Help! How To Escape Obsession With Social Media

Social media can become a nightmare, like waking up in a mental asylum. You have no idea you’re committed until you try to leave.

I was a late adopter and Facebook was my platform of choice. It was euphoric in the beginning, catching up with friends, family, college buddies I hadn’t seen in 15 years. Then my competitive nature took over. I started comparing myself and worrying about how many friends and likes I could get.

Sound familiar?

Social Media Became Another Addiction

Drinking and Facebook proved a deadly combination, and it became obsessive. Misusing social media intensified my chronic depression and anxiety for over a decade.

One morning, I got an urgent message from a friend to call him immediately. He told me that I had sent a few texts out the night before that didn’t make much sense. I didn’t even remember doing that.

That was my tipping point; I quit on the spot. These days, I use social media very differently. It’s not an obsession any more, it’s a tool, and a very good one for business. But I still feel the tug, I think we all do, the moment I go online and that totally unlimited world opens up with a single click.

How can reality compete?

The internet is like that sixties Arlo Guthrie song about how you can get anything you want in Alice’s Restaurant. The real world? Not so much.

Or, so it seems.

I’d like to offer a radical but easy, practical, and profoundly simple remedy: nature.

Nature Is the Answer

If being online is like Alice’s Restaurant, then being in nature is like a food court with a billion stations. The diversity in nature is almost infinite.

Imagine standing on a forest path. Here’s what’s actually happening. Beneath your feet, each tablespoon of soil is teeming with over 50 billion living organisms, including one billion bacteria.

Planet earth is rotating at 1,000 miles per hour while orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, inside our solar system which is traveling 448,000 miles per hour to traverse the Milky Way in 230 million light years.

Meanwhile, the Milky Way galaxy is spinning 130 miles per second (not per hour), while hurtling through space at 1.3 million miles per hour.

All this is happening all the time!

Remember to Take a Nature Break

I invite you to develop a new habit – nature breaks. Schedule yourself for walks, regularly. Not just for the physical exercise, although that’s healthy, but for soul nourishment.

Because when we’re stressed out, we often go to social media for relief. I did. It’s so easy! And there’s that instant dopamine hit. TikTok rules!

Meanwhile, our very cells are crying out, “Help!”

Give them what they need: reunion with their family. That’s right, we belong in nature. The natural world is the real world, with civilization plastered on top of it.

Some of us go from apartment to basement garage to car to road to another basement garage to elevator to office to elevator to cab to road to restaurant to cab to road to basement garage number two into the car back to the road to … Every week day!

Where’s nature? Nowhere to be seen or heard or smelled or touched.

But we all need the nourishment that nature provides. And … it’s free. Just like breathing.

“Help!” was echoing through my body every day back when I was a lost addict. Today, I’ve left the little screen for the big world.

I hope you experiment for yourself and can find the deliverance I did. And if you don’t think you have time for nature breaks, here’s what Lao Tzu had to say about that: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”