Social Media Detox In 7 Easy Steps

Written By Current Mindset

The relationship you build with social media is draining you of energy. It doesn’t have to be that way. Today, I'll show you how I transformed social media into a tool to learn from daily.

It hasn’t been long ago, when I decided to delete all social media and go dark.

The bombardment of content.

The endless doom-scrolling that left me empty inside.

The comparison with other musician, that are more successful than me.

All of that took a toll on me and I knew that something needed to change. As musicians, we like to follow other musician and look at how their life unfolds online. It’s all too easy to compare oneself with them. They are out there, living their best lives, but you “just” make music in your moms' basement. It’s hard to not feel depressed by that.

Worse, it puts everything into competition. Everyone wants to build their following bigger and better. They want to beat out their competitors. The desire to see our numbers grow blinds us.

The way we use social media platforms got out of hand. And the owners of them are fully aware. They know how to gather our attention to keep us online and engaged in the flood of content. Like a puppet master, they pull our strings to force us to open their apps and consume content endlessly.

Today, I want to show you a way you can use social media in a meaningful way and make it work for you.

Social Media As Education

Social media is one of the most impactful inventions of the modern day. I don’t need to tell you that it’s a great way to connect with people. It changed how people consume media and how content is shared. This effect spread to education as well.

With the introduction of short-form-formats like reels, shorts and TikToks. The consumption of content got kicked into overdrive. Suddenly, these platforms got flooded with new and easy to digest videos. The selection tripled over night. It’s all about grabbing attention and making the video as entertaining as possible. The goal is to keep the viewer engaged.

Education got hit by this change as well. Now, there is a plethora of creators you can watch. They make education easy to understand and entertaining. The days are oven, when you had to slog through text books only to get confused by them. Now you can go online, find a specific video on the topic you are interested in and start your learning.

Furthermore, it gives you the power to learn only about the things that are relevant to you right now. If you want to go to college and study music, you will have to learn information that isn’t even relevant to the music you want to create. All this information is nice to have, but won't bring you ahead. The time you would spend sitting in lecture halls learning about jazz standards is a waste of time if you want to write pop music. Your time is more valuable than that. Instead, learn about the basics of music theory, analyze how pop music works, and start to write songs to gain experience.

The best way you can learn is to use the knowledge you gain. As you write songs, you will hit some roadblocks. Then go online, find a solution or technique you can use, and get back to writing. With every problem, it goes:

Notice. Learn. Use. Solve. Repeat

This is also the best way we can keep the information we gathered.

A New Relationship With Social Media

Now is the time to change your relation with social media and make it work for you instead of against. Here is the framework I used to change these platforms into a tool for music creation.

Go Dark

Right now, you're still in the lair of the beast. Inside the spider's web. First, you need to escape from his claws before you can return, slay the beast and save your princess/prince. In other words, social media made you addicted to it, and you need to go to rehab.

It’s time to GO DARK!

Delete all social media from your phone and other devices. For at least 30 days, stay away from them. Your mind needs time to get comfortable with this. The days it got overstimulated with every swipe belong to the past.

You will encounter withdrawal. Every time you get the urge to use social media, you need to distract yourself. When the thought accrues, switch gears. Write down ideas for new songs, do some writing exercise, or write a verse about a something in your environment. Anything that helps you distract yourself and serves your music. We don’t want to replace a drug with another one.

The point is, not to use excessive amounts of willpower to stay abstinent, but to shape the environment to remove all triggers. Like the alcoholic that gathers every amount of alcohol in his home and pours it down the drain.

Watch out for the boring phases of the day and especial before you go to bed. Your mind will fight you to get into your addictive behaviour again. The best thing is to leave your phone in another room. Make it as hard as possible to get to it. The more friction we create, the better. The mind is lazy and after a certain amount of friction it won’t bother.

What If I Have A Social Media Following?

The momentum you built already shouldn’t be wasted, but this isn’t an excuse to stay addicted. You still need to delete all social media from your phone. All social media apps can be accessed by your compute. You can even upload to them with the help of some free tools online. After you did that, you need to set yourself a schedule when you can access social media. Don’t make it longer than 30 minutes a day. It shouldn’t take you more than that to post some pictures and interact with your community. After your time is over. You log off and go dark again. Alright? Now to the good stuff!

The Purge / Transform Social Media Into A Tool Of Education

After we went dark for at least 30 days, we want to change what we get shown on social media. The algorithms of these platforms are a powerful tool we can use. If we teach them what we want to see, they will recommend use the education we want to find. And it isn’t even that hard:

  1. Unfollow everyone that's not connected to education /skill development

  2. Go through your feed and mark every piece of entertainment as “not interested”

  3. Like every post that you found useful for your music creation

If you do this for an afternoon, your social media feeds will change drastically. After that, you don’t need to look hard for new things to learn, anymore.

Find Mentors

Now that we cleansed our social media feeds, we want to find quality information. The amount of information that’s online is almost endless, but not every thing is created equal. We need to sift through all the dirt to get to the gold nuggets.

It’s important to look for creators that deliver valuable information and insight. Find 2–3 of them per topic that you can relate to. Every one has their own way of communicating. Listen to them and pick the ones that resonate most with you. Here are some creators I enjoy:

songwriting in general

music theory

motivation/creativity

lyric writing

Business/Marketing/Sales

Learn, Don’t Consume

Now you found mentors that bring you insight, it’s important that you actually learn from them. I will dive deeper into this topic in the next newsletter, but for now:

The key is to use the information, not to just consume it.

A good rule is for every technique you learn, you write one song that uses it. There are some pitfalls to watch out, so stay to tuned for next week.

Limit Usage

Education can easily become a source of procrastination. It’s easy to watch your chosen mentor, but hard to do the work yourself. As you watch 5 videos in a row, you will feel good about yourself. You’ll think you learned so much, but that’s not the case. Remember, for us, social media is a tool for growth, not a source of entertainment.

Set yourself a schedule.

Determinate when and how long to use social media. There are a lot of apps available to help you stay on track. For maximum results, plan a time block of songwriting after that. Immediately use the technique you just learned.

Maintenance

The algorithms will sneakily throw you bits of entertainment in front of your feet. It’s important to stay strong and don’t fall victim to it. Mark it as “not interested” and go on with your day.

But no matter how hard you’ll try, your feed will succumb to entropy (= systems tend to become chaotic). It’s best you take some time every month to purge your feed of every bit of entertainment, like you did in the beginning.

Your Social Media Detox Begins Today

Change how you use social media and escape the doom-scrolling!

Detox yourself!

Use every thing we talk about to build yourself a tool of growth and learning. Follow these steps to get the most out of it:

  1. Go dark and don’t use social media for at least 30 days

  2. Purge your feed of every bit of entertainment

  3. Teach the algorithms to show you only useful content, by liking them.

  4. Find mentors that provide value and teach in a way that resonates most with you.

  5. Use everything you learn in a song or exercise. Don’t just watch. Learning is a change in behaviour!

  6. Limit your screen time. Don’t let learning become a form of procrastination. Set a maximum screen time and stick to it.

  7. Maintain your social media feeds and purge it of entertainment

Purge.

Learn.

Maintain.

Good luck with your detox.

I’ll see you on the other side!

If you got something out of this, share this with someone who you think can benefit from this advice. We all need to watch out for another.

BECOME A SONGWRITING MACHINE!

— Max of Current Mindset

Current Mindset
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