I quit using social media, mainly Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but I was still doing things like watching the occasional YouTube video and using email.

This is a topic that often gets people quite worked up.

You have people that demonize social media and applaud anyone who quits.

Then you have other people who say that social media is amazing and quitting a stupid or that you should just use it last.

This video isn't about trying to convince you that social Media is the devil or that everyone should quit.

This video is just a reflection on my own life about why I quit what I learned and how use social media now.

So I'll start with why I quit.

The main reason I quit was that I was compulsively checking social media.

I was wasting lots of time on it.

When I got up in the morning, the first thing I would do is roll over and check out my social media accounts.

Any time I was bored in an awkward situation, I'll pull out my phone and start scrolling through.

Social media began to feel like a crutch.

Instead of doing activities that I deeply enjoyed and created Valley for me, I took the easier but less fruitful action of scrolling through social media.

I felt like it wasn't accomplishing very much in my life.

And I know what some of you are thinking.

Why don't you just control yourself whenever someone quit social media There's always this outcry from people who just say, Why don't you just control how you use it?

I can see where you're coming from, but I think we also have to understand that social media was designed to be addictive.

The creators of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter want you to stay on their APS as long as possible the poor millions of dollars into researching what humans find addictive and how they can better craft their APS to get you to stay on them and use them as long as possible.

I recently read a book by Nicholas Carr titled The Shallows.

The book is essentially about how the Internet is affecting our ability to focus, think and learn deeply.

It takes a very scientific approach and is well researched.

In that book, Car explains how our brains are quite plastic Previously, it was thought that brains are not very plastic and that once we had a certain age, our brains are fully developed and we were who we were.

We couldn't change our brains.

I think this is best summarized by the quote.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but studies in Europe plasticity show that this isn't true.

The brain is more malleable than we thought.

Our circuits can be rewired, and we can be changed every time we receive a like or a follow.

Our phone notifies us and we got little hits of dopamine.

Every time we unlock our phone and open up Instagram, we're stimulating many of our senses.

We hear and see the notifications.

We can feel the phone in our hands every time we touch a tab were awarded with new information about what our peers are doing.

Every time you refresh the page, there's new information which rewards are brain with even more dopamine.

Our brain loves to learn and learns to love the attention we received when we use social media.

Because of that, we want to keep using it as we continue to repeat the cycle, we strengthen this connection, and this addiction in our brains on top of that car makes a really critical point in his book, Not just social media.

The Internet as a whole rewards us for shallow thinking.

Here is a quote from his book.

When We Go Online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning.

Block posts are littered with Urals toe other block posts.

YouTube is constantly showing you 100 other videos you could be watching in the sidebar and annotations, and at the end of the video, you can read the comments while you're watching the video.

In case you didn't feel stimulated enough, a simple scroll on Instagram will show you a new photo that you haven't seen before.

The Internet encourages us to rush from place to place and from link to link in the end.

All I'm saying is that while there are ways to control our social media usage, we should also remember that it was designed to be addictive.

And, as Nicholas Carr put it, it was designed to reward shallow and hurried thinking.

Now I'll go over what I learned.

The first thing is that I could learn more deeply and create more.

During this time, I began to read a lot of books, produced music and write articles.

I wanted to learn more deeply and to create more.

And quitting social media provided me with a distraction free environment to do these things.

I became more productive because I didn't have notifications popping up and distracting me all the time.

As I created more in my own room, I began to find out more about myself.

I felt less influenced by what everyone else might think of me.

The second thing I learned is that I won't miss out.

Everyone has this fear of missing out.

When they leave social media, they think they'll be out of the loop.

The truth is, the only thing you'll be out of the loop on is Mihm's gossip and pop culture news, things that are completely useless for your life.

Some of you may be thinking, but what about those times when a disaster happened halfway across the world and because of social media, we were all able to find out about it.

That's the amazing thing about social media.

We can get information like that out to the world in a matter of seconds.

However, our people actually taking action once the hair about these disasters, are they just hearing about them and talking about them also?

What if we created an app where everyone could link their credit cards to, and any time a disaster happened, people could read about it and then decide whether they wanted to donate money to help.

Is social media really necessary for communicating these disasters?

Because, unfortunately, for every good post that we see on social media, there are 100 dumb or meaningless ones.

Anyways, this is all just food for thought.

Thirdly, I learned that social media gives rise to lots of fake relationships.

I felt that I shed lots of superficial relationships when I quit.

It's weird because their social media we feel like we're still connected to people that we used to know.

We like each other's photos or see each others photos and think that we still know each other.

The truth is, so many years have passed.

In that time.

We're different people.

We don't see all the experiences that happened behind the scenes.

We don't actually really know each other anymore.

Lastly, I found that I was also happier.

I was no longer surrounded by these perfectly curated Instagram photos.

I wasn't seeing the highlights of everyone's life and comparing it to my behind the scenes.

I was just concerned with what was going on in the moment and with my own life.

As you can guess, I'm back on social media now.

Behind Manage.

My social media is different.

My goal now is to use social media deliberately and on my own terms.

I try not to be sucked into the highlight reels and all the negative aspects.

I do this by turning off all notifications, so I'm not constantly being distracted.

I check social media when I feel like it, and I only browse and post deliberately.

I deleted social media off all mobile devices so I can't check it while amount with people.

I pretty much only use Instagram and YouTube on Instagram.

I don't follow anyone who post things that might make me feel a type of way.

I just try to follow people who add value to my life or offer me some happiness.

When I turned into the APP on YouTube, I try to only log in twice a day to respond to comments.

I try not to look at the views, the likes and the dislikes, so I don't get attached to those metrics that create content that I want and I believe will help people.

I post it and the rest is out of my hands.

So I move on and I live my life.

This video was just meant to offer you one perspective on what quitting social media is like, and hopefully to cause you to reflect on your own use of social media.

What are your thoughts on social media?

Would you ever quit?

Lastly, don't forget to, like comment and subscribe.

Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.