When I first started as a social media consultant, I was online all the time. It was constant, because I didn’t want to miss a thing. I wanted my clients to be so impressed with my dedication.

What actually happened was that it became an addiction, and like all addictions, it was hurting me and my ability to create great work. Thankfully, before it took a bad turn, I took up crocheting. Crocheting required my hands which made it nearly impossible to be online all the time. And it was what helped me find balance.

So what happens when you’re online all the time? And how do you stop it? Here are a few of my thoughts on this topic.

Too much information

If you are chronically online, you are taking in a lot of information. That is a whole lot of information you are taking and not all of it is truthful.

Even if you are sticking mostly to client accounts, you’re still reading too much. What ends up happening is that fan voices get very loud. And it’s not even the majority of fans. It’s one or two people who like to post a lot. But because they post so much, it starts feeling like these are majority opinions. They are pushing so much information at you that it starts looking like fact. And that “fact” can start shadowing what you post and what you don’t post on social media for clients.

Spending time offline can balance these opinions so they can look like what they truly are. And you can get a better view of what should be color what you do and what is just one person being extremely loud with information that isn’t correct. It is vital that you are able to pick through and figure that out quickly, so you can keep your client on the right path with social media. Being chronically online will muddy those waters enough that you will go off that path.

Lack of creativity

Creativity is so important when it comes to social media. You can try out strategies from others, but it always needs some creative spin to make it your client’s own.

Constant work can steal your creativity. To be creative, your brain needs rest where it can take all of the information it is receiving and digest it. That means doing something that is not work. Your brain can do some marvelous things when it is not focused on a problem. It just keeps working on it in the background. And I think that’s why crocheting has helped me a lot. My brain is given a break from client issues and then it works its way back towards working on it on its own. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thrown a crochet project down so I can get what my brain has come up with onto my laptop.

No longer being a “normal” person

The more that you give into an online addiction, the further away you get from your friends and family. The further away you get from your friends and family, the less you are like a “normal” person. I know that the term “normal” is not great, but the average person is not constantly online. That’s really what I am referring to.

What happens when you get away from how real people interact with social media? Things start getting distorted. You forget how real people talk to each other. And since social media is a constant conversation, forgetting how to talk to people is kind of a big deal. You can also forget how often people post. Although organizations post more consistently than the average person, the frequency is similar. I’ve found people who are chronically online tend to post for clients A LOT. This often happens when someone is chasing reach and engagement numbers that are slipping away from them. Instead of focusing on higher quality content, they’ll double down on quantity and it gets to be too much for a community.

Find your balance

Getting back to a balanced life can actually be very difficult. You always feel like you’re missing out on something and you might even feel phantom alerts on your phone (this was constant for me). Maybe apps will work for you, but they never would for me. The thing that did work was making my real life more interesting.

Invest in your hobbies, especially those that require you to put your phone down. For me that was running, reading and crochet. The more I indulged in them, the less I felt the need to pick up my phone. And I bought a running watch that gave me only the most basic notifications, so I don’t have to worry about whether my daughter is safe, and I don’t have to pick up my phone when it has a notification. Kind of a compromise that I do to keep my head in the game while also knowing if my daughter needs me when I’m away.

Invest in others. My daughter has made me tend my relationships in a way that I never felt I needed. She gets me out so she can hang out with her friends. And luckily, she has good taste in friends and those friends tend to have parents who I like. I actually enjoy trying to control toddler chaos with these people. And we sometimes get together without the toddlers. Crazy, I know!

But I also found that I started writing more and had more things to talk about as my client online. The fuller my offline life was, the fuller my clients’ online lives began to be. I did better work more efficiently, and I was able to be myself without being tied to a phone constantly. It may have taken a lot of effort to get there, but my balanced life actually worked wonderfully for everyone involved.

How are you breaking your online addiction? What does your balanced life look like?