138 - 3 Habits to Put Social Media in its Place (Ep. 12 Replay)

Resources from this episode:

Show Notes:

Listen, we all struggle with social media. It is an incredible tool of connectivity, but it's literally designed to keep us scrolling, even when we don't want to be. Now in my best moments, I've connected with people I've never met. They have brought me hope or encouragement in a time I have desperately needed it. But in my darkest moments, I've thought some pretty terrible thoughts about myself as a wife, or a mother. I've wanted to escape a messy house or crying baby, or even worse, I haven't wanted to escape those things, but I've been scrolling none the less.

I want to say is that technology isn't good or bad. Social media isn't good or bad, it is simply a tool. Just like money can be used to bless other people, and you can help eradicate poverty, do amazing things with money. Or you can spend it on some pretty terrible things and fuel addiction. Just like you can use bricks to build a hospital or a foundation that helps people in need. Or you can take a brick and throw it through a window and bring destruction. It's just a tool, right? Money is a tool, bricks are a tool, social media, technology, they're tools that you can use. It's not good or bad, it's how we use it or how we choose to use it that determines its outcome. With that said, it's incredibly important for us to know that this is just a tool, but it's also important for us to understand how it has been designed and refined over time. I want to enhance your understanding of its design, so that you can be aware of it and take responsibility for your life and your scrolling habits.

It can be helpful. It can provide income. It can be addictive. It can be a trap. Today, I want to talk about simple practices that I have found incredibly life-giving to keep social media in its place.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through it below.

Okay, the first thing I want to say is that technology isn't good or bad. Social media isn't good or bad, it is simply a tool. Just like money can be used to bless other people, and you can help eradicate poverty, do amazing things with money.

Or you can spend it on some pretty terrible things and fuel addiction. Just like you can use bricks to build a hospital or a foundation that helps people in need. Or you can take a brick and throw it through a window and bring destruction.

It's just a tool, right? Money is a tool, bricks are a tool, social media, technology, they're tools that you can use. It's not good or bad, it's how we use it or how we choose to use it that determines its outcome. With that said, it's incredibly important for us to know that this is just a tool, but it's also important for us to understand how it has been designed and refined over time. I want to talk about a few things that we don't think about when we're using social media just to kind of set the stage today.

The first thing I want to talk about is the Like button. Now the first point I want to make is that social media, Facebook, they created it for themselves, not for you. It is a winning formula for engagement and addiction. It's the thing that keeps you coming back, right? You want to see how many likes you got on that Instagram post, you want to see how many likes you got on Facebook. It's like a virtual pat on the back, and it boosts your ego. It increases your engagement, it keeps you coming back and opening up that app. It increases the time that you spend on the app, which is exactly what they want. It's important to realize why we like the Like button, why does that keep us coming back? And it's because it is, it appeals to us, it appeals to our egos. We like it. I like it. It feels good when you get crazy number of likes on a picture or something that you say. It's affirming to you, right?

Another feature I want to talk about is the infinite scroll. As I was kind of doing research for this episode, this is something that I didn't even realize was a thing. This is something they made and created. And I know that this is how the apps work, but I didn't realize it was intentionally made and created, which kind of weirded me out a little bit. It's the infinite scroll, right? So as you're scrolling through Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, it's never-ending. You never get to the bottom of a web page, it keeps going. There's more to be said, there's more to read, there's more to see. Always leaving you with this feeling of "What am I missing? If I just scrolled a little bit longer, would that be the thing that I really want to see?" It's all subconscious, we don't actually have these drawn out thoughts, but it's an addictive formula.

This guy, Mr. Raskin, his last name is Raskin. He created the infinite scroll, and he said, "If you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling." Right? You don't give your brain the time to catch up with that impulse to just scroll, the impulse to see what's next. He said, "The innovation that infinite scroll keeps users looking at their phones far longer than necessary." Raskin says this about social media companies, "It's as if they're taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface, and that's the thing that keeps you coming back, and back, and back."

I've heard social media and the Like button kind of compared to the new cigarette of today. Which if you think about it like that, it makes me a little bit sick. Like what is this doing to our health? But it's not an actual thing that we can tie to something like lung cancer, but it's doing something to our mental health, right? It's making us sick, and we're addicted. We just have to keep coming back, and keep coming back to get those little hits.

Okay, the third thing that I want to point out is the refresh. You know how when you're on social media, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, you can like pull your thumb down on your phone and it'll refresh the page, and load new content so you can see what's the newest thing that someone's posted? It has been said that this was designed after the same pull down motion of a slot machine. I want you to think about that. People literally watched the addictive behaviors, people who were gambling, and designed the refresh after that, where you pull it down and waited to see what comes up next.

