A Cyclical Approach to Social Media: Or, How to Avoid Burnout on Instagram
Social media is a shape-shifter. Algorithms change. New rules arrive as old ones fade. In an ever-changing digital landscape, it’s useful to check-in a few times per year to see if how you’re using your favorite apps is still in alignment with your current season. Today we’re not talking about whether or not you should be on these platforms, but how to be in relationship with our visible side and the internet at large in a way that’s cyclical and informed by your body and nature.
My History of Social Media Breaks
The first time I took a conscious break from social media was in 2017, and it was for a grand total of ten whole days. This felt like a very long time back then, when I was in the height of my social media use. I called it a “10 Day Digital Detox,” which became the first of many short-term experiments to better understand my relationship with these apps. A handful of years later, I deepened my menstrual cycle awareness practice, leading to a more expansive (and cyclical) view of my own social media use.
Understanding Your 4 Inner Seasons
Before we talk about applying cyclical wisdom to social media, a quick primer on the four inner seasons of the menstrual cycle. Give or take some days, if you have a menstrual cycle, you go through four distinct inner seasons in the course of roughly 28 days. There’s a lot going on hormonally that’s allowing all of this to occur, but basically you’re moving through the process of expanding towards ovulation, and then contracting towards your bleed if pregnancy doesn’t occur. And, quite beautifully, these inner seasons also mirror the earth’s seasons. We also have the lunar calendar to support us here too, so there’s a bit of this cyclical layering going on.
FOLLICULAR | INNER SPRING | WAXING MOON
Your inner spring is really all about emergence. You’re coming out of your bleeding days, breaking through the soil so to speak, and it’s a great time to plan and initiate projects because whether you’re writing a book or a blog post, you need to lay the foundation for what’s to come, and your brain is really primed to brainstorm and start new things. It’s not unlike spring when we watch the leaves start to grow back and the weather warm up a bit, there’s just this sense of possibility in the air.
OVULATION | INNER SUMMER | FULL MOON
Ovulation is your inner summer, all about visibility and growth. Since this is your body’s peak fertility window, your energy tends to be high, which makes it feel easier to ride the wave from spring to summer and continue the projects you started. Connection and community are core themes of your inner summer. It’s really an ideal time to engage with others, have important conversations, and communicate ideas.
LUTEAL | INNER FALL | WANING MOON
Fall is nature’s harvest season, and it’s the same for our bodies. Culmination energy is really strong here, because your body is preparing to enter the cave of menstruation. Your physical energy, which was really high and magnetic a few days ago is starting to wind down and you start feeling a strong pull to go inward. This is the time in your cycle to check stuff off your to-do list. It’s all about finishing—whether it’s getting all the laundry done or putting the finishing touches on an essay, you're primed to tie up loose ends during these days.
MENSTRUATION | INNER WINTER | NEW MOON
This is the season of rest and reflection. Your hormones are really low here, bringing you deeper into your inner world. Your brain’s capacity for self-analysis is really high, which makes it a great time for journaling and thinking and receiving insights and gut messages about all sorts of things.
11 Ways to Align Your Cyclical Nature With Social Media
The ebb and flow of creativity is real and visceral, and I’m sure you’ve had those moments you’ve felt your body just electrify when you’re working on something. The incredible thing is our monthly cycle is a metaphor for the creative process. Every month our bodies spend half the time expanding and the other half contracting. Our projects do this too. Engaging social media with all this in mind can feel empowering if you’re someone who wants to utilize communities like Instagram while still honoring your own needs.
In no particular order, here are some of the ways you might consider experimenting with creating a more cyclical relationship with social media and tapping into those innate energies you have. (And if you’re not menstruating, these same suggestions would just apply to the phases of the moon, so when I’m talking about the follicular phase and the spring energy, that’s the waxing moon coming out of the new moon, for example.)
Based on our inner seasons, we know that we naturally expand and then contract and this gets repeated over and over. The first two phases, your inner spring and inner summer is when you’ll typically feel the most engaged outwardly. Your energy is higher, you’re more magnetic and eager to connect with others. This makes it a great time to be on social media. If you’re someone who’s a little on the fence about making videos that show your face, or even just putting together reels, give it a try when you’re ovulating.
