Social Media Cleanse

Disclosure: This post is sponsored by ABC through its partnership with KLOUT.

All opinions are my own.

If you can’t relate to what you're about to read you either a) don’t have a smartphone, b) don’t use social media on it or c) are lying.

Let’s rewind 20 years from today. I spent my days playing outside on the weekend with friends, running down the back streets behind my parents’ house—sometimes barefoot—without supervision, and I always knew to come in for a home-cooked meal where no one left the table without being “excused”, which could never happen until everyone was done eating. Now fast forward to today.

I’m glued to my cell phone.

I’m fairly confident I check my phone around 150 times a day. Now in my defense I do use my phone for my job and promoting this blog (which I’m starting to consider a second job…that I LOVE). I’m constantly checking and answering emails if I’m not in the office in addition to putting my blog out there and making sure to post enough pictures to stay relevant to all of you lovely readers, in turn building up my stats and following.

Anyway, I’m so grateful all of the aforementioned things can be done on a phone! That luxury makes me more valuable to my company, and hopefully makes my blog more enticing to you. But in addition to those things, I’m constantly on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter just seeing what friends are up to, what new blog posts are out there, searching for the latest gossip or {truthfully} just aimlessly scrolling hoping to find something life changing. Which never happens.

The point is I check my phone ALL the time. What irritates me about this is that I even check it when I’m with my daughter. Now I don’t hold it up to my face and completely ignore her or anything, but I usually have it in my hand or on the floor near us and open it up for a quick glance pretty regularly. I essentially throw valuable moments out the window for what reason? None, really. I just do it to do it. It’s a habit.

My cell phone is a habit I need to break.

Have you watched the new ABC sitcom Selfie, yet? It’s premier date was September 30 and it airs every Tuesday at 8/7 p.m. central time. Husby and I tuned in to the first episode to see if it had enough potential to add it to our fall weekday primetime couch time line up. While it’s definitely a little melodramatic, it’s seriously hilarious. The main female character, Eliza, is a social media-obsessed young professional who is attempting to give up virtual “likes” to be actually liked as a person in the real world, with real friendships.

The storyline, while like I said is a little over the top, hits the satirical notions right on the head with the social media-based world today. And while I’m not anywhere near as social-media obsessed as Eliza is, the point is well received.

As such, I accepted a challenge to take part in a social media cleanse. Since I’m leaving for another business trip on Saturday, I’ve decided that tomorrow would be the perfect day for this cleanse so I can make sure that every morning and evening moment I get to spend with my beautiful daughter before I leave is focused on her. And after she goes to bed, on my husband.

Because let’s be honest here…we all could benefit from a day of living in the moment and take our heads out of our…clouds.

To prep for this cleanse I already did a clean out of all social media notifications. I turned off all notifications from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and actually every other app with a notification. I even turned off the notifications for my Delta app, which would normally be key in updating me on any flight changes for my Saturday departure. That’s right folks, I’m going to have to rely on the good old fashioned logging into my Delta account manually to check for flight changes, and I believe that can even wait until Saturday!

I turned off all the notifications so I wouldn’t be as tempted to check the latest updates on Facebook or who was commenting on Instagram every time I heard a “ding”.

So what do I expect out of my day? A lot, actually. But I also expect it to be hard. I’ll update you with the results when I blog either on one of my flights or when I get home from my trip the end of next week. Until then, I encourage you to try this cleanse too. And if you’d like to see exactly why, check out ABC’s Selfie on Tuesdays at 8/7 p.m. central time. The show is proving to be filled with one-liners that Husby and I both crack up from!

Until next time.