When we are aware of these things, it can really change your mindset of how you are interacting with these apps, and with social media. And it's just really important to know that these were designed on purpose to keep you coming back, and to keep you there longer. Because that's how they make money, right? If you stay on their page, they're getting more engagement, more interaction, they're allowing you to see more paid ads the longer you're there. So these are the conversations they're having is "How can we get them coming back? How can we keep them on our apps longer?"

Now I am not here to bash social media. I am not here to bash Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, any of the other platforms. I use them, I like them, I think that they're kind of genius at business in a lot of ways. I think they stay very cutting edge in today's world. But this episode is not about them. It's not about bashing them. Again, this is just a tool, and this episode is all about you. I want to enhance your understanding of its design, so that you can be aware of it and take responsibility for your life and your scrolling habits.

Now before we get into the habits that I want to share with you today where you can put social in its place, I want to share a resource with you. The book by Andy Crouch, the Tech-Wise Family, is amazing. It is one of my favorite, I feel like most applicable parenting book. Even if you're not a parent, it's just applicable period, because you can put up these systems and guards in your heart, in your home about technology that's really refreshing, and very remarkable. I won't get into all of the book today, it's very, very good. Highly recommend it. I'll definitely leave a link to it in the show notes.

But I want I want to read you this quote. One of the premises of the book is that technology, again, isn't good or bad, but it becomes bad when it's not kept in its proper place. We need to keep technology where it should be. And what's happening is if we don't put these guards up in our homes, and if we don't put habits in our lives, it's going to creep in and take over. That's just how it was designed. And if we're not hyper-aware of these things, and putting these guards up in our homes, in our families, our relationships, and in our lives, it's just going to take over our mind. It's happened to me, right? They're designed to do that.

There's a quote from the book I want to read to you today.

"We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life that we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I'm nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves."

Again, that's a quote by Andy from the Tech-Wise Family.

This conversation we're having today about this topic is for one purpose, for you to start thinking about the nudges or habits that you can put in your life that will give you the life that you want. Because I don't know about you, but sometimes at the end of of my day, I'm kind of a little bit disgusted with myself. Like, I didn't like the way I was on my phone when my kids were playing. I didn't like the way I impulsively checked it without even realizing it.

So, I'm going to share with you three habits, or nudges as the author said, that I personally have embraced that have really helped me live a fuller life at work, and a fuller life at play when I'm with my family, resting, or just not doing work, which is, again, a time I'm very drawn to the social media apps on my phone.

In the Tech-Wise Family, Andy recommends to embrace one hour a day without screens, one day a week without screens, and one week a year without screen. That's when he and his family, they turn off their devices, they worship, they feast, they play, and they rest together. I don't know about you, but that already sounds so life-giving to me. After reading this book a couple years ago, I've done a similar thing. I've tried out different habits, I've tried out different rhythms or routines, and kind of experimented with this. But I've tweaked it a little bit for myself.

My three habits this year to put social media in its proper place is to take off one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a month. Andy recommends one week a year; I've been taking off social media one week a month. There's a little bit of differing approaches between this approach I'm about to tell you that I do in my life, and Andy's approach in the book, so again, recommend that you read his approach and works well for his family.

But let's start talking about one hour a day. This is what I try to do every day when I get off work. For one hour, I stick my phone to the refrigerator. Now you might be thinking like, "That's weird. How do you do that?" Well, I have a Steelie car mount, and this is not an ad for them, but I just love it. What it is, is a really strong magnet ball that is mounted in your car, and then a really strong magnet on the back of your phone that you can just clip right into the car mount, but also it works really well on refrigerators. And so, I like to put my phone on the refrigerator so I know where it is, and then I go somewhere else. I go outside with the kids, I go to the playroom with the kids. I try to get into a different space from my phone altogether.

Sometimes on Sundays, I will intentionally just come home from church and leave my phone in the car. We'll get to that in a minute. By removing myself from the phone, from even being in the vicinity of the phone, I'm not tempted to just reach in my pocket and check it, which is what we do.

Another thing that I try to do, which I've actually gotten out of the habit of, but I have really loved doing this in the past. And I'll explain why I've gotten out of the habit of it. But I like to sleep with my phone in another room, and I don't check my phone until after I've spent time with the Lord in the morning. The minimum requirement for me is one hour a day where my phone's not in reach, but I do try to do this in the morning when I wake up, and in the afternoon or evening as well.

One of the reasons why I've gotten out of the habit of doing it overnight is simply because I had a baby five months ago, and when I was feeding him overnight, I used it as my night light, I used a breast feeding app, I used all kinds of things on there. So that's why it was nice to have it just as a tool at night. But again, I found myself scrolling in social media then, and I didn't want to be. So, I'm exciting to get back into that habit of just putting my phone in another room, and letting it charge somewhere else overnight, and not picking it up again in the morning until after I've had my quiet time.

