I think it’s safe to say that addiction to social media is a real and growing problem in today’s society. This makes sense, though, when you think about what a quick escape it can be from the real world and boring daily tasks. Especially since starting college, I have noticed how much easier it is to scroll through TikTok than to do work. In fact, I have had tons of reading to do all this quarter and don’t feel like I have even caught up yet. For the past four days, however, I have gone on a social media detox and felt an increase in my productivity and motivation, among other benefits.
In general, I think I have had a pretty healthy relationship with social media over the years. I don’t post very often, but I definitely go on social media every day. For this social media detox, I didn’t allow myself to go on any social media, including YouTube and Pinterest. On normal days, I spend the most time on Instagram, mostly scrolling through reels, which I do to try to avoid scrolling on TikTok too much. I have had a 1 hour daily limit set on Instagram for a while now, which I’d say lowered my screen time to begin with, but I do ignore the limit some days. I think that I spend a reasonable amount of time on social media daily, and probably a lot less than a lot of people my age. Still, going on a little bit of a cleanse, even just for four days, felt great. My screen time during normal weeks tends to average about 3 to 3 ½ hours, and for the four days I didn’t go on social media at all, it averaged about 2 hours. I have to say I would have expected it to be a bit lower, but when I think about it, I go on social media a lot when I’m early to classes and when I have a few free minutes, so during those times, I was pretty much just playing games on my phone instead. Either way, one whole hour less in my daily average was pretty good, and I definitely felt the effects.
At first, it was a little difficult to resist the urge to open Instagram because I decided not to delete my social media apps for the purposes of the cleanse. The first couple days, I had to remind myself not to open social media when I had a minute to spare throughout the day. The only times I slipped up and opened a social media app was once on Snapchat when I needed to check if I had food in my teeth (so I only used the camera part) and once while studying when I completely blanked and used YouTube to listen to music on my laptop. It was also kind of difficult when I would talk to my friends about a particular post or they would mention a particular post and I either hadn’t seen what they were talking about or couldn’t pull it up on my own phone to look at. I think there was only one time during the four days that I looked at one of my friend’s phones to see an Instagram post that concerned me, which could also be considered breaking the detox. Overall though, there weren’t too many times where I felt left out of a conversation because of not having seen a post.
As for things that taking a break from social media helped with, I think the biggest one was productivity. Like I mentioned, I have been struggling a little bit this quarter to keep up with all of my school work, but especially for the first half of the social media detox, I felt more motivated and had an easier time than I had been getting work done. I can definitely see myself incorporating this information into my daily routines in the future. If I know there’s a day coming up where I just have a lot of stuff to get done, it would be a big help to make a resolution that I’m not going to go on social media at all that day. I also think that going on social media less helped with my attention span. I noticed myself not getting distracted as much and being able to watch more episodes of my favorite shows without being on my phone at the same time. Another little thing was that not going on social media helped my phone battery stay higher longer, which was nice.
Overall, it was very helpful to have gotten a break from social media for a few days and doing this also helped me take a closer look at my relationship with social media and what I could do to make it better. This didn’t make me want to delete all of my social media accounts, although I have been trying to get myself to delete TikTok for a while now and this gave me an even bigger push to do so. I just felt like I was able to get a reminder that social media is best when it is more of a creative or connective outlet than anything else. When inspiration strikes, or you take a picture that you really want to share, or when you need a good way to keep up with old friends, I think these are the best moments to spend on social media. That is one way I think this cleanse made me want to change my relationship with social media: by making it less of an addiction or pastime and turn it into something more meaningful and healthy. While it is fine to be able to use things like TikTok to allow yourself to take a break from the day every once in a while, I think it could also benefit a lot of us if more people took extended breaks from social media every so often. Going on a social media detox has been a great way for me to re-evaluate the ways that I spend my time on social media and has opened my eyes to better ways to use social media for its good aspects and not let the bad aspects take over.