“Why I Went to the Woods”

Since the start of the shelter in place order, I have noticed that my media consumption has increased substantially. Being far away from my friends and having the social distancing restrictions placed on me has cause me to gravitate more towards using social media to stay in contact with them. It was getting to a point where I was spending hours on Instagram and Snapchat, which made me arrive at the conclusion that the only way to limit my use was to go cold turkey. I have done this several of times before and it has worked very well for me. As someone who struggles with anxiety, I believe it to be helpful to eliminate certain distractions as much as possible so that I am more present in the task that I am trying to accomplish. Oftentimes when I’m at school, I find myself checking my phone frequently while I’m trying to study which ultimately causes me to retain less information. Not to mention, I find that social media leads me to experience cognitive overload since my brain doesn’t know what to do with all of the random images and captions that are impertinent to my daily life.

During the time that I deleted social media and stopped watching television, I filled my time with catching up on projects, homework, working-out, and reading. During the 3 days that I did the social media cleanse, I really enjoyed going on long walks around my neighborhood. Not having my phone with me made me more observant. I truly began to pay attention to each and every detail that went into the experience such as the chirping birds, the smell of the roses I passed, and the feeling of the sun on my face. For the first time in a while, I didn’t feel like I was in a hurry to get home. Heck, when I was home I even cleaned my room and put away the laundry that had been sitting in its basket for two weeks. I genuinely enjoyed everything that the days had to offer. I must say though, there were several moments where I didn’t know what to do or I felt as if I had already done every activity possible.

As for the challenges that I had, it was very strange to not listen to music. Anyone who knows me know that I love to listen to music at pretty much all times. I also like to watch a tv show in the morning and watch YouTube videos while I eat ranging from topics such as self-improvement to reaction/comedy videos. It was an interesting experience to just sit and eat with no entertainment in front of me. I learned to like it though, as its pretty peaceful. I must say, in the beginning it took every ounce of self-control in me to not redownload Instagram and to not watch TV with my family. At times it made me pretty anxious to feel so disconnected from everything. Especially since I am in the middle of transferring to another university, my primary form of communication with other transfer and incoming students is through social media. But this also made me remember/realize that the valuable friendships I made my freshman year were not based on how connected I was to the person through social media. All of these friendships were cultivated through intentionality rather than mere connections on social media. This is not to say that social media isn’t a great tool for us to connect with others, but rather that it must be used judiciously.

Now that I am three days into the cleanse, I feel really happy with how it went. I hope to continue to limit my use of my phone and laptop for entertainment purposes. Now that I have seen that I can go without that and greatly benefit from abstaining from overusing my devices, it is something that I hope to continue to carry out. It was pretty therapeutic to not have to not have to worry about responding back to every single text I and to have a legitimate excuse to ignore my notifications. I honestly made me feel more human and more in control of my life. Over the last several years I have developed such a reliance on technology, and I was essentially looking for an escape from this.

I absolutely think that everyone should do a phone or social media cleanse. I see my friends as glued to their phones as I am, which is honestly kind of sad. We are letting these little machines become a part of who we are, a part of our identity. I think that in order for us to have our priorities in check, we have to let go of the things that take up too much of our time without enriching our lives. I want there to be a movement of people saying that enough is enough and that we want to take back our lives from the cycle of social media and technology reliance. I know this may sound exaggerated, but I truly speak from experience and I know that many others feel the same way. The advantages of having the extensive amount of technology that we have are that we have access to endless information which can make us more intelligent and well-versed in more areas of study and because of this, we can make greater advances in the fields of science, technology, psychology, and much more. On the other hand, technology can also be a weapon and it can destroy our lives through our reliance and the time lost while using it, that could be more productive placed elsewhere.

I really enjoyed this assignment and hope to continue to minimize my use of technology and do another “cleanse” sometime soon. If anyone reads this, I hope it inspires them to go out “[In]to the Woods” as well!