Simple Living | Social Media Switch Off

The sweetest Elephant from our India trip to Goa last October. Image taken by my Mother and Father in Law to be.

Social Media is a beautiful thing. What I love most about it is its ability to connect us with the entire, far reaching world. You can meet people from all over who you would never have had the chance to meet otherwise! On the other hand however there is also a downside and that I think is burning out.

If I was just using social media for personal use I don’t think that this would be such a problem but when you are working with it at your day job, with your blog and freelance projects sometimes it can get pretty old, pretty fast. Therefore, in the spirit of giving myself (and Josh) a break we have decided to go social media free this weekend, and yes, that includes Snapchat (sorry).

If you’ve been hanging around here a while you will also know that we have done this before. We have taken a quick leave of absence to get some real world perspective but why actually do it? Does it make such a difference? Shockingly yes.

My Joshey last Autumn when we took another break from the outside world (yes, playgrounds were involved)

Why Take a Break?

Honestly taking a break is something that has helped us both hugely, time and time again over the last half a year or so. When we first went to India one of the biggest things we noted was feeling content. We had no (easy access) Wifi, no chances to Instagram as we went, hell, we even ended up not photographing either trip very extensively! and we were just happy.

It gave us time to think, to forget and to really let go of day to day life. There were no chores, no demands and honestly since then I have made it somewhat of my mission to continue finding those moments everyday to really switch off.

Small things make big differences.

Taking a coffee break can be a tiny thing, in fact you probably have coffee (or tea) all day but do you really take a break to experience it? Probably not, so come June we began changing that. We started by making time for lunch or a coffee break on a Saturday. Prior to this, Saturday had been a hectic chore day where we spent huge amounts of time not stopping. In fact if we consider the whole of last weekend I think we spent a grand total of three hours awake in our flat, impressive, no?

No, not really but in all that crazy we have found a coffee break where we can just sit down together and reflect for a second (sans phones) is in fact greatly beneficial. In fact as you saw on last weeks post, This is the Weekend  we now adore finding a few moments to sit somewhere pretty and literally stop talking and stop thinking so much!

What are you going to do?

So what are we going to do? Well something more simple than I ever thought possible, we will leave the rat race of social media Friday night and by Monday morning? Well, I will be right back and hopefully with a little more peace and a whole lot of less stress!

If India, and even Paris is anything to go by I would say we will be feeling a whole lot better, very soon! So whose with me? Think you could ignore your phone?