🤯 I Went Without Instagram For 7 Days And This Is What It Did To Me.

Hey there,👋

Now that I have grabbed your attention with this super-catchy title, It's time to walk you through my entire journey of going without Instagram for an entire week.

In this day and age, going without Instagram even for a day seems distant to normal. Our nervous stimulus system has been hacked by these companies to get our twitchy fingers to pick up our gadgets overly saturated with notifications endlessly buzzing and blowing up our dopamine levels like a roller-coaster - It continuously rises till the drop and crashes real bad, leaving you with nothing but guilt. I decided to challenge this by logging off and deleting Instagram from all devices of mine, and took a plunge to venture on a journey to regain control over social media consumption.

What will this blogpost provide?

🎞️ The Series Of Events: A Timeline Worth Reading.

📷 The Polaroid Capture: Emotions & Feelings.

😩 The Urge Counter: Enumerating My Impulses Directed Towards Opening Instagram.

🚀 Takeaways & Why You Should Attempt This Challenge Too.

Day 1: Thinking this was going to go swimmingly (I was wrong).

The day started with me not picking up my phone as soon as I got up from bed, definitely felt weird but motivating at the same time. As the day went by I saw myself feeling motivated like never before, I saw an adventurous me out on a journey to get things done with laser focus. The morning was productive and so was the afternoon but as soon as the sun dawned so did my realization, things started getting harder, I found myself clicking on the blank space where Instagram used to be on my phone an end number of times. Fighting the urge was something new to me and I did it by exploring ways to get rid of it, a majority of that was spending time doing creative stuff like: video editing, researching, doodling etc. 😶‍ Emotion: What have I gotten myself into.

😵‍ Urge counter: 29

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Day 2: Accepting it and moving on.

I slept like a baby. The quality of sleep I got was insanely good so much so that I remember the feeling of waking up ⚡energized and not 🥱 tired, this perhaps was the by-product of me not using my phone before sleep. I woke up to a list of fun events & tasks that I had planned to achieve by the end of the day. Espresso being poured from a fancy machine was how my morning went: it was real smooth. I got a lot of tasks down and then came the evening where I was trying my level best to explore new ways to fight my urge, rather thoughts like:

"What if my DMs are flooded?"

"Did I get any new followers?"

"Did Shaurya Sinha post anything?"

"What if I missed out on something cool?"

These thoughts were hovering in my brain filling it up with emotions like FOMO (Fear of missing out) & urges on the lines of me seeking validation from others. (the core reason why we all use it)

Fighting them were tough but it unlocked my creative potential to find ways to get back at these garbage/useless thoughts. I spent the night playing board games with family & watching Never Have I Ever.

🥴 Emotion: Optimistically broken.

😵‍ Urge counter: 33

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Day 3: Doomsday

Judging by the way I was reacting to the urges I knew this day was going to come, I just didn't know when it was going to happen. My day started good until I started catching myself picking up my phone trying to reach the "now" blank space where Instagram was on my phone every free second of the day.

The habit of picking my phone up was eating me alive, especially in instances like:

• Picking up the phone while waiting for a website to load.

• Scrolling through reels while waiting for the microwave 30 second timer to go off.

I started noticing the amount of times I was picking up my phone, I seriously brokedown on the fact that the internet had started controlling me like its puppet. I was feeling suffocated and the "fomo" had really kicked me in the a**.

I couldn't stop overthinking and feeling intoxicated of all the vast amounts of useless social media crap that had bundled up in my brain. I couldn't perform my tasks according to plan and that's okay because bad days are bound to happen. I am grateful I knew this was coming beforehand. I spent my day doing easy tasks/chores and watched spiritual discourses.

I gave myself a pep talk before going to sleep which turns out was extremely instrumental for the coming days.

🤢 Emotion: Suffocating.

