Habits

Most of us have been on social media for well over a decade (or even longer). It also seems that more and more of us are considering quitting social media—myself included, especially in recent years. I was a freshman when I signed up for Facebook on the first day it was available to my university. That puts my Facebook account age right around seventeen years old; if said social media account were a child, he would be getting ready to head off to college himself.

What started as a fun way to connect with your college classmates became an all-encompassing web of data collection and psychological manipulation. There are many reasons why life can be better with limited to no social media use, but that’s not the point of this article.

To Quit Or Not To Quit?

This article isn’t here to convince you why you should consider quitting social media. Perhaps you’ve already read Deep Work or Digital Minimalism, watched The Social Dilemma, or are simply feeling that a more fulfilling life awaits you outside the reach of social media’s grasp.

This is about several things I’d recommend doing before you decide to quit social media—that I’d recommend doing even if you don’t end up deleting social media.

I personally decided to take a break from all of my social media accounts this year, to focus on creating longer-form content here on the blog, in the newsletter, and on YouTube. I’ll reassess every three months to reflect on the results. Sign up for the newsletter if you’re interested in those observations.

Especially when so much of your life has involved events, connections, and updates that come directly from Facebook or other networks, the prospect of quitting everything can be intimidating. And by quitting social media, I mean hitting the big “delete” button and walking away indefinitely. Poof.

It’s perfectly fine if you’re not ready to do that. There are still things you can do to start unwinding the grip that social media has on your life.

4 Things to Consider Before Quitting Social Media

1 / Use Signal instead of WhatsApp

Facebook recently released new privacy terms that all WhatsApp users must agree to by February 8th, 2021 (and have since postponed it until May 15, 2021). The update, which WhatsApp clarified only impacts businesses who use WhatsApp for customer service, caused an uproar in early January. While the recent update doesn’t impact regular WhatsApp users, there’s still Facebook’s disingenuous track record on privacy for the end-user. Unless you opted out of data sharing with Facebook back in 2016, the data sharing has already been happening since then. Even with “end-to-end encryption,” it’s likely that some WhatsApp data have been shared with Facebook for ad targeting and other purposes starting several years ago.

…data set to be shared with WhatsApp’s parent company includes “battery level, signal strength, app version, browser information, mobile network, connection information (including phone number, mobile operator or ISP), language and time zone, IP address, device operations information, and identifiers (including identifiers unique to Facebook Company Products associated with the same device or account).”

Forbes.com

Your response might be, “Who cares if Facebook knows what my battery level is?” Well, Facebook is using all of that information to bolster the existing database of information they have about you. The more they know, the better they can predict and influence your future behavior.

I highly recommend switching over to Signal for your personal messaging needs. The functionally is the same as WhatsApp and available on all major platforms. Signal is free and owned by a non-profit organization (which you can donate to support if you choose). Most importantly, Signal is privacy-focused and open-sourced. That means anyone that is interested can investigate the software code to see if anything sketchy is going on (there isn’t).

I’ve already started reaching out to friends on WhatsApp and moving our conversations over to Signal. If you’d like additional help in transitioning, check out what my friend Amrit wrote in this guide!

2 / Update Sites Where You Use Facebook To Log In

This feature—called “Single Sign On”—allows you the ease of using your Facebook account details to log in to other participating websites. Early on, it seemed like a fantastic way to conveniently sign up for new services and websites. Fewer usernames and passwords to remember! But there’s a major problem with this. If you ever lose access to your Facebook account, you’re going to lose access to all of those sites, too.

Facebook can ban any account, at any time, for any reason. I’m not saying it’s likely to happen to you, but it’d be really inconvenient if it did. Even if you never get banned, you might eventually choose to delete your Facebook account on your own.

Start the process of switching over any sites that you use Facebook, Instagram, or whatever other social media platform account details as a login, to using your email address. You’ll need to go to each site individually and change your account login details to your email and new password.

If you can’t remember which sites you’ve used a Facebook login for, go to your “Settings”, and then select “Apps and Websites” to see a list of sites are authorized through your Facebook account.

