My Facebook free February could become a Facebook free life

Signing off for a month has made Ellie O’Byrne wake up to the fact that she needs to use social media and not let it be a ‘digital heroin’

Blame it on Trump. Blame it on hours of productivity lost in January to reading venomous political comment threads in the early weeks of the new US presidency. Blame it on my 12-year-old daughter’s first phone, and my increasing awareness of how she mimics my reflexive reach for my device in response to notification tones.

But when I got an email about Facebook Free February in my inbox on the first day of the month, I dived straight in. Within minutes, I downloaded the “FFF” logo to put up as my profile picture, composed a short farewell post and unceremoniously deleted the Facebook and Messenger apps from my phone. On my laptop, I trusted myself simply to log out rather than going the whole hog and suspending my account. I mean, come on: I’m not an addict, right?

Neuroscientists now know that the dopamine hit the brain gets in response to likes and shares on social media is identical to the one we receive when we indulge any addiction, leading to buzz phrases like “digital heroin”. Last August, British media watchdog OfCom revealed that Britons were spending an average of 25 hours per week online, checking their phones up to 200 times per day. 60% of respondents said they felt addicted to their device.

Am I addicted, and in denial? I frequently check both Facebook and Twitter last thing at night, and sometimes first thing in the morning, if those little red notification bubbles are showing an alluring number when I reach for the phone to turn my alarm off. I can’t count the number of times each day I respond to notifications on Facebook and Twitter.

I use work as an excuse; as a freelance journalist, my livelihood depends on staying “in the loop” on a wide array of subjects. Increasingly, it’s how sources make contact. On coffee breaks or in lulls, I’ll scroll through my feed to see if anything interesting is happening.

I’m not an over-sharer: I limit my posts to the occasional photo if I’m somewhere interesting, or share articles. Yet there are nights I go to bed wired, unable to sleep, brain over-stimulated and body under-exercised. There are days when I’ve wasted time, procrastinating over deadlines, trading inanities in comment threads instead of working.

Two hours into my first day, and I’m doing great. My work is cyclical, with days where I’m out interviewing, followed by long, isolated periods of writing things up at home. Today is a writing day, where I’m most likely to get distracted. I finish an article that has dragged for days.

I take a quick coffee break after emailing through the article. There’s one less tab open on my desktop, but I still spend a diverting 15 minutes on Twitter, and read a quite obviously essential article on how Johnny Depp spent $3 million firing Hunter S Thompson’s ashes from a cannon.

Lá le Bhríd faoi Mhaise and a redemptive challenge!Contact via email phone and carrier pigeon #FacebookFreeFebruary https://t.co/lVfk02iaoW pic.twitter.com/ZrrpU4EHQP

— Ellie O'Byrne (@ellieobyrne1) February 1, 2017

Back to work, and anxiety rears its head. I remember the coffee I arranged with someone who I only communicate with on Messenger: how will I get in touch? I’m in a couple of Facebook groups that have valuable practical applications. For many members, I’ve never established any other way to communicate. What am I missing?

I muscle on through. Within a few days, the FOMO evaporates, leaving only a sense of profound relief, centred-ness and peace.

Two weeks in, I call Diarmuid Sexton, the web designer behind Facebook Free February. He launched it in 2015, after working with Wexford hurler Diarmuid Lyng on a charity video: “He hoped it would go viral, to raise funds for injured players. He got obsessed with checking how it was doing, and was finding it very stressful. We built the website, came up with a logo and that was it.” Diarmuid freelances too. We chat about how productivity and concentration are affected by all that scrolling and sharing. A recent Danish study found that Facebook users are 55% more likely to feel stress. “If you’re not getting your work done due to distractions, that could be part of why it’s causing you stress,” he says.

He would like to see it become a part of the annual calendar, like Movember or Dry January. So is he sponsored by Twitter, then? He laughs. “No. People could do with logging out of other platforms too, but it’s just that Facebook is one of the more pervasive examples.” Indeed, the most unnerving part of my experiment is realising just how ubiquitous Facebook has become. With embedded video and article sharing, many people now use it as a one-stop-shop for all their information. Just days after I talk to Diarmuid, Mark Zuckerberg launches his megalomaniacal “manifesto” outlining Facebook’s future role in a global community.

What with Zuckerberg’s forays into virtual reality and AI, are we headed for a future like The Matrix, where sickly, eyebrowless beings are permanently plugged in to a reality of one corporation’s devising? If so, you’ll find me living on a mountain in West Cork, weaving goat-hair dungarees and launching sporadic guerrilla attacks on the mainframe.

In the meantime, I don’t feel in any hurry to log back in. For when I do, Diarmuid’s given me some handy tips for making sure that I’m using social media, rather than it using me. Getting an alarm clock for your bedroom is a great way to delay the inevitable by reducing the urge to check those notifications first thing. Or you can switch off notifications entirely in settings. Now, it’s also possible to install Messenger on a phone without having the Facebook app...I’m tempted to go this route and limit Facebook to my laptop; if I do this, and always log out after I check it, I think I’m better equipped to control the impulse to use it as a distraction while working.