Hey Blog Fam,

Trust we are all doing great and following hard after all that the Lord has placed in our hearts.

Today’s post was first published on the Blog on the 20th December, 2022, and because the lessons in it are so timeless, we are bringing it back for your reading pleasure today. Few notes will be added to it.

Sit back, read, and learn!

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Social media can be both a blessing and a curse depending on how you use it, but irrespective of all that, you are still supposed to have a little control over your life no matter how small.

This era is quite a digitalized one and everything seems to be bubbling, there will always be a trend to join online week-on-week. Still, there are times when you just have to take a step back from the seemingly fast-paced world and see if you are still you and can enjoy your space even if there are no likes or followers looking at you.

Some people are of the opinion that SM is fake as people only post the highlighted portion of their life on it, while this might not be the total truth, it is still true to a great extent.

Some months back, a lady on my timeline was posting how she was trying to make her braids all by herself, she showed us the process and the total number of hours it took her in getting the final result ready.

Then she mentioned something I consider profound, she said and I quote loosely that she could have left us out of the process and only come to show us the finished product and then start creating lovely hashtags for the finished product. Hashtags like #do-it-yourself, #i-made-my-hair-myself, and the likes, making it all look easy without mentioning the stress it took her to be able to achieve the result we now see.

But that is what a whole lot of people do; they'd leave you out of the whole process and make you feel as though nothing is really working in your life.

You'll agree that we all need a break as often as possible from these apps that people only post their highlighted lives on.

Pointers That You Need A Break

1. You Are Becoming Depressed Due To The Perfect Life Of Your Online Friends

Yes.

Social media pressure is so real.

It is on the media that you'll see the kind of car your friend is driving and you wouldn't even care to know if that car is a non-policy car from the company he works for.

Yes, companies give non-policy cars to their members of staff, it is a car just given to be able to take the employee around and should he want to leave the job, or if his appointment gets terminated, he'll have to drop the car.

And even if that friend of yours bought the car with his money, what makes you think that you can't also work to be able to afford that.

If you start seeing yourself beginning to compare the life of the random person you see online or even that of a friend, and then you begin to use that as a yardstick to judge your life with all the beautiful things you have going on, and you keep falling short or the life on SM, now might be a good time to go offline till you are in a much better place mentally so that you won't end up committing suicide or worse, thinking that God is not faithful.

2. Important Things In Your Life Are Beginning To Slack

You no longer pray.

You can't meet deadlines at work.

Assignments are left undone.

The pile of your unread books keeps increasing (you should know I love to read by now😄) 

All because you took a chair to Instagram and TikTok and spent four solid hours there busy scrolling down the different news feeds and creating videos. You can never exhaust your news feed even if you stay there for a week; there will always be something new.

If you discover that there are things you consider important that you no longer have time for because you are on the media for hours without end, now might be a good time to take a break until you are able to come back in control.

How to go on The Break

1.     Uninstall the app

Uninstall it and if you'd want to go to that extreme, you can delete it for the duration of your break.

2.     Fill the time with something worthwhile

Worthwhile things you can do while on break;

~ Build your spiritual life

~Read books

~Take online courses

~Bond more with your offline friends

~Be happy to be by yourself

~Go to places, have fun, take pictures and just let the pictures be on your phone since you don't have to upload them for the world to see.

Remember you only live life once, so be determined to live it to the fullest.

Even if you have a business to run online, you can have two phones, one for personal use, and the other, strictly for your business.

So when you are on break but you still need to run your online business, you pick up your business phone and do business on it.

If you'll still be coming online because of your business, make sure you respect yourself enough to only do business when you're online.

No one will know when you stop attending to customers and quickly log into an app, but you know. So respect yourself enough to take a clean break.

One of the things about social media break is that it'll help you see if indeed your life is full of there are no likes and comments from followers.

It just puts things in the right perspective for you.

December is here (at the moment, June 2022 is the one almost here), a month of reflection, take time and go offline, and do this periodically within the year too. 

If you are very active online, you might post it on your timeline or even decide to go offline without prior notice. Whatever you do, just take the time offline to detox.

I know some adults, people in their 50's and above who spend a healthy portion of their life online, but what I tell myself is; I am in the building phase of my life and these people are in their maturity/declining stage, whilst there isn't much that they can do with their life, but I who isn't even thirty yet have the best of my life ahead of me, which I am not allowed to spend mindlessly scrolling online. This is a mind you should have too if you are a young person who is aiming for success. 

Let me tell you this for free, you will come back from the break feeling refreshed.

Cooperate with God to make your life beautiful not just online but truly beautiful.

There is so much light!