So, I Quit "Social Media Content-ing"
Why I Cold Turkey'd “Social Media Content" & How I Avoid the Soggy Wet Brain Blanket of Reactive Creativity
As a creative person, your brain is always on the lookout for what actually matters to you. Because of a phenomenon called “the mere exposure effect”, the more you see something, the more you’ll start to value it. With social media, this means you can spend your valuable creative energy thinking about and making stuff that doesn’t even matter to you.
The big picture:
It’s no secret that social media has some soul-sucking side effects.
For every like, share, comment and sparkle-heart-love-eyes emoji we encounter on social media, dopamine is released in our brains. (Dopamine is a feel-good neurotransmitter that’s used to send messages between our neurons, and it’s released when our bodies expect a reward.)
This is why, despite your best efforts to chill your social media use, your phone is still likely one of the first things you grab when you wake up in the morning, maybe even before you’ve seen sunlight. The siren call of infinite scroll is addictive as hell, and all of the big apps have commandeered our biology to keep us there.
Now, none of this is new, and, like me, you’ve probably known about this for years.
But it was never enough to actually stop me from showing up online fairly consistently. And it also wasn’t enough to stop me from keeping up with ‘content creation’ (barf), online business, and showing up on all the virtual spaces as a writer & entrepreneur.
You know how it is – generally playing the game, trying to set limits as I could, and grumbling to myself every time I realized that a mind-numbing scroll spiral had eaten up an hour.
But this past April, something shifted. And it was shockingly apparent just how much my creativity had suffered because of it.
Hey!
