Last night, just before heading up to bed I published a blog post. Not an exceptionally long one, but something that I wanted to share and hopefully inspire others. Rushing it out, hitting publish just before I turned everything off for the night.

Despite settling down and reading my kind for a while and enjoying a peaceful house my brain started to wonder what feedback I had gained on my post. But you know it’s getting late, dark outside and I am quite enjoying this James Patterson book so I try and put it out of my mind. It’s still there though, the need to check what’s going on. This is a feeling I have been paying attention to recently due to my years of ingrained Twitter muscle memory.

It’s more than a fear of missing out and seems to run deeper into my brain than I care to admit. Soon becoming apparent that I can’t shake this itch in my brain and need to see what’s going on. So I put my Kindle down, pick up my phone and bounce around on Twitter and micro.blog annoyed at myself.

Of course nothing is happening other than a couple of likes, but even if there was I shouldn’t be reading it at this time of night anyway. My need for feedback is now messing up my sleep pattern as well as beginning to stress me out. It seems I am surprisingly good at giving out advice to others, but not very good at keeping it myself. When it comes to social media, it’s got me right where it wants me. Not only am I checking it every bored moment, but I am also checking it for feedback.

I wouldn’t say that I was doing it to inflate my ego, this wasn’t that kind of posts, but I wanted to see if others thought the same. To see if I could provoke others to do something kind, so I’ve already got a kind of excuse sorted in my mind. The fact remains that social media is taking a much larger role in my current life and I don’t like it!