Finding that Flow

Finding that 'flow'

~ Previously published on my Patreon where I write monthly essays about creativity and confidence ~

Eleven weeks and three days ago I decided I was going to come off Instagram for a few days. The political noise, the sanctimonious posts, the lockdown fever was all just too much for me. A few weeks previously, on one of my daily lockdown walks, I received the sad news of a close family friend passing away suddenly. I don’t deal well with sudden changes, happy or sad, and the depression I had been fighting during 2014 arose and tried to grab me with its horrible bony fingers. The Internet just compounded my depression and anxiety. I couldn’t concentrate, I had dark thoughts and it was too much for me to handle.

The answer was to come away from the Internet. From Instagram, the mainstream news and from other social media apps. 

I wrote about this briefly in my last essay and I’ve also written about it in my weekly newsletter. But I wanted to explore it in more detail. I want to write about my process of taking a back seat from Instagram, how this has impacted my mental health and my work and what the alternatives are for my writing business if I am not marketing myself on social media. The latter being the big question. I have spent five years creating for Instagram. Hours and hours and hours of content. Hundreds of pictures and videos. I’ve gained around 17,000 followers. That’s a lot of people. And it seems crazy to throw all of that work away and to not have that space to highlight my writing.

But, coming off Instagram has been one of the best things I’ve ever done. A few weeks ago I was cooking in my kitchen. I’d invited our friends over that evening for a barbecue and I was creating a vinaigrette for the new potatoes, baking ginger and bran cookies and whisking up meringues. I was in my element. I had a podcast playing on my iPad, the dogs sniffing around me at my feet looking for dropped crumbs and the beautiful scent of lemon, ginger and garlic wafting around me. I felt content. I felt happy. I felt free. 

This is because in the past I would’ve been picking my phone up and documenting my cooking exploits for Instagram Stories. My attention would’ve been divided between what I was doing in real life and how I was presenting it to my audience. I wouldn’t have been feeling contented. I would’ve felt a bit stressed: my attention being pulled in a multitude of directions. 

But this time my phone was nowhere near. I wasn’t uploading slo-mo film of the meringues being whisked, or replying to DMs or linking to the recipe for others to use. I was just enjoying myself. I hadn’t baked or cooked like that for many years. I remember doing it in my old old house, my son and husband would be at rugby practice on a Sunday morning and I would be listening to my friend on the local radio during her segment whilst I made Sunday lunch. There was little in the way of social media then. We certainly didn’t have this urge to document everything in our lives. We just focused on the task in hand and didn’t dream about sharing this experience directly into the phones of other people. 

My new reality meant I finished all of my cooking and baking in record time. My friends arrived and were impressed with how organised I was. The barbecue was lit, the chicken thighs were cooking and I was showered and changed before they arrived. I was relaxed instead of feeling like time was slipping away from me and I had a great evening. It was yet another reminder that coming off Instagram was the best thing I could do for both my mental health and my productivity. It’s a cliche but I was truly living in the moment.

I want to come back though to that feeling of having your attention pulled in numerous directions. This was a constant issue for me. Imagine you’re watching a film of a woman working with toddlers all yelling and demanding for her attention. Someone has spilled their drink, another one wants to go to the toilet and another needs something to eat. You can feel her stress emanating from the screen. All she wanted to do was to have five minutes to herself in order to think and to organise herself. That’s how I felt with Instagram - but with all the noise coming from my phone and not three noisy toddlers. Instead the noise was being created by me. All the activities I was trying to achieve were constantly taking my time, energy and attention. And it was too much.

There has been a number of times when the pull from Instagram and getting things done at a certain time has raised my heartbeat. When I’ve forgotten to breathe properly because I was in that anxious state of getting things uploaded at a certain time, or making sure the Stories flowed, or finding a typo and deleting it before anyone saw and then getting another one out before the gap between the two stories was too big. As I type that out now it seems like such small things I was getting myself into a tizz over. Instagram had made me lose my sense of perspective over what was important and what wasn’t. And not just with the small things like uploading Stories within a decent time frame. But with spending lots of time on the app full stop. This raised heart rate and not breathing properly was affecting, not just my mental health, but my physical health, too. My shoulders were tight, the area between my chest and my neck was sore and my neck was painful. I’d been seeing a physio for a while and when the country locked down and I was no longer able to see her I was worried about the pain I might find myself in. But I was fine during the lockdown, quite possibly because I wasn’t stressing myself out with Instagram…

Initially I thought I’d take a break for just a week. That week was fairly easy to keep off the app although it was ingrained in me to check it on a regular basis. I would stop writing: coming to a brief pause in an essay, a blog post, my book or my newsletter, and automatically pick up my phone. I was startled how often this happened and I realised I had trained myself to be like this. By using Instagram Stories to document my writing process it was natural for me to pick up my phone and record what I was doing numerous times a day. I would stop my writing flow and start thinking about how I could describe what I was doing for my audience. Then, I would endeavour to pick up where I’d left off in my writing - and switch my brain again to do something different. Switching gears like this a number of times an hour was exhausting. 

In the book How to Break up with Your Phone by Catherine Price there is a brilliant chapter on multi-tasking - which is what I was trying to do: writing my book, filming, typing and uploading to Instagram all at once. Catherine says: “When we think we’re multi-tasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call ‘task-switching’. Like cars making sharp turns, our brains need to slow down and switch gears every time we stop thinking about one thing and engage with another - a process that has been estimated to take twenty-five minutes every time you do it.