I recommend using a secure password manager like LastPass. I’ve been using LastPass for more than five years at this point and highly recommend it. This will help you generate secure passwords for all new accounts and store them under one secure master password.

3 / Start Compiling A Contact List

For many of us, there are many people who you are only connected to through various social media platforms. You’re not going to have an immediate way to contact that person if you delete your account on the platform.

Start compiling names, email addresses, and phone numbers so you don’t lose touch with certain people you want to remain connected with. It doesn’t matter if you build a spreadsheet in Excel or on Google Sheets (yeah, I know… we’ll tackle Google another day, maybe). You’ll likely find you really don’t need to keep in contact with the majority of these connections on the platforms.

There are some very helpful tools like the Fabriq app (thanks to Amy W. in the Collective for recommending this!). To get full features, Fabriq is a paid service, but I’d recommend paying for it if you use it. It helps remind you to stay in touch with people you care about and fills in the gaps left by the lack of updates in your timeline/newsfeed if you decide to quit social media. I know you might be resistant to paying for services like this but remember—if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. There’s no other way.

4 / Deactivate Before Quitting Social Media For Good

It’s as simple as that. Try deactivating your account for a month or so and see how it goes. You’ll inevitably run into any issues you may have if you were to delete your account entirely. That way, you can go back in, adjust, or fix any issues before deleting your account entirely.

Expect the first two to five days to be more frustrating or uncomfortable, just like any other kind of detox. But doing so will help give you a sense of the freedom you’ll likely find by quitting social media altogether.

There is a greater intersection between the things we do and social media and tech companies than we realize. There is tracking happening of our every move across the web—from our search queries to even what our grocery shopping habits are. While there are conveniences and features these companies provide, it’s up to us to determine if those benefits outweigh the cons: the massive data pile they’re collecting on us that will eventually allow them to predict nearly anything we do, think, or need.

The appropriate balance will likely differ for each person. But for now, taking a few steps to give yourself a little space from their data collection matrix is probably a good idea.

Welp, here we are again. Another pass around the sun, another year here on planet Earth—and what a year it was. While I’m not here to dwell on the past, I can’t help but think how absurd the idea of planning out an entire year is, given what happened in 2020 (and what happened in just the first week of 2021).

There is a wide spectrum of how 2020 affected everyone across the world. Wherever you personally fall on the spectrum, I sincerely hope 2021 is a better year for you and the people you care about. As I thought about the new year, I decided to take a slightly different approach this time around with some mindset goals.

While it can be hard to see while you’re going through it, it really is the uncomfortable things that lead to the most growth in our lives. Especially if we face those discomforts along the way. This work is incredibly taxing, which is why it’s often easier to distract ourselves (The Twitch gets super intense during these times) so we don’t have to deal with the discomfort. Sometimes, we just need a distraction to get through it though, and that’s okay.

Facing My Own Discomfort

One of the bigger things I did last year on the topic of uncomfortable growth is I finally started sharing that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Not the hyperactive variety, but Type-2, which is what used to be called just “ADD.”

I was diagnosed formally when I was eleven years old, when I literally failed all of my classes in 6th grade and my life dove into a tailspin. When I received the diagnosis, I thought something was horribly wrong with me. I thought I was broken, that my brain was bad, and that I wouldn’t be able to operate in the same way my friends did at school and elsewhere. And so, I effectively left that part out. It’s really the only way that I’ve lied to almost everyone in my life, including you. I simply omitted it.

The years passed, and now at 35, here we are. I wish I’d been ready earlier, as I’m sure it would have been helpful to many—but better now than never.

It was long overdue, but after a lot of personal work through 2020 (aka therapy) I decided it was important to start sharing this. It’s a big piece of what makes me, well, me—both good and bad. Omitting that (along with the clearly very personal reason of why the topic of “attention” is so incredibly important to me) would do us all a disservice. The encouragement from some good friends also helped immeasurably.

2020 brought a level of self-awareness that I never imagined, and did not expect. The pandemic and seemingly constant disasters forced me to turn inward and better understand the connection between what was going on in my mind and what unconscious actions I was taking (hello, Twitch). This internal work is central to what Break the Twitch is all about, so I’m grateful to be in a position to share more of that here.

