Nobody warns you that the platforms designed to make you visible can make you completely disconnect from yourself.

This is not my first rodeo on social media. Back in 2021, I was active for about a year until I crashed and burned badly. It took me over a year to properly recover.

This time round, I have been active on it for under a year and I am stepping away before the inevitable crash and burn.

Looking back, I wonder why I got back on it considering my previous experience with it. But all the professionals around me said: you have a product to sell, you have to be visible and keep showing up as much as possible. And because they were professionals, I listened, to my own detriment.

The Results That Prompted the Step Back

How I Felt Daily

I felt like crap, absolute crap. I was not sleeping at all. I spent my nights rehashing content I really didn’t care about. I was frustrated, bored, and angry. I was dissatisfied with literally everything and constantly on edge. I couldn’t settle or enjoy anything, borderline depressed all the time.

Social media has long felt like fast food to my body: cheap, lacking nutrients, real substance, and deeply unfulfilling. Yet I've pretended this wasn’t the case and been in this weird, frenetic state for months, unable to do anything without also looking at my phone at the same time. This sounds a lot like too much dopamine flooding my system.

There is a lot of research available on the consequences of dopamine brain flooding: symptoms like anhedonia (the inability to feel joy or pleasure from activities that once made you happy), brain fog (the inability to focus, concentrate, or start tasks), emotional flatness (feeling numb, hopeless, or detached), and extreme fatigue (feeling low on energy, even after a full night's sleep) are just some of them.

→ Dopamine flooding and its effects on the brain https://www.healthline.com/health/dopamine-effects

You could argue that I am particularly susceptible to it and you would be right. I am sensitive to everything, so I tend to get immediate feedback from my body. Feedback I had been ignoring because someone told me it was the only way to be successful.

But the physical toll was only the beginning. The deeper cost? The effect it had on my work.

The Impact on My Work

My whole body of work is based on intuition and self-authority. And guess what? I couldn’t even hear my intuition anymore: it had completely shut off. My biggest tool and power was refusing to cooperate with me and gone on strike.

I had spent the last few months mostly creating for social media and for the algorithm, chasing likes and views like my life depended on it. And my intuition had checked out.

Instead of leaning on my truth and what my soul wanted to express, I had been caught up in endless soulless creation.

I've heard social media described as "a soul suck," and I would wholeheartedly agree. It felt like the living daylights had been sucked out of me. I wonder where I — my soul — had gone. It was completely missing in action. And that terrified me.

How did someone manage to convince me to outsource my power and self-authority just for the sake of visibility?

*How to remember your* *soul magic* *when the world has squeezed it out of you*

Free Labour Dressed Up As Opportunity

This is the one thing I have really sat with. Social media platforms are masters of making you feel like you are building something, when in reality you are growing their empire. You create the content and show up consistently. You pour energy, creativity, and time into a system that packages it all up and sells it yet the income flows almost exclusively to someone else. That is free labour dressed up as opportunity, and it is one of the most sophisticated marketing ploys of our time.

That relationship is parasitic at best. And I'm all about reciprocal relationships.

Let me tell you, there is nothing reciprocal about social media, even when you pay for ads, views, or followers. The system is skewed and warped, and not in your favour. That, for me, is the definition of insanity.

Let me share my own statistics as an example. I get thousands of visits to my website monthly and can track exactly where the traffic come from. On average, over the last 6–9 months, I have been getting one referral from each of the social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Tiktok) I am on. If you take into account that I have spent 10-15 hours a week creating content, my ROI is nil. Social media creates no value for me.

Also, can you imagine that Meta only shows your posts to 1% of your followers? You are set up to fail unless you are spending thousands of dollars on ads. So whoever made us believe this was a winning proposition is someone very smart and very greedy.

→ "Meta reportedly shows posts to as little as 1% of your followers" - https://www.socialmediatoday.com

What Has Been Happening Since I Took a Step Back

It took about three weeks for me to start feeling like myself, but it has been a very slow process.

This is something I track: do I feel like me when I'm doing something or when I'm with someone? Because let me tell you, when I am on social media, I don't feel like me at all. I barely recognise myself.

I found an app called Clear Space that makes access to social media genuinely difficult. It requires me to breathe or do a squat before I can open the app and it's working. Just that pause, that moment of awareness, has kept me off the platforms. Before, I would reach for social media instinctively in any empty moment. My ‘addiction’ would start first thing in the morning because I would reach for my phone right away. I know I'm not alone in doing that, and I also know it's not good for our brains. More to come on this subject.

— >"Research on morning phone use and its impact on the stress response" - ‍ ‍https://www.apa.org

And don't even get me started on the toll social media and our phones take on our relationships. I won't go down that rabbit hole today.

What came next was the ability to relax a bit more, be present with myself, and engage with people differently.

I started to appreciate the small things again: the birds chirping, the colours of nature, my meditations, and just being human. The key has been to let my body do what it does best: heal on its own time.

*"Why* *integrity, not visibility, is the real medicine"*

I haven't decided what to do yet with the platforms I'm on , whether to close them down completely or not. I'm giving myself the time to figure out how to make them work for me. Because that is the only way I'm going to continue engaging with them: if they support me and what I'm trying to accomplish. I’m taking my power back from social media.

FAQs: Stepping Back from Social Media

Q: Is it possible to run an online business without social media?

A: Absolutely. Many entrepreneurs generate consistent income through SEO-driven content, email marketing, podcast guesting, and word-of-mouth referrals. Social media is one visibility strategy among many , not the only one. The key is building channels you own and control.

Q: What are the signs of social media burnout?

A: Common signs include chronic fatigue, inability to focus, emotional numbness, creative blocks, poor sleep, and a persistent sense of dissatisfaction. If you feel disconnected from your own intuition or joy, that is your body signaling that something needs to change.

Q: How do I reconnect with my intuition after social media overload?

A: Start by creating space : even small pockets of phone-free time each day. Practices like meditation, journaling, breathwork, and time in nature help recalibrate the nervous system and quiet the dopamine noise enough to hear yourself again.

*What your* *body's signals* *are really trying to tell you*

Q: How long does it take to recover from social media burnout?

A: It varies for everyone, but most people begin to notice a shift within two to four weeks of significantly reducing use. Full nervous system recovery, including restoration of focus, creativity, and emotional range, can take several months.

Choosing Yourself Over the Algorithm

If any part of this resonated with you, I want you to know: you are not failing by stepping back. You are listening to your body and reconnecting to your self-authority and that is one of the most advanced things a human being can do.

The real work is never about being everywhere. It's about choosing what feels true to you.

If you're ready to reconnect with your intuition and hear yourself, click here.

Last updated: May 25 2026

Taking a Break from Social Media: What It's Really Costing You to Stay