She goes on to say: In fact, we’re often shifting the focus of our attention so rapidly that we never give ourselves time to get into gear to begin with…Not only is this making us unproductive, but it’s also affecting our ability to think and problem solve. It’s also mentally exhausting.”

No wonder I wasn’t completing my projects. No wonder time was just sailing by. No wonder I felt tense and was in pain. And, no wonder, I wasn’t getting into that deep flow of work. 

Cal Newport, author and professor from the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University describes “deep work” as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.” Because I was dividing my concentration between writing and social media I was unable to get into that deep zone of working. I was always thinking how I could share what I was doing on Instagram, even when I wasn’t sharing it. I could still write and string a sentence together but it was mentally tiring. It was a slower process. And I was unable to join the dots between different strands of thoughts. Or even think about if I was pursuing the right strategy. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist, described this process as “flow”. A cognitive state where one is completely immersed in an activity such as writing, painting or prayer. When you are so immersed you don’t think about anything else like food or being tired or uploading to Instagram Stories - you are completely immersed in the process. 

I was missing this deep work and flow. When your attention is being pulled in different directions it is impossible to achieve it and to really absorb yourself in your work with no awareness to what is happening around you. 

But as my time off Instagram was getting longer I found I wasn’t reaching for my phone as much. I was beginning to write for longer periods of time without being distracted or without being tempted to create an order in the online supermarket or to check my stats on YouTube. I also found my thoughts were becoming more cohesive. I was thinking more deeply about what I wanted to do and I could see a clear path ahead. Despite this I was lonely. I was missing the chats I would have in my DMs. Yes, I was aware now that these chats were affecting my flow and I was using them as an excuse to stop work and procrastinate but they were also bright spots in my day. They helped me feel I was not alone as I typed things on my computer. 

Not only was I lonely I also had this deep unease. I felt guilty for neglecting my followers. I was still worried that I would lose followers. And I felt like a bit of a failure for having seventeen thousand followers but that the large majority of them were not in love with my work. They just liked desk pictures. I had attracted a significant number of people in order to impress my potential publisher but how many of them would buy my book if and when I finally finish writing one? Which begs the question: just how good is Instagram as a return of my time invested? Instagram probably gives me the least return on investment out of my blog, my mailing list and even Pinterest. Why do I think all of this? Because whenever I highlight my newsletter on Instagram, whether in Stories or on my main feed, my sign ups are less than ten. On my Stories I’d say my sign ups were between one and two, on my main feed a few more. The vast majority of sign ups to my mailing list come from my blog posts - where people have discovered me through Pinterest. All these years I’ve been putting so much effort into my Instagram and my return on that time investment is a small percentage. These followers were my audience on one app but were not invested in my writing. This realisation was a bitter pill to take but had I not taken some time away I’d never have come to this conclusion. 

When I realised this, however, I had more courage about coming off Instagram. Instead, I developed alternatives. Those people who were really interested in my work could join my mailing list where I intended to write about three times a month. I’d share photos on there as well as a smaller essay than this one. Sort of like a more in depth Instagram post. I also had my Patreon and started creating more on there, too, such as my Weekly Diary and my Desk Stories. I wasn’t disappearing from the Internet. I was choosing to spend my time in places where I could give more value, where I could go more in depth and where I could flex my creative muscles. By doing this I became more focused and because I didn’t have to open the app I wasn’t distracted or depressed by certain aspects within the Internet world.

As the days passed my mental health improved. I was no longer absorbing other people’s angst or opinions. I felt lighter. Free. I cannot emphasise enough how not having so many different voices in your head helps your mental state as well as your productivity. It was, and still is, simply marvellous. Not only did my mental health improve but so did my physical health. I had more time now so could go on dog walks or work out without worrying that I was neglecting my work. I was getting more done in less time. 

To combat my loneliness I reached out to friends I knew in real life. I made time to go out for coffee or dog walks with my friends. This was so good for my soul.

There is still that question, though, on how I could market my writing and mentoring services without social media. Yes, I knew the answer was to get people to sign up to my mailing list but how do I go about attracting them to sign up in the first place? This question was at the back of my mind for some time until I came across the work of Alexandra Franzen. Alexandra has (probably well over) 13,000 people on her newsletter list yet she has no social media accounts whatsoever. She talks and writes a lot about unplugging from technology and is passionate about the fact you can build up a successful business despite not being on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Once I found her and knew it could be done this gave me confidence in my own convictions. I started mentioning my newsletter after a blog post. I would encourage my current subscribers to forward my newsletter onto a friend. There are lots of ways you can market yourself without the need to spend hours and hours a month on an app that no longer gives you joy. And we all know what Marie Kondo says. If it doesn’t give you joy - get rid of it. 

And that was going to be the end but I just wanted to mention something - a real life example of what I’ve been talking about with the process of writing this essay. This essay normally takes me many drafts to write and get my thoughts in order. The hardest aspect is organising my thoughts and ensuring what I was thinking was translating into words on the screen. But this time I gave my husband the first draft to edit before making changes and then uploading. I already had my thoughts in order and this was because I wasn’t interrupting myself in order to take Instagram pictures or upload Stories. I was in the flow or the deep work state whilst writing it. I can’t remember the last time this happened. At least not for a number of years. 

And it felt good.

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