After all this time of exploring minimalism, habits, and creative flow here on Break the Twitch, it’s wild to me how it was really about attention all along. While the three topics are effective tools for the process of owning your attention, I didn’t fully realize the underlying connection until now.

Our Collective Attention Is At Stake

In a lot of ways, I’m uniquely qualified for the work I’m doing here at Break the Twitch. With my neuro-atypicality, I’m not actually all that out of place in the world at this point. Everything’s getting faster, more distracting, and more demanding of our attention. Our collective attention is more scattered than ever, and is being threatened in the environment we’re in now (thanks to Bridget, one of our awesome Attention Collective members, for bringing the linked article to our attention!).

Economist and psychologist Herbert A. Simon, spoke to how “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The real kicker is that he was talking about this, and the attention economy in 1971—nearly fifty years ago. Imagine how much has changed for better and worse since then. We’ve never had access to more information than we do now. Maybe we weren’t built to know everything in the world all at once.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Just kidding. What a year it was, huh. Now that we have that context out of the way, here are the three mindset goals I’m focusing on for the new year.

3 Mindset Goals For The New Year

1 / One Thing At A Time Reduces Stress and Anxiety

This was a big realization after I heard Naval talk about how stress happens when something wants to be in two places at one time. 

I thought it was a great analogy of what happens when our attention is split between multiple things and how that resulting stress can increase our feelings of anxiety. When we’re thinking about something else while working on a task, it only contributes to the painful feeling that we have too much to do. That we must do more than one thing at a time because there’s so much to do. This is an example of our brain and our body wanting to be in different places at one time. And multi-tasking, as we know, isn’t really effective.

So, first of the mindset goals for the new year is: one thing at a time—no matter what. 

2 / When You Accept First, Change Comes Later

This next one was partly inspired by Kyle Cease, who I’ve been following on and off for a while, on something he shared on acceptance. 

It struck me that to get where we want to go, we must accept where we are now. It’s embracing self-compassion for who we are and where we are in this moment. Learning to accept where you are doesn’t mean that you love where you are. It also doesn’t mean that you want to be where you are forever. It’s more about accepting where you are now and knowing you can grow from there.

When we accept where we are now, there’s an energy shift that’s more abundant and open. It enables you to see opportunities and have more energy to change things up. When we feel like we’re not okay, it contributes to the feeling that we’re not enough. Instead, we feel the need to be somewhere else rather than where we actually are. Operating from that place of lack and the feeling of “I’m not enough as I am” creates fear, anxiety, and low energy. It ironically also makes it harder to get the change we’re wanting.

So wildly butter on that self-compassion in moments of difficulty. Don’t tell me that self-compassion is for other people who actually deserve it (I’ve been there). Everyone needs and deserves self-compassion, yourself included. From my experience, embracing self-compassion in tough moments doesn’t let you off the hook, but rather, gets you back up and running again faster.

3 / Planning For A World We Do Not Yet Know

The final inspiration for my mindset goals came up when I was doing some morning journaling recently. If 2020 has taught us anything, we are making plans and creating for a world that we don’t yet know.

A lot of people have strong opinions about Elon Musk, who just became the richest man in the world. Ten years ago when he said he was going to Mars, many people thought he was crazy. The world as it existed back then didn’t have the capability to do that. He was starting on a goal that was not yet possible and wasn’t thought to be possible. As of today, he’s still working towards that goal, but the collective thinking around the possibility has shifted.

This illustrates that you can create and work towards goals beyond what your brain is telling you is possible. Because the goal isn’t for today as things stand now; the goal is for a year from now or sometime in the future. The best way to get to a big goal is to have very small, consistent actions that get to the goal over time.

So when it comes to setting goals, allow yourself to dream in a way that doesn’t reflect the limitations that may be currently in your brain. Be flexible in your planning—especially in the path of how and the timing of when the goal is realized. As we learned with the events of 2020, even the best-laid plans can be disrupted. All we can do is focus on what we can do today with what we have and continually adjust in the process of working on our goals.

