Quit Social Media Lower Blood Pressure Gain Hours Back

We don't do that. And I don't do that. And when I do use social media, if anyone knows me, it's usually positive messages every day. And people know me in St. Louis, Missouri, for being very positive. I speak positive thoughts. I come in my clinic, and everything is positive. It's jazz music. It might be Steve Harvey on the back, deal or no deal. But there is no warfare. There's no anything. There's no politics. It's a safe, free zone for people and veterans to be veterans and to connect with each other. All right, chaplain. OK, I wear quite a few hats. My name is Byron Watson. They call me Sarge. I am also a military veteran. I'm also a veteran with the police department. I was a police officer for 35 years here in this county. I retired in 2008. I came back as a police chaplain in 2016. And so my experience with social media really revealed what they were talking about on the panel. My father passed about two years ago. And I was on social media a lot more than I really realized I was. I was there hoping to connect with people like most people here. I was trying to avoid a lot of the negatism, some of the things that were just flat out racist that I saw on the internet to kind of turn me away a little bit. And after my father passed, I wanted to take a break away from social media because I was just really just grieving of the loss of my father. And I wanted an opportunity to just sort of spend some time with God and being able to get back to what I do. And one of the things I realized when I turned off social media, I turned it off for about six months. I didn't look at it. I never turned it on. And there was two revelations that I immediately noticed. My blood pressure went down. That was the first thing. I went to the doctor. And he says, man, what are you doing? Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. Your blood pressure is the best it's ever been. I said, you're kidding me. He says, what have you done? I said, I really haven't done it. Oh, you know what? I'm not on social media like I used to be. He said, that's one of the reasons. Social media can cause you to become emotional, can cause you to get angry, can cause you to be frustrated. And in the process of all of that, you're actually raising your blood pressure and you don't even know it. The time that I was spending on social media was about six hours a day. I didn't realize I was spending that much time. That's time I could be doing God's work. That's time I could be praying. That's time I could be doing something productive.