Daily writing prompt

What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?

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I feel like there are so many improvements to be made, it’s hard to pick just one. Besides the obvious ones like exercise regularly and drink more water, probably what I would focus on is less scrolling.

I don’t think there’s one benefit to losing oneself down a rabbit hole on Facebook or Instagram or whatever social media app you mostly use. In fact you hear time and time again, how detrimental it can be to your mood, your psyche and your life in general.

I justify it by saying well I hardly watch tv anymore, this just replaces sitting and staring at the tv. But is it the same? Not really. Television is a great distraction but it typically doesn’t lead to as much comparison, in my opinion. Comparison is the ultimate poisonous result of scrolling on social media. And I know that. I tell myself I’m not going to go there, but it’s really hard not to. I know better, I know that you can’t compare your Sunday afternoon spent cooking and cleaning to a friend from high school’s Sunday afternoon exploring the beaches in Belize. It’s ridiculous. But so very addicting.

Being nosey is part of it and being on social media does provide “news” in some fashion. I want to know what’s going on in the world and in my community. Then again I could just read an actual news app, so I guess that’s kind of a lame excuse. FOMO (fear of missing out) is part of it too. God forbid someone else finds out something about some actually really irrelevant person or place and I’m sitting here clueless. Would that really be so bad?

I need to take a step back from it. Either set aside a time in the day when I plan to just spend scrolling or if I’m picking up my phone, say on a coffee break while at work, I set a timer and spend, say, two minutes on it and then put it back down. I’ve done the latter before and it really did work for me.

As I’ve said before, if it weren’t for my non-profit and the ease of advertising that comes with social media apps, I would delete them completely. I did it before and it was absolutely freeing. But I do appreciate the free advertising and fundraising I’m able to do for my charity, thanks to social media. So unfortunately I can’t completely quit it.