Keyanna Bowen took a one-year social media hiatus to rediscover the joys of living in the present. In the process, the interior designer and photographer gained a newfound appreciation for building her business on her own terms—she was offline, but decidedly in control. Here, she explains how you can do it too. 

I am an interior photographer, designer and content creator, so Instagram has always been pivotal to my business and what I hope to build as a brand. But in recent years, I started to realize how much I admired people who would say, “I’m taking a break from Instagram.” When I would meet people in the industry who weren’t on social media, I was baffled by the fact that they could have a business without it.

Last June, a few days before my 36th birthday, I decided that I wanted to take a little social media hiatus. I didn’t put a timeline on it—just signed off and deleted the app, because I had a habit of clicking on it for no reason. It started as a few days, which became two weeks. Then I thought, “I want to keep doing this.”