Another way to play around with these first two weeks is to schedule posts during this time, so that way you’re sharing and engaging on Instagram again, when you’re most naturally suited to do it.
On the flip side, when you’re in contraction, in your inner fall and winter, you can do things like save posts that you want to share later on. You can scroll but not engage or share.
Or you can try being off the app during those two weeks as well, maybe deleting it during your bleed to just be in that cocoon space, and re-downloading it after you emerge and you have all that spring energy to bolster you.
When it comes to planning social media posts, if that’s something you do, based on your inner seasons, the first half of your cycle would be a great time to gather your photos and draft your posts and do some hashtag research, and the second half of your cycle would be a great time to finalize those posts and schedule them. During your inner fall there’s that “crossing the t’s” energy of finishing things, so again, another way to play around.
These suggestions are based specifically around your menstrual cycle, but there are also other ways to bring that cyclical energy to your experience regardless of which cycle day you’re on.
You might choose to…
Use Instagram Monday through Friday, then delete the app on weekends
You might alternate months, one month on, one month on.
You might be inspired by nature’s seasons, like I am, and take an intentional sabbatical from social media during certain times of the year. For me, that’s typically July and August, and then again starting around the holidays and through some of the winter.
For some people, you might really love that summer energy and actually might really enjoy being online during that time. We’re all different so again, check in with your needs and what sounds good to you.
You could also think about your day-to-day and your family rhythms to help inform when you’re using social media. If your kids are off of school for the summer, that might feel like a natural break when you want to be more present, you have less time to yourself, etcetera. Maybe you have a job—I know this was me a handful of years ago—where there are things that happen annually that might be more demanding on your schedule. If there’s an event or something you’re building to, maybe a good time to be offline would be during those periods.
Something else to keep in mind is where you’re accessing the app. Are you using your desktop, your phone, or both? Maybe play around with deleting Instagram from your phone, but still check it on your desktop. When I’ve done this in the past it’s felt like a nice middle ground where I can still see what’s going on (and I can still schedule posts) but I’m not constantly checking it on my phone. Sometimes this feels like a great choice.
How to Get Started…
As always, let curiosity lead the way. As you were reading, which idea felt exciting and maybe doable? Which one felt like a hard no? Really trust that, and maybe pick one or two things to try and go from there.
For example, if you’re someone who already tracks their cycle and are pretty familiar with how your body’s feeling, maybe try making a reel during ovulation, or recording yourself for a story or something, and see how you feel. Then try making a story on Day 1 or 2 of your cycle and check in. How does your physical energy and inner season impact your interest in engaging with the app?
If you’re someone who has never tried a longer-term break, don’t necessarily commit to being offline for three months. Try deleting Instagram on the weekend, or maybe play around with a month off.
You can also enter any experiments with an eye towards your current LIFE season. If you’re planning for summer—you might have vacations lined up, kids out of school—that could be a really natural time to play around with being online less and seeing how it feels.
Finally, I do want to remind my myself and you of some tough love tough love: social media apps don’t care about your inner seasons, or the lunar calendar, or the fact that your energy ebbs and flows. It’s possible that if you leave social media for a few months and come back, it’ll take some time to rebuild engagement, or you’ll lose followers. Personally, that’s a risk I’m willing to take because it’s more important that I prioritize my own needs within this larger digital ecosystem. And no one is going to do that for you. It’s one of those examples of really needing to take responsibility for ourselves. It might seem strange to give this much thought to how we’re using apps like Instagram, but as Annie Dillard once wrote, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Social media can be a land with a lot of gray area. I don’t need to go into all the data we have about how social media impacts our brains and our attentions and our nervous systems. We know it’s something to bear in mind. All or nothing usually isn’t the answer for me, but to thrive in this ever-evolving landscape, we should be aware and fully present in our decision to use or not use social media, and and how it serves us versus how our attention is serving the companies who create the apps and profit from how we use them.
Social media can be a wonderful tool. At its best, it can help us feel connected, we get book recommendations, meet like-minded people, participate in important conversations, and share our work with others. But let’s also honor the fact that, as cyclical beings, our needs can change on a day to day basis, which means the way we use social media might benefit from adapting to a more cyclical rhythm too.
