So, back in 2016 I began experiencing a couple of things. Though they might’ve been unrelated but they seemed to make sense when put together in perspective.

I was at a job that I didn’t like very much. I had plans to quit that job and start something of my own, but those plans weren’t very structured and hence I was mostly slightly anxious and in a second-guessing mode.

At the same time I had been stumbling upon article after article, talk after talk; that were somewhat talking about the adverse effects of overexposure of social media on our lives. This repeated stumbling might have been by the virtue of search history, browser cookies and other pattern recognition software, but at that time I interpreted this as some cosmic hint. Like someone was watching over me, and wanted to give me a way out from my usual tense days.

But before moving forward let me elaborate what these talks and articles said. There were many perspectives. Some said that we are so much consumed in the internet world that we miss out on the real world. So much so that, even when we are physically present with someone we can’t totally be present with them, and instead have this impulse to go back to our ever elusive ‘news feeds’.

Some said that for most people, staying on social media is not a productive activity as they’re mostly just consuming information instead of creating something or utilizing that information for some productive use. And since everyone has just 24 hours in a day (actually much less if you remove time spent on sleeping, eating, commuting, day-dreaming etc.) social media has become a very substantial distraction in our lives, thus blocking us from spending time on really productive activities. This point was critical for me because I didn’t care if I lost a little bit of productive time during my day job. But I had made a promise to myself that everyday after coming back home I will devote some hours towards finding out a career option that I am passionate about. And this endevour was surely being sidetracked due to many distractions, social media indulgence being one of them.

Some articles in scientific journals said that there were conducted some fMRI studies to test the effects of social media on a person’s brain. And these tests found out that a person’s brain when on social media acts a lot like a person’s brain while taking hyper-addictive drugs like cocaine. This was a shocker to me. They found out that the reason for cocaine being so addictive is that it instantly prompts the secretion of a neurotransmitter (hormone) in the brain that makes the person feel immense pleasure and thus provides positive motivation to keep repeating that behavior i.e. taking more cocaine. They found out that whenever we receive a like or comment on one of our post, or especially as we’re scrolling down our news feed, a similar secretion of dopamine takes place in our brain. And thus we get that tiny shot of pleasure. This keeps us scrolling down further and further until something else breaks our trance like state.

These few perspectives that I found were impactful but not truly compelling. Until one fine day…

One day I woke up and was laying in my bed for some extra minutes of comfort. I was thinking of what all I had to do that day. Go to that place, do that thing, talk to that person etc. And suddenly, like a brick to my face, it hit me. I realized that every morning I wake up, from the exact moment that I open my eyes, a to-do list also wakes up with me.

A little voice inside me that somehow remains ready to bombard me with tons of information about “what I have to do, what I don’t want to do, what I could have done better yesterday, how that should have happened, how this would happen, what if I did this, why have I not been able to do that.. on and on and on.”
It keeps on talking and talking and mostly it’s not something that is very pleasant to hear.

I was utterly shocked by this realization because I also realized that how consumed I am in my own thought processes the whole day. It was as if my whole existence revolved around these things I wanted to do, have and be. It was a truly transformational moment for me because I could step back and observe my thoughts from a ‘hawk eye’ perspective. And I didn’t like what I saw. I wondered “is this why I am here? to finish a few silly tasks? and obsessing about them day-in and day-out?”

I didn’t like my reality even one bit. And that was when I was reminded about another perspective I had heard about social media. (Well, to be honest, it wasn’t entirely about social media but a much larger contemplation). This perspective said that we’re often so much domesticated in our daily grind, hundreds of times doing the same things over and over, that it becomes almost normal for us to spend the entirety of our days on auto-pilot mode. We are awake but never truly present. We are responsive but never truly appreciative or at ease. We spend most of hour waking hours in a zombie like state, not unhappy, but utterly powerless to create any substantial change in our lives or in the world around us. If we want to create such change, it would demand for us to come to our senses, take a step back, and look at our minute-to-minute existence from a ‘hawk eye’ view. And evaluate if it is going how we want it to go? And if not, what is my say in the matter?

I know this post suddenly went too metaphysical & esoteric but this is how I was feeling in that moment.
So I decided to make a drastic change in my life. I decided to go on a total social media fast for exactly one month. And at the end of this one month I would look back and evaluate if this change had impacted my life positively. It was a kind of test I was doing. And I was charged up thinking about what I would find at the end of the road.

[Note: I knew at that time that social media indulgence wasn’t a primary cause to my problems, but it wasn’t helping either. So I decided to eliminate just this one bit from the whole equation to see what effects this had. This is a standard way of testing a hypothesis by the way]

So this social media fast had three aspects.
1. I deleted all of the social media apps from my phone. (At the time I was using only Facebook, Instagram & Snapchat)

2. I decided that I cannot even touch my smartphone within 30 minutes of waking up, and 30 minutes before going to sleep at night

3. Since I had my first 30 minutes of the day intentionally cleaned free, I would take that time each day to go for a walk & think about what I was grateful for

***

What happened over the next couple of weeks is hard for me to put in words. It was a weird kind of cascade of positive events. And it was pretty evident from the start that I had found something really beneficial by taking this up.

So let me try to profile all the benefits I started experiencing.

