I Eat Toxins on Social Media

I read an Instagram story the other day that said something along the lines of how we all need to unfollow the people who do not make us feel good about ourselves. I tried to count on one hand how many pages I would need to unfollow in order to feel better about myself, and I decided that in order to feel better about myself, I'd need not to exist online, period. 

I can't explain how many times I've opened Instagram, or Facebook, or SnapChat, and looked at pictures and decided my life was shit. It happens nearly daily. And yet, there's a solution: delete it all. 

I remember this past winter (which was like one month ago if we're discussing weather changes), I deleted my Facebook, my SnapChat, and my Instagram apps on my phone. Every morning I woke up and pressed snooze on my alarms 6 or 7 times, and then I put the phone down. I went to school, I did homework, I went to the gym, and the day seemed to be filled with productivity. There was a change in my mood from "I suck" to "my success is on its way." The moment I reinstalled those apps, I went back to sucking. 

In my fitness blog page on here, I explained a journey I began in May 2016. Since that time of embarking on a fitness journey, to become more active and achieve a healthier lifestyle, I have lost 100 pounds. Every time I'm on Instagram, or Facebook, or SnapChat, it feels like I've lost nothing and have gained zero strength. People are always doing better, looking great, losing more weight, traveling to Guam, eating the chocolate sprinkled donut I can't have, or accomplishing goals that I tell myself I'll never accomplish myself. 

So, why don't I just delete it for good? I can't. Can you? It's one of my biggest flaws. I feed on it. I'm addicted to it. I know it's toxic. It's like smoking a cigarette. But, like anything in life, if I can't rid of something completely toxic at the moment,  I can control  it. 

So, for the past 2 months, I've decided to write down in a journal one or two things I did that day that I'm proud of myself for. After a week, I sit down and read all of those things and I feel pretty damn good. I do this after I've looked at social media for the last time before going to bed. So for every day I've gone to the gym and sweat my ass off, for every day I haven't yelled at customer and told them to go fuck themselves, and for every day I've read something that has lit up my soul, I write it down and remember that, yes, this is the age of toxic social media and it's a damn shame I'm infected, but I'm also human, and have the ability to practice self-control, a challenge I'm almost always excited to take on. So, for anyone who's reading this, write it down. There's something in you that your apps don't know, and something in you that they don't deserve to know.