Okay, now let's talk about the second habit, which is taking off one day a week. I always plan for this day to be coinciding with my Sabbath, which is when I try to take off one day, stop any kind of work, rest, just enjoy. And this is so important that you're not resting while also looking at social media all day. I don't know, it's like you need a break. Your mind needs a break from that, so by taking one full day off, it's so refreshing to just not be connected with anybody else in your life other than your family.

I really try to focus my attention on being outside, on reading, on doing things that really build up my life, and make me feel super alive, on just enjoying my people. So, I do have my phone with me that day, I don't completely take a break from screens entirely, but I use it as a communication tool, right? A phone. I use it to text, I use it to call people, I just don't look at my mail app, or social media.

Okay, the third habit is I take off one week a month where I just break from social media completely. Now this is specifically for me just in regards to social media where I don't look at Instagram. I don't look at Facebook, or Twitter, any of the other ones that I really feel like I've kind of created a habit going to, opening up on my phone a little bit too often.

Doing this this year has been so eye-opening for me. It's been incredibly helpful, but here's some lessons that I've learned, or things that it has revealed to me as I've done this this year. And again, I've only done this five times. I'm about to do it my sixth time this year, since I'm in the month of June as I'm recording this. But what I've learned is it take me a full seven days to get my mind out of that habit. The first three days, I'm constantly reaching for my phone, I will even open the app. I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, honestly. I'll even open the app before I even know what I'm doing.

I just open it. I'm like, "Oh. I don't want to be looking at this right now." And I immediately quit the app and put it away. Some people delete the app off their phone. Honestly, I should probably do that. By the middle two to three days, I'm thinking about the apps and social media a lot less. Just not really coming across my mind nearly as often in the day. And by the end of the seven days, I am loving life. I'm like, "Holy cow, look at the life that I've been missing. It's so good. It's so good." Yet, to be completely honest, by the end of the seven days, I'm kind of looking forward to getting back on social media just to see what happened. What did I miss while I was gone? And again, that's how they're designed, so it's just good for me to acknowledge that.

So, how can I do this when I run my business a lot through social media, or that is an important aspect of my business in connectivity, in engagement, all those things? Well, the cool thing is, is there are businesses and apps, outside of social media apps, or accounts that you can create that will actually post for you. So, what I do is I use Later.com, you can also use Planoly. Those are two organizations that allow you to create a profile, pre-plan your Instagram feed, and post to it automatically. I'm not even in the app and my feed is being updated, which is pretty awesome. I can just keep my engagement going, and I personally don't have to be engaging.

This is just where I am today in my journey. These are the habits that I have embraced right now in my life, where I take one hour a day, at least, where my phone's not in my reach, one day a week, where I rest my eyes from screens other than just basic communication, and one week a month, where I break from social media completely. I think it's incredibly important to treat this entire conversation and these habits as a journey, and to continually educate ourselves on this. Because social media is always changing. What's working for me now, might not be enough next year.

Technology's always changing. It's not up to the companies, it's not up to Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter to change. It is up to you and me. We are in charge of our own lives, and if there's something that you don't like about your relationship with social media or technology, I am here to encourage you today it's up to you to do something about it.

There will always be things that we don't like about the world we live in, always. That's like a given. But we can change the way that we relate to the world. A lot of times it's hard. It feels like I'm swimming upstream, but again, that technology's going to creep in and take over if we don't put those boundaries in place.

So, what's next for me in this journey? Honestly, I want to read the book Digital Minimalism, which is by the author Cal Newport. I've read his book Deep Work, which is awesome. And from what I've heard about it, it does encourage you to take a month off to do kind of a social media detox of sorts, and then establish an extremely intentional plan in your relationship to media. I plan to read this next year sometime, it's part of the Nancy Ray Book Club, and I'm excited about it. Yes, it gets a little sticky when you run an online business, but for me, it's possible and it's absolutely worth it.

Thanks for listening to episode 12 of Work and Play with Nancy Ray.

This topic is hard, it's tricky, but it's also extremely important. It's part of our lives. And I hope that, more than anything, you've been encouraged to put your screens away, and then choose a walk or real conversation instead. Maybe your nudges won't look like mine. Maybe your nudges are social media free weekends or maybe you delete an app off your phone during the week. Maybe you turn off all notifications all the time like I do, which is also part of the boundaries I've set up in my own life. The point is to embrace habits or nudges that lead you to the fullest life, living fully awake and aware of the life that's being lived right in front of you.

Everything I've mentioned today can be found in the show notes at NancyRay.com/Podcast/12, and you can find me at NancyRay.com or follow me @NancyRay on Instagram or Facebook almost daily. I'm going to close with words from Cal Newport,