😵‍💫 Urge counter: 37

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐

Day 4: The Great Reset (big up Ryan Trahan)

Woke up fresh, ate some delicious poha with an aromatic tea and had a lovely chat featuring my mother. I felt a sugar-rush both literally & metaphorically, literally cause of the tea and metaphorically because of the rise in Rhythm's motivation charts. I got heaps of work done today, completed a lot of research, checked off a few company tasks (shoutout Tech Nuttiez), finished reviewing 10+ articles, had a meeting with the interns to deliver feedback, played Monopoly with my family & chilled out. I engaged myself into tasks that completely absorbed me like a sponge and surprisingly reduced the amount of times I had the urge to pick up that hideous phone.

😌 Emotion: Damn, this thing is actually working.

😵‍ Urge counter: 12

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Day 5: Broke a Record.

Pep talks are phenomenal, If you ever feel demotivated, sit down for 10 minutes and talk to yourself, and you'll instantaneously experience a rise in motivation, as much as I know how cliché it sounds, it works every time. The reason behind me talking about pep talks is because of how instrumental they were in getting me through intense urges of re-downloading Instagram. Day 5 started off with me doing some chill work, I ate some lunch, played Minecraft with my brother and just kept checking off tasks throughout the day. The best thing that happened was that I finally felt the habit wearing off and saw an increase in focus levels. I started losing track of time and got completely absorbed with anything I was doing, this state is infamously known as Deep Work by Cal Newport. I made some good old iced coffee🥤 and had a lovely conversation with my homie (big up Aarav 💪).

😌 Emotion: Damn, this thing is actually working.

😵‍ Urge counter: 5

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Day 6: Hot Girl Summer

Rhythm: randomly getting creative ideas. Aarav: rambling about the startup ecosystem.

Rhythm: holy s*** it's 2:00 am, yeet.

The morning started with my dad yelling me to get up cause it was already 9:15 am (yes that is late in our household) because we had to get to a gathering to watch our guru's discourse that happens every Sunday. The twist here is that right after the gathering, all the families had planned to go to Khor Fakkan, a beautiful place in Sharjah filled with dry mountains & a beach, and I hadn't packed anything. The whole day passed by with me not even having a glance at the phone, we went for a ride in the beach and did some kayaking that made my hands incompetent to even hold a phone. It was an extremely fun day that gassed me up like never before.

🥳 Emotion: Broken hand, Broken records, Broken dreams.

😵‍ Urge counter: 0

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Day 7: Forgot it was the last day.

I was living a life with a deleted addiction, there is no feeling that can trump that. On Day 7, I went for a gathering with the same group with my family and we had a lovely time having lunch, playing cards and socializing, we also decided to hit up Bluewaters Island & spent the day with each other. I spent the night researching for a project and was off to bed. I had forgotten what Instagram was, I stopped picking up phone every free second, I forgot it was the last day of the challenge, I started living in the present, My focus levels blew out of the water, I was enjoying every moment, I was happy each second.

Not even the best words can encapsulate this feeling/experience of living life without an addiction that was eating me alive. I continued this challenge for over a month and found it life-changing✨

🤑 Emotion: last day? no way?

😵‍ Urge counter: 0

💪 Productivity Rating (scale of 5) : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

7 Takeaways Of The Challenge:

🧬 Improved Life Quality.

😌 Simpler Life.

🗣️ More Real Conversations With People Physically.

📈 Shot Up Focus Levels

😴 Increased Sleep Quality.

🧠 Decluttered Brain.

⚡Increased Productivity.

These takeaways explain why you should also attempt this challenge and document your journey/experience to make a difference in your life to become a more productive human entity! If this post inspired you to attempt the challenge, please feel free to hit me up on my socials talking about your experience/journey, I am looking forward to seeing blogposts, Reels, YouTube videos, TikToks talking/expressing your journey.

super h y p e d to see them ;) That's it for today's post, I hope you enjoyed reading and learned something useful!

This post was written on 18/08/22. Stay tuned for more, and show some love ❤️ by spreading the word about it!

Talk Soon 👋

Rhythm Doshi