How a Social Media Trend Changed My Life (And Helped Me Delete It All)

Photo by Rebecca Winter on Unsplash

Hey sweet friend,

How are you?

No, really, how are you?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately (granted, my mind never actually stops, so I guess that is not saying much lol).

Since the weather in Texas has finally shifted here to brisk temps and gloriously gloomy rainy days (and as I’ve been wrestling with heavy things that have come up in counseling), I find myself feeling very tired but in a pensive, reflective way that makes me feel like a tragic heroine staring off into the distance of the English moors pondering the meaning of life.

Photo by Leonie Zettl on Unsplash

I guess we are all angsty teens deep down inside, no matter how old we get, huh?

Anyways, all the therapy got me thinking about just how much I have finally slowed my life down after making that my mission for two years. I was actually pretty proud of myself…until a recent counseling session that my husband and I have every few months came up, and our counselor mentioned that I seemed pretty anxious as I was talking and everything was quickening in how I was speaking, moving, etc.

Yall, I think I might have been less shocked if he said I had grown a tail.

I was surprised. I told him, “Hey, I’ve deleted all short-form social media; it’s been two months, and I feel like there isn’t as much going on in my head.” But he gently pointed out that while that was a great start, there still seemed to be a lot of anxiety and fast-paced thoughts occurring, even though I had stripped my life back.

Seriously, my life right now kind of reflects the depths of autumn that we are in here in November: the bare leaves, the foggy weather, and how everything is well into its hibernation season mirror exactly what it feels like for me.

I don’t have a lot of extracurriculars going on; I’m part of a small group and one other mom group, and I'm keeping up with my kids, home, and childhood trauma. I’ve even put a pause on creating YouTube videos and podcasting, for crying out loud!

As nature and the rest of the world slow down for the holidays, I’ve been trying to do the same and use this time to both reflect and look ahead, like a mom-and-pop shop closing down for the year once December hits. It feels like I am closing up shop once December hits. I just really want to spend that time with my family and calm my brain from all the projects and creative things I feel like I need to do right now, trying to let go and give myself some grace.

Usually in November, I'm usually already in full swing for Christmas.

I love Christmas! The last few years, I’ve been that person who came home from trick-or-treating, got the kids down, and already had the boxes ready to put up our little trinket decorations (I respectfully waited to put up the tree after Thanksgiving for my husband’s sake, but everything else was fair game haha).

But this year, I feel like I am actually able to savor fall. Past me was constantly drinking information from a fire hose, overstimulated in her own mind, so she decided to scroll through the timelines of terror as a means of relaxation lol.

Christmas felt nostalgic and calm, so I just rushed right into it, thinking it would give me a sense of magic and whimsy when really I had MORE to do, HIGHER expectations of myself, and I never actually stopped to look back on the prior year or look ahead in a healthy way towards the next year.

Frazzled but make it festive, if you will.

Looking back across this past year, it feels like I’ve been an ostrich with my head in the sand, just trying to get through the next thing.

But there has been so much growth in me, especially within this last year, and it all started with (drum roll, please)…

A social media trend.

Burnout & Rebuilding (2018–2023)

This time last year, I was still heavily into “my year as a content creator,” as I like to jokingly call it. But I need to take you further back for this all to make sense.

You see, I essentially got married, became a mom, and started following Jesus all within a very quick four-year period (2016-2020).

I didn’t start actively embarking on my faith journey until 2016, when I moved back to the area where I grew up and spent a year trying to find a good church, friends, all the typical post-grad life stuff. Soon after, I met my husband, got engaged and married within a year, was diagnosed with an alphabet soup of mental and physical health issues, and then suffered a traumatic pregnancy loss right before our one-year anniversary. Three months later, I got pregnant with my oldest, only to experience horrible pregnancy anxiety that the pandemic definitely did not help with. Following her birth, I had a severe PCOS flare-up, packed on 20 pounds while breastfeeding, and continued to mentally unravel while trying to navigate my own emotions alongside a toddler who was trying to do the exact same thing.

Let’s just say I wasn’t #livingmybestlife.

So you get the picture: a lot happened in a short period of time, and it was hard, blah blah blah. The years between 2018 and 2023 were essentially what I like to call my burnout recovery era. I literally just tried to put one foot in front of the other, clutching onto the Lord for dear life and just regurgitating what I learned about emotional regulation to my toddler cause we were literally learning this together.

Isn’t parenting humbling like that? We aren’t experts at this at all a few steps ahead but still hand-in-hand on this journey with God and our children.

I spent my time rebuilding good rhythms in my life, taking care of my daughter, going to church, and being part of community, while visiting medical doctors to handle my PCOS and counselors for my mental health. Finally, around 2023, my body and mind felt like they were in a cozier form of survival mode, and, you know what, it was a win for me.

