Last week I listened to a great panel discussion on mindfulness and social media, featuring Jennifer Louden, Tara Sophia Mohr, Marianne Elliott, Bridget Pilloud, and Tara Gentile. Lots of great thoughts and ideas were shared on the call, but I took away four key ideas, which I’ve elaborated a bit on below.
Set Your Intention
Jen Louden recommended setting a clear intention before you open up social media, whether that’s Twitter, Facebook, or your blog reader. Knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing helps you stay focused on your own larger goals. Do you want to connect with people you know and care about? To learn what’s going on in the world, or in some community within it? To entertain, educate, or enrage you? To find like-minded people you don’t already know?
Jen’s point reminded me that my best work gets done when I set clear intentions for each activity or block of time. For me, it works best if I write it down. Putting a goal or intention in writing makes it more meaningful for me because there’s a physical action attached to the words.
The challenge, of course, is to remain true to your intention once you’re online.
Ground Yourself in Your Body
Marianne Elliott offered suggestions for specific breathing and attention exercises you can do to ground your physical awareness before and during your time at the computer. Especially when you get caught up in the back-and-forth of ideas, the media distractions, and the pull of other people’s demands, it’s easy to forget about your physical posture. Right now, for instance: can you breathe deeply and easily? How are you sitting? What muscles are you using — where are you relaxed and where are you tense?
A small little thing I do sometimes that I’ve found helpful is to deliberately move my mouse a bit out of reach. This encourages me to consider a bit before quickly clicking forward to the next page, the next site, the next distraction. Even just taking your hands off the mouse and/or keyboard while you’re reading something online can help you become more aware of what you’re doing as a physical being.
It’s All Energy, Even Online
Bridget Pilloud talked about the energy exchange that happens between two people in conversation, suggesting that it happens online too, even though it may be asynchronous. Bringing your awareness back into your physical and emotional body is a good way to check in with yourself, to ask how am I feeling? do I feel energized or drained by this website, interaction, or set of images? If you are emotionally or intuitively sensitive, protecting yourself from over-indulging in media images can be an important element of your self-care.
Yes, It’s Addictive. Deliberately So.
Tara Mohr suggested that some aspects of social media platforms and tools have been deliberately designed like video games to encourage users to keep coming back. Numerical scores (of likes or followers) work the way lifeline scores do in video games, encouraging us to measure our “strength” and to do certain tasks in order to build it up. Such feedback and the introduction of new features encourage us to keep checking in and moving from level to level. That’s why so many people lose track of time while on Facebook or have trouble reducing their Twitter habit, even temporarily.
Keeping this mind can help you deliberately disengage when you need to, recognizing that Facebook will still be there tomorrow, or next week. The world’s not going to end if you miss a news feed. At some level, some of these tools and platforms are designed to make you feel like you have to keep up with every little thing, even when it’s clearly beyond a single individual’s capacity to do so.
This isn’t to say that we don’t each have some responsibility for our actions. But if you suddenly realize that you’ve just spent an hour on Facebook when you just wanted to see a picture of your cousin’s new puppy, don’t beat yourself up too much. Self-blame isn’t helpful. Making a plan for how you’ll manage your Facebook time tomorrow, is.
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