I'm a little late to this topic but I think we can all look back and agree that the inconvenience of the Facebook/Instagram outage brought up a lot of unwarranted frustration with people. It was all over the daily news and conversation among friends and coworkers. I know I kept coming back to Instagram and checking to see if the app was back up and the minute it refreshed, I scrolled to catch up with the feed.

All this tells me is that everyone, including myself, is filling way too much time with social media and we're all a lot more addicted to it than we would like to admit. We were behaving like drugged-up lab rats that compulsively check the laced water feeder to see if we can get our scheduled dopamine hit.

For those who are addicted to social media, everyone, what did we decide to fill up all that spare scrolling time with? There's an entire Life to live outside that screen and there's things that need to get done.

That outage was a good thing. Maybe going cold turkey for a few hours was needed.

What are we scrolling for anyways? Glimpses of other people's lives. News updates. Pictures of attractive models and nature and animals and cars and sports highlights. Mindlessly filling the void of free time.

We spend too much of that time keeping up with what other people are doing with their lives and with whats going on around the world that we aren't living our own. We aren't appreciating the present moment we occupy in time.

I get it. Social media is the new social setting we're all attached to. It has the ability to connect us with all sorts of people and accounts that are potentially beneficial to keep up with.

I'm not saying to completely cut off social media and deactivate accounts; I mean to encourage people to take an app fast and decide to step away from social media once in a while even if its just for a couple hours.

The solution is simple – just turn off your phone, which I hear is supposed to be really good for battery life; I have no idea if that's true. Or set an alarm, put it on mute, put it away, and forget about it.

Here's something else you can try: what is something you do every day? Turn off your phone before you do it, go get some chores done or engage with your hobby or whatever you want to do then reach out for your phone when you're done.

Surely, we can live without our phones and social media for a few hours. Right?

How many hours can you go before the withdrawals start to kick?