Doomscrolling to “Doomcreating” (2024–2025)

By 2024, I got some mental bandwidth back and was ready to make life feel slow, soft, and, most importantly, SAFE for my psyche.

It was time for some hobbies.

I have always loved writing. I had multiple blogs before and after having kids, and while I am not necessarily the most career-driven (being a stay-at-home mom has been my dream come true), writing brings out more passion and ambition than anything else outside of Jesus and my family. I had majored in Public Relations and Communications, and my work experience was in multi-unit dental healthcare marketing, specializing in social and digital media, but I became a stay-at-home mom after being laid off during COVID.

After getting through burnout, I found myself both over- and understimulated as a stay-at-home mom, and I was spending way too much time on TikTok. So in 2025, I told myself, “Sarah, either stop consuming and start creating, or just delete everything.”

So I started a Substack as a hobby and tried to promote it on short-form platforms to learn the ins and outs of social media marketing, keep my skills up to date, and keep my resume sharp.

I was in my content creator era.

Photo by Collabstr on Unsplash

Throughout 2025, I shared my experience with burnout and rebuilding into something softer, slower, and more sacred.

I dove into creative projects with gusto, publishing an ebook, a children’s book, and a digital product.

I was posting about living slower, but really I'd simply shifted the chaotic energy from happening AT me (via life circumstances) to WITHIN me. I survived burnout with God, meds, and a nasty doomscrolling addiction. And now that I had energy, I transferred that addiction to what I now call doomcreating. If you are unfamiliar with the term, here is a completely valid definition that I made up myself:

doom·cre·at·ing /ˈduːm.kriːˌeɪ.tɪŋ/ noun

The phenomenon in which a creative individual bypasses or replaces the habit of doomscrolling with frantic creative production, project-hopping, or constant artistic pivoting. Covert doomcreating is a more subtle and internal form characterized by an overactive mind obsessively checking analytics, refining strategies, or chasing digital validation. Common signs include a loss of joy in hobbies, heightened internal pressure for creative perfection, relentless comparison, and an inability to let projects unfold at a natural pace.

I noticed I would get overwhelmed by real life and just want to retreat into my online writing life, even getting annoyed if my husband or children interrupted that time. It was not a life-giving hobby so much as my pacifier, but I thought it was a sign that I was doing better because it was a far cry from how I had operated in previous years.

I was handing myself the adult version of Mountain Dew and Cocomelon on an iPad before bed and wondering why I wasn’t feeling any more regulated.

Now to be fair, was it like this the entire time? No. I learned a lot of useful things, made some money, connected with great people, and grew in my confidence. But something I have said over and over again is that a good thing can always become a God thing if you’re not careful.

This is where I was at mentally in November 2025, right before I ironically encountered the “analog living” trend.

The Analog Trend & My Analog Experiment (Early 2026)

I’ll be completely honest: I rolled my eyes a bit when I saw the rise of “analog living” on TikTok. But I had to do a heart check. I came across this kind of content and its trend cousins (cottagecore aesthetic, romanticized homesteads, slow living) amid horrendous burnout, and while some of it seemed performative, it reinforced my need to find my identity in God and contentment in my own life.

I realized that slow, soft, sacred, intentional living can be biblical. God had a perfect design for the way everything in this world should be, so it shouldn’t surprise us that amid a striving, burnt-out world, there was a rise in people seeking connection in things that feel simpler (we saw that later this year as well with the rise in 90’s nostaliga).

But just like serving McDonald’s on a silver platter wouldn’t make it fine dining, so it is with these trends. You will never be able to completely capture the essence of God‘s full design for an intentional life and translate it digitally in a way that does it Him justice.

My initial irritation at the rise of this new trend stemmed from the idea that MY heart for my content was in the right place, but that THEY were doing it from a place of pomp and performance. God swiftly humbled me in that thought. So in early 2026, I decided to start my own personal analog experiment to turn my insecurity into inspiration with two goals in mind:

1. Make my phone a tool again, rather than a tyrant that consumed my whole life

2. Find more ways to enjoy life offline and build a life I loved offline

As part of this experiment, I did a variety of things like getting a small notepad for my purse (hello, ADHD mom brain), using a digital camera again (didn’t last lol), reading on my Kindle instead of my phone, and using a Brick phone blocker and time limitations.

As the experiment went on, it became an eye-opening journey into how I handle stress and overwhelm. I noticed that when I felt out of control in my day-to-day life, the temptation to retreat into my phone instead of pressing into God and my family was at an all-time high. It was a devastating and humbling realization that, for me, it was deep heart issue. That was the place I was running to for comfort instead of retreating to where true comfort comes from: God.

So the analog experiment stopped being something I casually documented on Substack and became a ruthless pursuit of intentionality.

