption to valuable insights and learning, than social media can have a place. Trouble is keeping it from becoming an addiction or bad social habit.
Great read !!! I show my students the negative side effects of social media with Simon Sineks YouTube video !!! The most addicting drug ever – social media !
Now you can show them my blog post, Josh! 😉 Thanks as always for stopping by.
Bahaha! Can’t wait to see how the experiment goes! I was about to beg you to check Twitter briefly just because I would have missed your updates. 🙂
Social media isn’t bad in and of itself. We’re just consuming way too much of this stuff and it can have ramifications on the way we process our own life experiences.
I seem to have a lot of these so-called “experiments” going on these days, right? I’ll get back on Twitter tomorrow morning, during my writing window, at my desktop. 🙂
This is probably a challenge I should take!
I actually do not have a personal Facebook, Twitter or Instagram… blog only! Haha- that helps to eliminate some of the clutter and noise, but I do want to get on a better schedule of limiting “checking in” throughout the day. I like your idea of setting up a specific time to check in.
Let’s do it, Mrs. AR! We’ll see who can go the longest without anything more than an auto-post Tweet?
Yeah, it really boils down to eliminating the extra clutter and noise. Whether it’s online or the crap we compile in our homes and garages. Definitely a minimalist theme underlying the happiness equation.
It’s a bad addiction indeed. I really try to cut it out as much as possible, especially during the evenings with the family. It’s just so darn easy to pop twitter open to get the late breaking sports news! Facebook I couldn’t care less about. Way too easy to get distracted these days. Just like reading this post for example. Kidding 🙂 Take care dude!
Ahh… That other addiction: Sports!
Love the sarcasm, Mr. DS. Just remember how much these posts add to your life’s betterment. 😉
This is a great challenge. I’ve never been into Facebook. I have an account that goes unused. I just created twitter account when I launched my blog. It can be very addicting. Good luck!
You fell into the same trap I did. The blog sort of fed the need for a Twitter account, but I found it had iffy returns for the time / distraction invested. I’ll still put in my daily 5 mins, but not from my smart phone!
I have another Twitter account that is totally not personal finance related that I gave up cold turkey about 9 months before I started the blog. It was too distracting and stressful. Then I started the blog and thought, well, I need to get back on Twitter to meet people and promote the blog and all that. I’m not as bad as I was (I don’t think) but it definitely gives me shiny object syndrome. I’ll be looking for some follow-up on how this goes …
Absolutely, DiC! (nice.) I’ll check back with y’all on how this is going. I even tried removing Safari – which you can do, but finding it tough to not have that emergency internet when I need to check email.
I’m feeling the same way about Twitter lately. I don’t get much interaction on the blog from Twitter, but there are people I enjoy connecting with. I’d like to join in (after FinCon) and do a 5 minute morning, 5 minute evening to start with. That would really help with the distractions too.
Same here, Vicki. I’ll miss the fun photo sharing with Cheesy Dutch Finance, Cheap Athlete, and others. Hopefully the five minutes I’m giving myself is enough to stay as connected as I need to be?
I can email those pics too 😉
LOL. I’ll check each morning on Twitter. Promise!
Right, a bicycle, I remember on of those contraptions. Been sitting in my garage for the last months or so. Something to do with rain, rain, rain, more rain, monsoon, rain, storm, holiday, more rain again, more storm, sigh….. Hope to be able to have something again soon for you to look at.
My Dutch friends over here seem to forget all that rain when they start complaining about the cold winters here in Minnesota. 🙂 Sadly, about time to hang up my bike here for the season as well.
Ive seen NO yes NO difference in blog, music, web site hits without “social” media.
I have felt more calm, sanity though!!!
Right on – Serenity NOW!
I just upgraded my phone because I couldn’t fit enough apps on it. Good Lord. What have I done?!?
I had more to say, but I need to check on these notifications.
Cheers!
-PoF
Silly rabbit… 😉 I trust you of all people have the willpower to avoid the “trap”?
Thanks for the encouragement, Scott! I definitely believe I’ll it’ll everything I imagine.
Smart man, been doing similar efforts to reduce screen time online and on the mobile phone. Seems to work!
Thanks, CF! I miss your tweets most of all. But I can still check them out in my daily AM window of Twitter time. All about compartmentalizing I guess?
Hi Cubert,
That’s a great initiative. Since I started blogging a month ago, I have given up all my personal social media accounts. I only have the blog ones for now.
Good for you! I would hate to go it alone here. Let’s keep tabs to see if we can keep each other accountable.
