Stillness is the answer – and Facebook is never still!

When I was an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, we picked up our post from ‘pigeon holes’ at the Porters’ Lodge. To find out if I had post or messages, I had to walk a fair bit of the second longest continuous corridor in Europe and check my pigeon hole. If I was feeling a bit lonely while revising, I might do this several times a day. There were no mobile phones, just a few payphones which would have long queues outside them as soon as the cheap rate started, so checking pigeon holes was the only way to get news or find out what was happening.

How things have changed. My house has a letterbox through which post is still delivered, much to my dog’s consternation, once a day at most, but if I want to know if anything has happened, or if anyone wants me, I can check my email, glance at 24 hour news or flick through Facebook or Twitter on my mobile phone. And if someone really wants me, they can text or ring me wherever I am – almost.

Life has become a lot busier, full of information, new stuff happening every few seconds, and the more we get used to this, the more we feel we have to keep on top of it.

Every now and then, the subject of a ‘digital detox’ is aired. People feeling they are too tied to their devices and to social media and that they need to pay more attention to real life, at a real pace, in a real environment. Until recently, I thought that this wasn’t for me because I need social media and email for my business. Until I realised what it is about this information overload that is so stressful.

The commonly cited reasons are listed in this helpful blog post by Scott Ayres from Post Planner. I have one to add, however:

It is just too busy; there is simply too much of it.

In 30 short years, we have gone from walking for 10 minutes (told you it was a long corridor!) to look in a wooden cubby hole for scraps of paper to swiping our finger over a screen to see what friends, relatives, and people we can’t remember ever adding as friends are doing all over the world. Scrolling down a news feed in either Facebook or Twitter (and I am sure on other platforms as well but those are the ones I use) allows us to see scores of snippets of information in a few seconds. We might notice that one of our friends has been out for lunch, that another is on holiday, that a page we have ‘liked’ is advertising something, and that someone we can’t remember meeting is holding an event somewhere. There are photographs, sometimes posted and viewed a matter of seconds after being taken (remember albums?), quotes, memes, pleas for help and rants. So much stuff.

Yes, it can be addictive, and yes, there are the pitfalls of comparing ourselves to others and feeling hard done by or inadequate. But my concern is the busyness. In Mind Calm, we say often that ‘we feel what we focus on,’ and if we are focusing on all this stuff, fairly frequently during the day, we are going to feel busy-minded, our attention scattered, possibly even anxious as a result of scanning and, fleetingly, taking in so many scraps of information. I used to empty my pigeon hole and find, perhaps, a letter from home, a note from a friend and a flyer inviting me to something. I would walk back along the long corridor, perhaps reading my post on the way, and return to my books. That was my dose of information for now, perhaps for the whole day, and it was a welcome diversion. But too much information is not a welcome diversion; however interesting, however nice it is to keep up with friends and family; it’s overload. We feel what we focus on, and we are overwhelmed.

Although I live a calm and mindful life these days, I am still interested to see whether cutting down on social media busyness will make a difference. It is easy to get used to something when it increases gradually, and this is exactly what has happened with digital information. I may be working more than I need to relax and stay calm in the face of all this stuff.

So, what to do about it? In his post, Ayres suggests, if you need social media for business, checking it at the top of the hour, just to respond to anything important. I think this is a sensible compromise, and am working on finding my own, reduced, Facebook-checking-routine. I am also asking myself whether I am scrolling just for the sake of it, and quite often simply checking my notifications and ignoring the feed altogether. I don’t want to lose touch with my friends, but I don’t want to lose touch with my inner stillness, either.

What do you think? Is it worth limiting your social media use for a few days to see if you feel calmer? Let me know how you get on if you do!