A wellness guide's honest reflections on quitting social media
I didn't take a break from social media because I had some grand plan. I took a break because I was tired. What I didn't expect was to find out how tired and how much of that tiredness had been hiding in plain sight.
The Overwhelm I Didn't Know I Was Carrying
Here's the first thing I noticed: I'm not as overwhelmed anymore. Not in the obvious way but in a quieter way I hadn't even clocked as overwhelm until it was gone.
Before the break, there was this constant rolodex spinning in the back of my brain. Should I share this? What's my next post going to be? I don't have time to write three posts this week should I just let AI write it for me? None of those thoughts were dramatic on their own. But stacked together, running on a loop, they were a low hum of pressure I'd just... gotten used to.
I think a lot of us have gotten used to a hum like that. We don't notice it until we step outside of it.
The Noise Underneath the Noise
Then there's the content itself. The ads. The sheer volume of AI-generated content — what I've started calling AI slop — flooding every feed. And now, a new layer on top of that: AI-generated "women" selling perimenopausal women advice on how to look better. Women who aren't real, setting a standard for women who very much are.
No wonder the beauty industry is worth close to $700 billion globally and climbing toward a trillion when you count everything adjacent to it. No one wants to look old. And yet we all want the wisdom and the privilege of getting older. Say that out loud and the hypocrisy is almost funny — if it weren't so exhausting to live inside of.
They Don't Take No for an Answer
Here's a small, telling thing: even off the app, Instagram sends me an email nearly every day telling me what I'm missing. Some days it's two. It's relentless in a way that says the quiet part out loud — this isn't about staying connected to my community, it's about keeping me hooked on the hit. No doesn't seem to be an answer they're willing to accept.
What Real Friendship Sounds Like Now
One of the strangest, best side effects of stepping back: when I see a friend now, I actually don't know what they've been up to. So we talk. What have you been up to? How's your summer been? Are you planning any trips?
That used to feel like small talk. Now it feels like the whole point.
Tuning Back Into My Own Inner Wisdom
Off the apps, I've noticed I can hear myself again — especially when it comes to the offers and content I want to create. Online can become an echo chamber without you ever realizing you're standing inside one. You start crafting something you don't actually want to make. You start messaging in a way that doesn't feel like you, simply because that's what everyone else is doing — and the sneaky part is, you don't even notice it's happening while it's happening.
Who I Actually Trust Online
Stepping back also sharpened something for me: I notice, more than ever, who shows up consistently who sends the regular email, who publishes the regular podcast and who I actually feel connected to versus who's just... there.
Take Substack. I'm on there. I have about five followers, and I do enjoy posting occasionally. But I'm not a fan of it being someone's only newsletter. When a Substack lands in my inbox, I usually delete it even if I know I'd enjoy reading it and go read it in the app instead. Maybe that's the elder millennial in me.
Compare that to the people who send genuinely heartfelt emails. Those are the people I've actually bought from. Not because I got swept up in clever marketing, but because the email felt like a real person talking to me — and I bought what I truly needed, not what I was pressured into wanting.
Real World vs. Online: A Framework That Changed How I Think About This
Recently I was in a webinar with my longtime teacher Tracee Stanley, who hosted author Shannon Algeo. He laid out a distinction between real-world space and online space that I haven't stopped thinking about since:
- Real world is embodied. Online is disembodied.
- Real world is synchronous. Online is asynchronous.
- Real world is one-to-one, or one-to-a-few. Online is one-to-many.
- Real world has a high bar of entry and exit — you don't just walk out mid-conversation, or leave in the middle of a yoga class (usually). Online has a low bar of entry and exit — unsubscribe, delete, block, gone.
Once I heard it laid out that plainly, so much of what I'd been feeling clicked into place. It's not that online connection is fake. It's that it's structurally different from the kind of connection our nervous systems evolved to trust.
What I'm Choosing to Build Instead
Coming out of this break, I keep coming back to what actually feels needed right now — for me, and I suspect for a lot of the women I work with:
- Shared sacredness
- Embodiment
- Stillness
- Being slow to anger and quick to forgive
- Connection to nature and awe
- Connection to ancestors and the transcendent self
None of those live comfortably in a feed built for speed and volume. They live in real time, in real bodies, in rooms with each other or in the quiet, unhurried space of a single voice in your ear, or a real letter in your inbox.
That's the space I want to keep building.
Want Support Getting Started?
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Nourished & Rooted
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