Burning The Freakin’ Digital Bridge

By the time summer hit, I reached a limit where all the friction, detoxes, and obstacles I was setting just weren’t enough, so I fully deleted everything. I had read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport in May and was immediately intrigued by how I could use social media more intentionally so I did one last break over the summer then tried to reintroduce it (per the prompting in Cal’s book). When I reactivated everything, I just couldn’t do it. I was too overwhelmed. So one Tuesday afternoon, I deleted everything and didn’t look back.

Not deactivated. Full send delete.

Scorched Earth delete.

Because apps have a 30-day grace period where logging back in reactivates your profile, I kept getting entrapped. So, I took some extreme measures:

• I created a burner email address

• I updated my Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts with this new burner email as the primary login

• I scheduled all those profiles for deletion

• Then, I permanently deleted the burner email account itself.

The I wasn’t able to regain access, even if I wanted to.

It carried a strange sense of grief, realizing that something I grew up with since I was a teenager was coming to an end. But louder than the grief was the overwhelming sense of peace, freedom, and exquisite SILENCE I felt.

They say the devil is in the details, but I've found that the devil is actually in the distraction. Now he has one less door to access my attention.

What’s Next

As I sit here in November, watching the foggy rain and taking time to slow down, I really marvel at my journey. I don’t think I can adequately do justice to just how addicted to social media I was.

I hear amazing testimonies all the time of God breaking people free from addictions to porn, drugs, alcohol. Those are big deals. But social media and digital usage are so entrenched in our lives and culture that it feels weird to talk about being “set free” from it even with people calling it out more.

We have seen this with “mommy wine” culture (something I also fell victim to in the midst of my worst motherhood burnout). More and more people have been calling out the dangers of normalizing things like “mommy just needs her juice” commentary and sneaking alcohol to kids’ sporting events or birthday parties. While I love a good glass of wine, this social callout convicted me a few years ago.

But what about our phones? Mommy’s not sipping her glass of wine on the toilet or holding it in one hand while driving to school drop-off with the other.

And, sweet friend, I know it is SO much more deeply nuanced than what I am presenting. Please know that my job is not to convict; that is God’s domain, and praise Him for that! As someone who has struggled with social media and alcohol, this commentary is aimed at myself as I spent over a year wrestleing with my own shortcomings and work to determine what my own personal boundaries need to be. What I am finding myself asking, though, is this:

In terms of addiction, where is the line between algorithms and alcohol?

Both are not only more socially prevalent but also more socially acceptable than, say, cocaine. Both allow you to have some performative level of functionality if you’re careful enough.

With digital addiction, you also have people with entire platforms (myself included) dedicated to how not addicted they are or how not addicted they are trying to be. The irony isn’t lost on me.

I am not advocating for everyone to get a flip phone or delete social media. My addiction to social media was extreme, and so I took more extreme measures for myself to determine a moderate, sustainable, long-term approach on a soul level. So if you don’t struggle like how I did, praise God for that. You are stronger than I was.

I have started to notice just how much we try to bring God online instead of bringing people offline to talk about God. Stepping back has given me the bandwidth to build genuine relationships with people who actively demonstrate the love of Jesus, and to make space to hear from Him and engage in my faith, motherhood, and creativity in a way that is so much more meaningful than before.

I think it came down to asking myself this: in an age where everyone is posting content and sharing thoughts, how important is it, actually, for me to post as if content creation were my job? I would love to get paid for writing and content creation, but is it worth joining the grinding masses to try to build something that may never take off? Last year, I would have said yes. But this year, I’m answering no.

I would rather worship at the altar of Adonai, not AI.

Whether you’re a consumer or a creator, we are all on the same hamster wheel of the algorithm and validation. When you use vulnerability to chase virality, whether knowingly or not, you inevitably reach a crucial moment where you have to choose which you want more: the fickle affections of the double-tapping thumb or the eternal love of the nail-pierced palm?

So this is how a social media trend changed my life. This is why I am so passionate about intentional living and talking about the intersection of faith, motherhood, creativity, and social media. This is why I share what I’ve learned both on here and more specifically in my Made for Mom digital resource library (more resources to come soon regarding digital minimalism for moms!)

If God can use my journey to encourage and equip one person, that’s all I can hope.

Thank you for being on this journey of intentional living with me. I leave you with this question, sweet friend: what is one thing you have done, or can do this week, to be more intentional about either making your phone a tool again or creating a life you love offline?

Much love,

Sarah

Thank you for taking the time to read the words on my heart. I want nothing more than to encourage others and learn from their wisdom in the community we are building here.

If this space has resonated with you, you’re welcome to support my work through a paid subscription (including resources I’ve made thoughtfully for you) or a small gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Your presence is a gift enough, and anything beyond that helps my family and honors the time I put into my writing and resource creation.