There is a detox plan for just about everything. Did you know social media is one you should regularly detox? I’m not just talking about taking a break from screens, which you should do. I’m talking about really digging into the feelings you get when you are online interacting with others.

Envy?

Anger?

Sadness?

Joy?

Whether you have a personal account, a business account, or both I’m going to help you detox your account so you can feel better about the time you spend on social.

If you are like me, you spend time on social media because you have a business. It’s how marketing is currently done!  So how can you detox your social media and still be online promoting and making those sales?  I’ll show you what I do. Scroll to the bottom for the detox worksheet if you don’t want to hear the backstory behind it. Keep reading if you’d like the backstory.

The Backstory

But before I jump in, I want to give you a little back story. Over a decade ago I had a Facebook account that I used as my main form of socializing and finding local mom groups. Having five children made it difficult for me to establish any type of adult interactions. Sure, I chatted with moms at park playdates but there wasn’t a whole lot of chatting. Partial sentences were exchanged as we were constantly interrupted by diaper changes, trips to the potty with littles, pushing babies on swings, opening snacks and stopping children from throwing mulch at each other.

Playdates were mainly used to break up the monotony of the day and hopefully help wear my children out enough to nap, so I could catch up on laundry and dishes. Facebook became my late evening time after the children were asleep. Or when I was laying in bed next to them hoping they would fall asleep soon.

This late-night mom connection was my saving grace, it made me feel human again and not just a mom even though I was mostly talking about kids. But something changed. I started noticing negative emotions arising as I opened the Facebook app. I was bombarded with pictures of perfect husbands, perfect children, perfect houses, and perfect vacations. And as I sat there unshowered, matted hair, and a sink full of dishes I started to feel like I wasn’t enough. Every time I opened the app I felt sad and unworthy.

The next day at a park playdate I had an interaction with a mom I knew well and followed on Facebook. She cried and complained about how hard motherhood was and stated, “I hate this life and want to go back to work fulltime.”  She went on to say that her children won’t listen to her, and she feels like a failure.

During this time with her at the park I saw her yell at her children, and her children yell back at her. She is not a bad mom she was just having a bad day and was feeling overwhelmed. We’ve all been there right? Motherhood is HARD.

Later that evening while my two small boys sat in a bubbly lavender scented tub with a thick layer of dirt settling to the bottom, I opened the Facebook app.

The first image appearing on my screen was my friend from the park who had the breakdown today.

Photo 1 description: Three children at the table dressed impeccably, cups of glass jars with paint brushes soaking, brand new watercolor paints, a white lace table runner with a candle stick on top and three brightly smiling children in a neat and clean showroom ready dining room.

Photo 2 description: Empty wooden picnic table atop bright green grass, with a perfect blue sky.

Photo 3 description:  A put together middle aged woman wearing a pale blue apron adorned with dainty yellow embroidered flowers across her chest holding a loaf of bread in front of vase of flowers at her kitchen window.

Caption: We enjoyed this beautiful day at the park with friends enjoying a lovely picnic followed by an art lesson. While the kids played peacefully with Legos I baked a loaf of sourdough bread and prepared a salad for dinner. #blessed #homemaker #lovethislife

LIAR, LIAR, Pants on Fire

I almost dropped my phone in the tub seeing this. What a LIAR!

I quickly typed a response to her post “It was a beautiful day today wasn’t it?”

She responded “Yes, it was a wonderful day.”

She arrived and left the park when I did, and there was NO perfect picnic lunch. She had a few snacks in her diaper bag for her children, but they refused to eat what she had brought and whined that they were hungry.

I gazed at my phone dumbfounded. This was not anything like the interaction I had with her just a few hours earlier.

I laid in bed that night carefully analyzing what had just happened, I came up with two theories.

1. Her day got better, and she did an art lesson when she got home, changed her clothes, put on makeup, and made salad. That didn’t explain the lie about the picnic though.
2. She is a complete liar, and put out false images and caption depicting a perfect day that didn’t happen.

How many of us have put out an image or a caption that made our lives look better than it really is?

If you answered NEVER, good for you but you are probably 3% of the users on social.

Here I was feeling like an inadequate mother because my children are not impeccably dressed at a table that isn’t marked up with crayons. 

The Lightbulb Moment

I knew at that moment I had to leave social media behind and write a book showing the imperfect side of motherhood, The failures, mistakes and all the flaws. The raw uncut version showing all the ways I screwed up but kept going.