I hope you find that these three mindset goals help you make 2021 a more peaceful year for you and your family.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been super into personal development, habits, and other intentional living topics. Even when I was 12 or 13 years old, you could find me in the self-help section of the Borders bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan (may it rest in peace).

This is to say that I’ve spent decades thinking about this beyond the six years that I’ve spent making content and exploring this stuff here at Break the Twitch. And throughout this time, I’ve found that there are only two effective ways to change your life—at least, change your life sustainably.

So what are they?

Slow and Steady

Well, one of the ways to change your life is slowly and steadily. If you’ve been with me here at Break the Twitch for even a small amount of time, you’ve most certainly heard me talk about the power of small consistent changes. I mention this quote from Annie Dillard a lot: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

It’s the little things we do each day that become who we are. We’re no longer just a person who runs. We are a runner. Not a person who lifts, but a weight lifter. We become the things that we do.

This slow and steady option is incredibly effective. Because any time we make a change in our lives, we are breaking out of the status quo. We’re breaking out of our comfort zones, what we’re used to, and often, we can only do that at little bits at a time.

Imagine if I told you to learn to speak Spanish in a day, that would be an overwhelming task. In fact, you might not even know where to get started, but if I asked you to learn just how to say hello in Spanish, could you do that?

Yes, you absolutely could do that.

Hola. It’s just one word, but it’s learning a new word consistently that creates a vocabulary in Spanish. And eventually, you’re not just a person who is learning a few words of Spanish; you are a language learner and then eventually, a Spanish speaker.

Burning the Bridge

But there is a second option to create sustainable change in your life, whether it’s learning Spanish or something else.

And that is burning the bridge. Here’s how that works.

Burning the bridge would be changing something drastically in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to go back to what you were doing before. Because if you make a big change that is really uncomfortable, it can be really hard to sustain it unless you have some friction between you and your comfort zone.

The example I gave earlier, learning Spanish in a short period of time, is a completely overwhelming proposition. But what if you were on a plane to a Spanish-speaking country, where you didn’t know anyone at all?

And you stayed there for three months. What do you think would happen? I’d be willing to bet that in that environment you would learn Spanish a heck of a lot faster because it would literally come down to your survival. Asking for food, asking for things that you need, communicating and making friends.

All of your existence during that time would be in a Spanish-speaking country and so you’d need to speak Spanish more than you would back at home. Without having a quick way to escape the discomfort and go back to where your native language is spoken—that’s an example of burning the bridge.

An example of burning the bridge for me and Amy was selling our house in Minnesota and making our way down to Phoenix about a year and a half ago. We needed a change and while part of us didn’t want to move, we knew that taking that big step would push us out of our comfort zones.

There are many ways you can burn bridges in your life to support a change for the better. While the term may have some negative connotations, when it comes to changing something difficult, I think it can be a really positive thing. You can help yourself stick with a big change by burning the bridge behind you. That way, you won’t be able to easily revert back to what’s comfortable when you feel the discomfort or resistance to that big change you’re creating.

What you’ll find in these situations is that as humans, we’re incredibly adaptable. We will do our best to make it work. The circumstances in 2020 are a perfect example of that. So if you’re going big and fast, burn the bridge to help you keep the change going.

Choosing One of the Ways to Change

It’s important to be intentional in the approach we take in changing our lives. When you change something in your life, which one of the ways to change do you choose?

You can either take the slow, steady, methodical route. Or you can go big and fast and burn the bridge behind you. But you have to choose one. There is no middle path here if you want the change to be sustainable.

Those week-long detox diets you see on the cover of magazines at the grocery store checkout aisle don’t do much. Any benefit you see from these quick solutions will disappear once you stop doing the work. Lasting benefits will be from the long-term actions you take—from the consistent work that’s not very sexy. So if the change you want is big and fast, then you better do some bridge-burning behind you to make it stick.

In my experience, these two ways to change are what end up creating the most sustainable lasting impact. What’s been your experience? I’d love to hear about it and what you’ve learned. As always, I appreciate your attention, and I’ll see you next time.