Welcome to my 365-day instant gratification detox

During the last 2+ years (covid!), I’ve lost my spark. I feel drained, not very joyful, and kind of stuck. Working from home has been really convenient and nice in many ways, but also has not been great for living my best life. As a way to get myself out of this rut, I’ve tried a number of things like 30-day challenges and transformations, healthy eating plans, training for races, trying to be more grateful, etc. Nothing has really worked out like I intended. In fact, I couldn’t even stick to many of these plans for longer than a a couple weeks.. This made me feel like such a failure and sunk me deeper into my rut. But the other night, I had a mini revelation.

Maybe the solution is a lot simpler. Maybe I need to stop focusing on adding things but instead deleting things from my life. Throughout the day, I turn to mindless instant gratification to entertain me, distract me, numb me. What if I cut all of that out for the next year and see what the result is? This idea really excited me. I decided to sleep on it, but I woke up this morning feeling even more certain that this could be really good for me.

So for the next 365 days, I commit to significantly limit social media (already deleted the apps from my phone!), mindless scrolling on pop culture websites, processed sugar, iphone games, TV/Netflix/HBO/Hulu, online shopping for things I don't need, and mindless snacking. Now, I’m going to give myself a few exceptions. If doing any of the above is for social reasons (like watching a show with my husband at night or having birthday cake at a party), I will happily engage. I don’t consider that “cheating” per se because the real problem that I’m trying to eliminate is using these things to distract me from the (sometimes mundane or stressful) present. I’m not sure if anyone but myself will read this, but I’m going to track this journey here to hold myself accountable (and if anyone else wants to do this along with me, I’d welcome the company with open arms!). Okay, here goes…