Hello everyone, how have you been?

As you probably noticed, I’ve basically disappeared for a couple weeks; I’ve taken a little break from my blog and social media in general for a while, to focus only on myself and improve my life.

I really needed it.

But why did I make this choice to shut down from technology for a while?

As we all know, we live in a society obsessed with smartphones and social media: we keep checking out notifications and updates all day long, wasting a lot of time that we could use for something better.

I’ve seen random youtubers who were enthusiastic about their sudden lives’ improvements, just by deleting social media apps for a while and focusing on other things they’ve always wanted to do, but “didn’t have enough time for”.

Well, not surprising, but if you ignore completely Twitter, Facebook and whatever social media you use the most, you basically end up having free time to do everything you want.

Learning a language, reading a book, writing, drawing…. trust me, if you don’t keep scrolling your TL all day long, you can focus a lot more on everything else.

Youtube is not a social media, but it’s addicting too, so I suggest you to delete it for a while.

Great, isn’t it? But it’s easier said than done.

Don’t pretend you aren’t addicted, we all are. We can’t just stop when we want.

So I decided to challenge myself with a “15 days without social media detox”, and while I’m at it, I thought I could keep track of this experience and share it.

I hope it encourages someone to try it!

Day 1 was obviously the hardest.

When I woke up in the morning, checking out twitter notifications used to be the first thing I did, even before taking a shower or having breakfast.

But from that day, I only looked if I had important messages on Whatsapp, then I tossed my phone away in another room.

To avoid feeling lonely, I turned on my mp3 player and listened to music or random Finnish sentences to learn while I was doing house chores and my usual morning stuff.

It was almost scary to see how my hand automatically tried to reach my phone, from time to time, to check out notifications or open a random app. I literally had to stop myself and avoid being in the same room with my phone while I was reading or doing everything else.

My productivity on that day increased a lot and without distractions I was able to fully concentrate on my tasks and get them done faster and better.

At night, I always used to sleep kinda late: I went to bed around midnight and stayed awake for about an hour watching random youtube videos.

Since I couldn’t do that anymore, I went to sleep as soon as I felt tired. It was 11 pm.

On the 2nd day, I obviously woke up early without any effort.

But my impulse of checking out twitter still was there. I realized I needed to physically touch my phone from time to time, with random excuses, like checking out the time at least.

So I went back to my dear watch, which I haven’t used since college days.

From that moment, I gradually started to detox from social media and it became easier each day.

The biggest problem came when I was out waiting for someone and I couldn’t scroll twitter or random apps to kill some time while waiting; but it was easily solved, I just listened to music as I used to do when I was a teen and twitter didn’t even exist. Yeah, I’m that old.

After a few more days, when I felt satisfied enough to give myself a short break, I’ve decided to jump back on twitter for a little while, just to read if I was missing out something great or if I had urgent messages to answer; after I replied, I backed out immediately and decided to make my social media break longer. I wasn’t missing anything important at all, but my productivity increased a lot in the past days, so I knew the best way for me.

This led to a total of 15 days without social media of any kind, and I can say proudly it was a great choice to make.

I can’t go as far as saying “it changed my life”, but it improved it a lot, that’s sure: my free time increased, my eyes don’t hurt anymore (spending hours in front of a screen will damage your eyesight, be careful!), I read a lot of books and overall I just feel better.

So, here I am to encourage you to try it, at least for a few days, and see if you feel better and your productivity increases too! I swear it works, it may be hard, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

I’m not here to say I won’t use social media anymore, but after this break I’ve realized how addicted I was and how it damaged my life; but now I’ve changed, I can control myself and draw a line.

I’ll still go back on twitter from time to time and I’ll still update this blog, of course; but you may not see me around so often anymore. Don’t be sad, I’m not disappearing!

I’m still playing games, so reviews and updates will come soon.

See you in my Starry Sky After Summer review!