I quit social media for 24h and all I got was exactly what I was looking for
What hit me Wednesday night wasn’t creative burnout, exactly, but it’s frantic cousin:
Creative restlessness.
Wild, but caged.
Gorging, but unsatisfied.
I have a recurring nightmare where I’m screaming but no sound comes out, and this was the closest I’d come to experiencing it in the waking world.
I.
The majority of social media support you’ll find online is centred around figuring out what you want to say, and then learning how to say it in a way that connects with your audience and aligns with the platform.
Ideally, you find a method that you can stay accountable to, and you reach the nirvana of consistency at last.
But what if we’ve spent so much time clawing our way towards the promise of showing up enough that we aren’t practicing any discernment around how much is too much, when we arrive to it?
Once you master the strategy, skills, and systems, the most dangerous next-step is also the most tempting:
More.
The sensation of being overwhelmed by creative ideas — and god forbid, having all of the tools to actually execute them — is like standing in a boat that’s rapidly filling up with the sea below.
You’re rushing to get the water out, fighting to stay afloat, and while you’re splashing around looking for the leak, you notice something in your hands:
You’re holding a goddamn hose.
That’s how I felt on Wednesday.
I’d just pushed out my third Instagram grid post of the day, a Reel I’d put together for funsies after already getting my two planned posts live.
Plus upwards of 20 Stories.
Plus at least two Threads of my own, not counting replies.
Plus two Substack notes.
Plus a newsletter.
All within a week where I had not only planned daily short-form content on three platforms and multiple launch emails, but also maintained my weekly Substack article cadence, and recorded, then uploaded, a podcast episode.
I was shovelling ideas out as fast I could while the hose just kept pouring more in, my compulsion to share so overwhelming that I found myself gasping for air.
It’s how I’ve been feeling for a while, if I’m honest.
Bailing out. Filling up. Drowning.
II.
I’ve worked in social media for almost 15 years, and I’ve never once prescribed myself a detox from it.
My digital habits are solid, because they have to be.
My livelihood literally hinges on me NOT burning out on “online,” so I’ve built boundaries in my day to day that have kept my screen time decidedly managed.
But while I’ve been working to stay marked safe from over-consumption, the inverse of that addiction has been working it’s way into my bloodstream.
Turns out, input wasn’t the only risk.
The Frankenstein’s monster in the content strategy world is the creator who has both endless ideas and the capacity to bring them to life. I’d gotten so caught up in putting out because I could that I wasn’t really thinking about whether I even wanted to.
I was yelling so loud I couldn’t hear myself.
I didn’t need a digital detox to quiet the noise of other people — I needed to block my social media apps so I could shut the fuck up and listen to ME.
III.
It just so happened that the next day was the Spring equinox, so I decided to call my little experiment “spring cleaning” and set my Opal app to block Threads and Instagram for 24h. I planned to allow myself a few Pinterest sessions (and I’ll admit, I exploited them) but surprised myself by staying off Substack, too. I ended up extending it to 27 hours in total, and even two days “back” as I write this, I feel my habits have been altered permanently.
Although the goal was to STFU in the public sense, I was live-tweeting the whole experience to myself in a note on my phone, thinking it would be either hilarious or harrowing to look back on afterwards. It’s definitely both.
ABSTINENCE: THURSDAY MARCH 20TH, 2025
- Hopped off a call at 10:45 and that’s when the itch started setting in… I could just type it into my browser, couldn’t I?
- Found myself reaching for connection — someone to speak to, checked my texts and was thrilled to see 2 new messages only to realize… they were promo spam
- First thought: tell Threads how it felt to open my phone and not be allowed to scroll it. Second thought: just write that down and save it for later
- Immediately I took to writing, speaking is non-optional
- Looking forward to work just so I can talk to somebody
- I am a person who says something, I don’t know why I tried to convince myself otherwise
- Took a video of my book pages floating in the wind and it pained me not to upload them anywhere
- Opened IG on desktop a couple times and got a jump scare at my messages — proudly x’d out
- Goal was also not to think about content — not to get into over-planning mode / trying to “make it make sense” aka my cryptonite always strategizing everything all the fucking time
- Finished my book so that was good
- Astounded at how much time I have in a day
- Kind of bored to be honest, but that’s always a good thing
- It’s not other people’s ideas clogging up my psyche it’s MINE, I’m making the noise
- Urge to check analytics on old posts when I have a new idea and for what???
- As soon as I have an idea, I look for evidence of it. Let me see how they… Let me see if there’s… NO!
- The way I feel overwhelmed and my immediate instinct is to go on Threads to talk about it instead of just… dealing with it
- Such a crutch for creative discomfort
- Nothing like being an Aries in Aries season, burning alive in a bonfire of my own ideas
I popped a few more notes in after I started scrolling again:
REINTEGRATION: FRIDAY MARCH 21ST, 2025
- Coming back I could immediately feel the lost time (moments slipping away with the scroll)
- Noticed what I was missing, the people and conversations
- So quickly sucked into things I really don’t give a shit about, makes me more curious about where I am contributing to the noise
- Everything we share is an exchange — even the Threads that get no likes, energy out, suspended
- The art of knowing what NOT to say
- The lost art of shutting the fuck up
Needless to say, I’m feeling much better.
In lieu of feeding my freaky ecosystem of output-overload, I had rich conversations within my private communities (and with myself, as evidenced above) instead.
I feel the purpose of why I love posting returning to my body.
I feel the conviction behind my content landing back in my bones, where it belongs.
But the most treasured outcome is realizing why I felt the compulsion to scream into the void in the first place.
IV.
At face value, the system is simple:
We create, we post, we wait, and ideally, we receive something in return.
What we don’t realize is how much of the strategy lies in the waiting — and how much strength it takes to sit in it.
As noted in diary entry number 22, every post is an energy exchange, and the things that don’t get engagement are the heaviest to hold.
The short-form content spaces are making this particularly difficult (Notes, Threads, Stories, TikTok even) because it’s so easy to just keep going if we don’t get a response right away.
It took pausing my output completely to notice this pattern within myself:
Post something.
Wait an hour.
Check how it’s doing.
See no engagement.
Post something else.
It’s a self-soothing of sorts, softening the blow of the perceived rejection by filling the silence with my own voice, instead.
We protect ourselves from that discomfort by creating more — but that’s the moment when the cycle turns counter-intuitive, if not totally toxic.
Leading up to this come-to-Jesus moment, my engagement had been rapidly declining in direct correlation with the frequency of my posts, and STILL, it felt impossible to stop.
More posting led to less engagement.
Less engagement led to more posting.
And the only way to stop the cycle was to shut the fuck up.
𐄂𐄂
