Unplugged

I hate feeling like I can’t live without being attached to a material item, but that’s exactly how I started feeling with my iPhone. I was constantly connected to it, checking emails all day, twitter updates flooding my phone and me in turn responding right away and in return “hanging out” for way too much time, same with Instagram.

I would sit at night nursing A rocking her to sleep and I’d be connected to the web-o-sphere – twitter, Pinterest, IG. So much so Ryan would say “what do you do on your phone all the time? And I would reply “nothing” because in the grand scheme of things, I really was doing nothing of any type of importance.

Or I’d get sucked into that Temple Run game, have you played that addictive little sucker? Guess what, they have Temple Run 2 now and I’ll be damned if it isn’t even more addicting than the first. Trying to hit goal after goal after goal to keep moving up in the game. A few days of that and I had to delete the darn thing.

Finally I was done, and had enough – with all of it.
I need to make a change, because honestly I started hating the feeling of being connected all the time – it’s draining.

So two Mondays ago I announced on twitter that I was unplugging from Twitter, IG and Pinterest. Frankly, as most of you remember I didn’t blog that week either..

At first I left the apps on my phone and turned off notifications but by the end of the day I decided it was far too tempting to hop back on.

So I deleted the apps from my phone.
If I wanted to check them I had to connect to the net, and manually log in every time because I have my settings set up to clear cache so my memory isn’t bogged down.

Manually logging in every time made it more complex – more work, it took more time than clicking an app icon. Did I though? Yes, but only about once a day that week if anything on twitter but that was it. No Instagram, no blogging, just me unplugged and it felt great.

I got caught up on things that I had been feeling behind on and I started feeling like I was finally separate from my phone. I was spending more quality time with Ryan and A. I had quality time before, but I had even more quality time and that made me feel amazing. My phone wasn’t buzzing in during dinner.

Throughout the week I did get a few “checking on you” emails from some of my sweet friends, and I explained the situation, I explained that I felt too connected and too dependent. I thought I was the only one that felt that way but I wasn’t. My friend Cody felt the same way, and ironically wrote a post about it the same week I disconnected, via a Google Chat she led me to her post (you can read it here) about how she’s learning to Shut.It.Down. and we talked about the benefits she started seeing in her life and with those around her.

I got caught up. I finally felt free and frankly it’s exactly what I needed. After the week was over I re-downloaded twitter and instagram but this time it was different, I knew what it felt like to be disconnected and I liked that feeling so I left my push notifications off from Twitter (hence why my responses aren’t always quite as quick as before), but I left my Direct Messages notifications on because usually if someone DMs me they really want to talk to me, and they are less frequent. I can plug-in on my terms, when I want to – which is usually a couple times a day, it’s not all day long anymore. And it feels amazing.

Oh, and I remembered to download Pinterest too, just last night and I honestly almost forgot all about it. Crazy, right?

Do you ever feel the need to disconnect? Do you ever feel owned by cell phone?