We are all flawed and imperfect, and I believe what we all need is to see how everyone else is just as flawed as we are. This is especially true in the age of social media which can bombard us with picture-perfect images. But they are just perfect-looking pictures not picture perfect lives. There is a story behind every beautiful photo, and that story is not always as perfect as the picture.

The Birth Of A New Kind Of Motherhood Book

^{Copies of this book are currently only available through my website. The small publishing company I used has decided to change direction with their business. So it was pulled from amazon.}

Not a Picture Perfect Parent: Unfiltered Motherhood from Birth Through Adulthood was born on December 12. 2020 and was the first book of its kind. A book that talks about the unwritten side of motherhood. The side that’s never shared on social media. The uncut, raw parts of motherhood when you are in the thick of it.

For two years I went to writing conferences, pitched to agents and was told the same thing. They LOVED my idea but nonfiction only sells 10% of the market and if you are in that 10% you need to be famous or have a social media following over 500K to even be considered. I finally gave in and self published through a small self publishing company. But guess what? In order to sell my book, I had to get back on social media to market it. Oh the repeated irony!

So I came up with a social media detox worksheet to protect my mental health and work a business.

Social Media Detox Worksheet

 DISCLAIMER: When I say social media in the steps below, I’m personally talking about Instagram, it’s the platform that works best for my demographic. I’ve found that I cannot be fully present on ALL platforms, which was hurting my sales, so I chose to focus on one. I have some accounts on Instagram cross post to Facebook where I have set up an auto response to let people know it was cross posted and the best way to reach me is through Instagram or my website. You can use this information as a general guideline for all social media.

• Social media hours (3x a day)

I break my social media time into three chunks throughout my day. Morning, afternoon, and evening. I spend about an hour on each session. During that hour I spend my time creating a reel, post or infographic leaving enough time to post and engage for at least 10 min. before I post, and 10 min. after. I’m not always posting the content I was creating at that time, sometimes those are saved in my drafts to be posted later. I will also answer DM’s and make sure I’m posting 2-3 story slides at each session. Stories on Instagram are where customers are made. This is where they get to know you. More on IG marketing in my unreleased course.

• Turn off notifications.

The one sure fire way to spend more time on social media is to have those notifications turned on and IG knows it. Know that you have set hours and utilize alarms on your phone.

• Have a no social media day.

I use Sundays, never choose a Monday, it’s the highest traffic day on IG. There is one exception to this rule. If you are a new account or are in a growth period (gaining hundreds of followers each day) POST EVERYDAY up to three times a day.

• Separate your friends from your potentials.

This is where you need to establish personal accounts and business accounts. The women who will support you most are the strangers you meet online. Your friends may do the opposite because they see you succeeding when they wish they were. Yeah, I said it!

I do not invite any of my real-life friends to my pages. If they choose to follow me, I usually do not follow back. I follow them on my personal page but not my business page.

• Haters make you famous.

They really do but if it is costing you your mental health, BLOCK them or turn comments off on a post. The more famous you get the more haters you will get as well.

• BLOCK!

You are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and some people will make a job out of making sure you know that they don’t like you. BLOCK them, they are not your target audience.

• Remove followers.

I clean up my accounts often removing bot accounts or those who I just don’t like. This is also a good time to evaluate who is following you. The guy who says you have nice legs, remove him. I’m running a business not an Only fans Page.

• Keep your business your business.

When you are interacting on your business page stay in your NICHE don’t go look up someone from high school. The algorithm is always watching ONLY interact with what’s in YOUR niche on your business page.

• Create a private feel-good page.

I have an account that’s just for me. I try and visit it for a few minutes when I log off each day to boost my mood. I follow only pages that make me laugh and smile ” my feel good page” I rarely interact with.

If any of this sparked an interest, please sign up for my newsletter and you’ll be the first to know when I release my full social media reset course. Everyone on my mailing list will get a discount code for 50% off.

• What you can expect from the course.
• Access my private Instagram page with videos showing exactly how to organize, unfollow, block and restrict people.
• Breakdown of these 9 tips above.
• Social media marketing tools
• Weekly hours where you can pick my brain

I send out about 1 email a month so you don’t have to worry about being spammed. You can also unsubscribe at any time.

And if you are interested in homesteading check out my IG page eclipsedacres where I spend most of my social media time these days .