Two Steps That Transformed My Relationship With Facebook and Twitter (and made my life better)

Just before Christmas I had a conversation with my coach. I wasn't in a good place, and the last thing she did in the session was to encourage me to do the things I need to look after myself.

After that, I sat down with a sheet of paper. I split it into four quadrants. I labelled them Mental, Physical, Emotional and Spiritual, based on the work of Tony Schwarz and the Energy Project, which has been a part of how I make sure I am fuelled up ever since I first heard Schwarz interviewed on Waking Up The Workplace eight years ago. I don't always do it actively, though, these days, but this time it was incredibly useful.

One of the things I did was to buy 12 Rules For Life on audiobook and listen to it as I walked in the park (ticking off things from in the Spiritual, Mental, Physical and Emotional lists in one go). Another was to fully give myself permission to stop going on Facebook and Twitter. And - so far at least - I haven't looked back.

Of course, technologies like Facebook and Twitter start off as a huge boon: they are an amazing resource which allow relationships to be enriched, connection to grow and many businesses and organisations to flourish which otherwise wouldn't have been possible. And, like everything, they have a shadow. Jonathan Haidt believes they are behind the massive rise in self-harm and suicide attempts among young people. Many believe they are behind greater polarisation in our societies. Some even blame them (and the Russians of course) for election results they don't like. For me, they are - often - just something that makes me anxious and upset. I don't think they always used to be like that, but they are now.

And when I'm as fragile as I was just before Christmas, something needed to change. To make a shift around social media, it turned out, I needed to really only do two things: I needed to give myself permission to not go on. And I needed to log out of Twitter and Facebook on all my devices.

The first part of this was important, and initially it took that very important desire to look after myself to get me to the place where I gave myself that permission, where I really remembered I can choose to go on here or not.

The second was just as important because, you see, our instincts are very often wired to take us to social media. Let us not forget that the cleverest people in the world now converge on Silicon Valley, working at these companies, and many of them are working on developing algorithms designed specifically to hold our attention (and these algorithms are hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the program that beat Garry Kasparov at chess). They use data about where our mice hover, what we like, who our friends are, what we write, all in order to keep us hooked.

My bother, after reading Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism, says one of his favourite things to do on the buses and trams of Amsterdam where he lives is to watch other people on their phones. If you can see their screen, he says, they cycle through the same four or five sites or apps over and over again. It might be: Facebook, Instagram, CNN, Whatsapp, Twitter. Then, he says, they just go back to the start. Start to watch yourself and you'll find yourself doing this too; mine, pre-Christmas, were something like: Facebook, Twitter, Guardian Football, BBC Sport, and then here, to LinkedIn. Then, of course, back to Facebook.

The thing is, we don't know we're doing this. At play here what Haidt would call the elephant (in his metaphor of the elephant and the rider), and what Daniel Kahnemann would call System One. This is our instinctive self, not our conscious self. It craves the dopamine hits of the likes, the feelings of outrage at the clickbait headlines, the desperate feeling of connection or validation and perhaps even the frustration and anger.

That's why logging out is important. I was so instinctual that I would open Chrome on my phone, press F (which made Facebook's web address come up) and press return without even noticing. Then I might wake up 20 minutes later after scrolling, liking etc, slightly gobsmacked at how much time I had spent there. I had already turned off the notifications for productivity reasons, and eventually removed the apps. Logging out gave me just enough space from my instincts to engage Haidt's rider or Kahnemann's System Two: my rational brain to say. Engaging that, I had the power to choose: do I or don't I want to go on there? (The permission not to was important in that moment, too).

It has been remarkable since then to see just how many times I have ended up at that Facebook or Twitter login page without even thinking. Almost every time, I have laughed at myself inwardly and then not logged in.

The reason I started this experiment was emotional need. The reason I'll continue it is productivity. It's about doing the important work. Seth Godin says that when people ask him how he gets so much work done, he says: 'Well, I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, I don't watch TV and I don't have any meetings.' Think about how much time you spend a week doing those things and imagine what you could get done in that time.

Giving myself that separation from Facebook and Twitter has allowed me to look after myself. It has allowed me to really choose when to go on (including having lots of fascinating discussion on the post that 12 Rules For Life inspired me to share on Facebook). And it has allowed me to channel my time into other things.

It's not perfect - I can see myself emerging into a new pattern of five sites, but at least they don't leave me anxious or upset as often, and some of them are even to do with something that makes the world a better place!

Be careful how you use technology. Take a moment to notice when the shadow outweighs the value.

--

PS I'm currently in the enrolment process for my group programme for coaches, The Coach's Journey. If you, or someone you know, is a coach who wants to take their business to a new level in 2020, then I'd love to hear from them. It all starts with a chance - free of charge, as a gift from me - to experience group coaching with me. The opportunities to do that are coming up at the end of the month. You can read all about it here.

This is part of a series of pieces, written in about twelve minutes (this one was more like 15), proof read once with tiny edits and then posted online. The first three years of those posts will be published (this year) as a book entitled: I Wrote This Book in 12 Minutes. Sign up to my mailing list here to hear from me about my writing, that book and other things, or read my other posts here.

You can read more about my work as a coach at www.robbieswalecoaching.com.