Firstly, since there was no Insta or Snapchat, suddenly there was no more a mandate for me to click a picture of every funny/stupid/interesting thing I saw & post it online. Nor was I required to be updated about what the rest of the world was doing. I experienced a weird sense of calmness from this.
I say weird because it was like one of those stories. Stories where the hero had been born with a weight on his shoulders and had spent his entire life like that. It’s only when that weight is taken off that he realizes what life could be like without that weight. It’s a new kind of experience and that’s why I’m calling it a weird calmness. I don’t know if everyone is in the same predicament as I was. But I don’t think you can find that out unless you lift off that weight from your shoulders.

Secondly, refraining from checking my phone first thing in the morning (& last thing at night) was a massive pattern interrupt for me. During the first few days it instantly gave me some meditative effects. This is how it used to look. I would wake by the sound of my alarm. As a habitual instinct my first act of the day would be to pick up my phone & open the lock. But I suddenly would get reminded that “Hey, I can’t do that”, and I would keep my phone down.
THEN, I would take a moment and suddenly realize that I’m in a room. It’s my room so no surprises there, but I actually would look around. Notice the colors of the walls, our bed sheets. I’d notice the bright warm sunlight pouring in from the window and experience the richness of the morning sky outside. It won’t take long for my attention to go to the birds chirping outside, or the traffic moving down the roads below. I would take all these sensory inputs & cozy up a little in my comfortable bed. Feeling & experiencing the impact of my blanked on every part of my body. Fully aware and fully in the present moment. This experience of merely 5 minutes started to become that part of my day that I most looked forward to. I started to be excited about getting up in the morning. Nothing like this had ever happened for so many days in a row. I knew I was on to something.

Thirdly, I found out that all that morning laziness I felt while in the bed, totally vanishes the moment I get out of it and start walking. It was something that you always know intellectually but still is remarkable when you experience it firsthand. So I noticed that as soon as I started walking not only my body went from a sleepy state to an awake and heightened state. Even my mind became hyper excited & charged up. But in this instance it would go towards only positive, resourceful and empowering places. While walking every morning I used to naturally have thoughts like “what all can go right today, how is today’s meeting an opportunity, what’s a hidden benefit that I’m not able to see yet in a problem I’m facing etc.”
So I found out that just by changing my physical state I could impact my mental or emotional state. It even resonated with a quote I had heard from Tony Robbins that said “Motion creates Emotion”. All of this was positive, but each day I also remembered my initial promise. That I will walk and contemplate all the things I am grateful for. So each morning, while my mind was running towards a 100 different (& positive) directions, I would catch its reins and bring it to this question “what am I grateful for right now?”.
I would ask this question to myself and mostly each time was provided with an answer from the inside. Then I asked the question again “what else am I also grateful for?”. And then a new answer would come.
I kept repeating till as long as I wanted. And this was so much fun! Shots of empowerment within the first 60 minutes of the day. Who wouldn’t want that.

In fact, I even started experiencing a positive side effect of this exercise. You see, each time I would ask myself the gratitude question, my mind would sooner or later wander away into some unrelated thoughts. That’s the common behavior of our mind. It invariably goes into multiple trains of thoughts without much of our will. But almost everyday, after 2-3 minutes of my mind wandering, I would suddenly realize “hey I was asking my mind a question”. So I would bring my mind back. This used to happen at least 5-6 times during a 20 minute walk. I would ask myself a question. The answer would come from the inside. In between somewhere, the mind would wander away. Then I would realize that it has wandered away and I would bring it back.

A few days later I started noticing that my ability to remain focused had increased substantially. At least by a factor of 5. I could maintain laser sharp focus on anything I was doing, throughout the day. It was enough of a difference that I could notice it very clearly. I was suddenly able to remember the conversations I had had with people hours ago, exactly verbatim i.e. word by word as it had happened.

A few months later I found out that what I had been doing as part of my morning rituals is the classic way to practice mindfulness meditation. You focus your attention on a singular aspect of experience. And whenever your mind wanders away, simply notice that it has wandered away, and gently bring it back to the same thing you were concentrating on earlier. Attention & Focus are like muscles, you can make them stronger by working them out over a consistent time period. And unknowingly I was doing the same thing. Well good for me!

***

I did these things (social media fast) and experienced so many delightful benefits in such a short time that I was sure that I would continue this for the rest of my life.

When the one month was over. I looked back at the 30 days that had passed by. I was sure that my tendency to over-indulge in social media had gone away, because now it made no difference to me if I used social media in the future or not. I was much more in control of my daily moods & emotions and very rarely allowed any distractions to come between me and my plan for the day. And most importantly, my overall stress and second-guessing nature had been much calmed down over those 30 days. So I was able to accomplish more, with a lot less of fussing over it.

Now many months have passed since I had this experience. And today I am on social media as any other normal person. But I think now I control my phone instead of the other way around.

And as for my other rituals i.e. not looking at phone screens first & last thing in a day; and going for morning walks & gratitude.. I still continue those things to this day.

Over the last few months I have accomplished some very notable things in my life. And I am certain that they have been possible because of my ability to stay ‘present’ and take daily decisions proactively rather than reactively.

Hope this helps!