This is a well-written piece about how not to get stuck in the phone with the “yeah…uh huh…” response to people-REAL PEOPLE-who are talking to you. While 98% of social media apps are time-wasters, you may be doing something that can only be done right now and from your phone, i.e. something actually productive and important. The trouble is, the people you are supposedly interacting with don’t know the distinction, unless you specify your activity. I feel like communicating my intentions is better than to simply try to ‘multi-task’ when I’m around other people. No way around it, though, just sticking my nose in my phone is rude and a habit worth breaking. Thanks for writing an inspiring and encouraging post!
Great comment, Runner! It truly boils down to REAL PEOPLE and making them the focus, not the little plastic and silicon bar in your hand. 🙂
Nice post! I’ve given up facebook many times but seem to go back. Even after you delete your account they make it too dang easy to start back up by just logging back in and viola, there it is just like you never left! I’m currently about a month without it, and I seem to activate it again when I’m bored. However I never had it on my phone, twitter too, just on the desk top so I guess there’s that!!
Thanks, Matt! Whereabouts in Michigan are you? I grew up near the thumb. Congrats on giving up your FB habit. I’m finding life is still worth living without out. Crazy, right?
Ha, that’s true! I thought I saw a post where you mentioned Michigan….we are just south of Lansing. My wife grew up in the thumb area though, well kinda, Saginaw. We get back there quite frequently to see her parents. We usually try to meet them in “little Bravaria” for world famous chicken and good German beer. I’m sure you know where I speak of……..
Oh yes. I’m from Saginaw myself. Born and raised. Don’t miss it, though a little part of me is sentimental. Lansing rules! Being a Spartan alum, I could see myself retiring to East Lansing one day.
Careful with those chicken dinners. I remember when Zhender’s had issues with reserving unused food portions…
Oh, thank you. This post reached me just in time. I was on the anti-soial-media side ever. When started blogging jumped into all. Fortunately the WTF feeling hit me immediately so reduced my focus only on twitter. Even this started to feel addictive and overwhelming, but the temptation to connect with other bloggers (cannot really talk about fans yet 🙂 )is huge so cannot skip this. I made my evening rule of not checking mail & twitter until someone needs me around. The morning window is a good idea too, maybe I will restrict twitter for coffee time and not checking it every time I finish a line of code…
Dumping the smartphone would not be a big deal to me, only enabled internet on phone because of blog email and twitter and only when I don’t have a machine at hand. Maybe I am conservative but for me there is no useful screen for browsing under 10″. My friends joking on me by saying I am a telecommunication amish.
Haha! Love that last line. I appreciate the utility of the smart phone, and I think this post sort of romanticizes a simpler age before cells. If we recall carefully, though, how many times did we get lost on the road to point x with a bad or no map? How often did we wish we had our camera on hand? How about a flash light, level, or compass? Just chuck the FB, Twitter, Snapsh*t, etc. and you’ve got a valuable device. 🙂
I hear you on this, but everybody has different needs. My answers would be: 0 times, 0 < x < 5 times, flash light is the most useful feature, but can replace with a $2 device. Dam, maybe I have a problem 🙂 I was honestly considering to try out the new Nokia 3310, but my wife said that I cannot bring that into the house.
I find it hard to believe you never found it useful to have a smart phone GPS on hand when trying to find a destination. For reals? At least for me – I used to get pretty flustered (before finding my center of course!) And with little kids, having a camera for God-knows is nice, and for blogging of course.., Good luck with your Nokia 3310 lobbying!
This article is so true . I abandoned my social media pages 12.31.16 and have not logged back on Facebook since. I did however relapse on Instagram this year but feel like an idiot every time I post now .. so I’ve only posted a handful of times. I’ve had major life events such as marriage and now pregnancy since I quit and I don’t want to be one of those annoying people who have to share every aspect of their life online. In the past I was big into hiking — posting those pictures, food pics of course and my dogs . But since I’ve come clean I really have no desire to log back in. I still take a lot of pictures though.
Got into a conversation at work about social media. It seems like everyone there is glued to their phones ALWAYS. I mentioned how I quit and one person argued she’s not addicted it’s just habit. Noooo I think your addicted !
Hi Jules! I’ve never taken the Instagram Plunge. I can see how it’d be addicting though – every moment can be capture by your phone camera these days. Do you find that those activities, like hiking, are more enjoyable without the constant connection to the Net?
Tell me about it with work – no one seems to be looking at their CPU screen anymore. Heads down, glued to their phones! Yeesh… Addicts indeed!