In recent months TikTok’s ‘that girl’ trend has inspired me to take better care of myself in order to embrace the influencer lifestyle. I did a deep dive into skincare hacks, re-vamped my wardrobe, and even tried to meditate. however recently I realised the one thing stopping me from becoming the poster child for TikTok wellness was deleting the app entirely. At my worst, I was spending 6 hours a day on TikTok, and after all that I could hardly remember any of the videos I’d seen. At least an interesting movie is something you can relay to someone else and justify spending 2 hours on. However, 1 minute story time clips were not. So I went cold turkey and deleted the app, along with Instagram, to stop me from watching reels instead. Here’s what you need to know.
First of all, all of your drafts get deleted when you delete TikTok. I only remembered this after the fact and am currently mourning the loss of all my dance videos from 2019 – gone but definitely not forgotten. If you still want to get rid of the app but can’t bear to lose your drafts you have a couple options. Publishing them privately will download them to your camera roll for your viewing pleasure, but will not make them public even to friends and followers. You can do this by clicking a draft, pressing post, and making sure under ‘who can view this’, it says only me. A more mellow option would be to remove TikTok from your home screen. Sure, it’ll still be there, but not seeing it might limit the amount of clicks it gets a day. Consider putting a screen time limit on the app if you think deleting it is still to drastic. Or, keep it, whatever works for you!
After deleting TikTok, I would try and open it at least 10 times a day, forgetting it was gone. I would get bored so easily and wished I could just open TikTok for a few minutes. The main reason I used the app was my indecision. I wouldn’t be able to decide what to watch or do, so instead I would open TikTok, hoping something would come to me. Instead, I would find myself endlessly scrolling through the app, and not much else would get done. Once it was gone I needed to find a way to have a bit more agency in my day to day. The first thing I did was make a list of movies I’ve always wanted to watch, or a show I should start. This way, when I wanted to open TikTok I could consult my list and do something a bit more worthwhile. It’s also helped loads with my attention span. Previously even if I was watching a movie I would have to be playing a game or scrolling through insta at the same time. But, by the end of the second week, I found it easier to devote my time to just one thing.
The next thing I started to do after I deleted TikTok was read. I bought book after book after book. It was a great thing to do when I only had a bit of time and didn’t want to watch something or start something big. Plus, unlike TikTok, it works on the tube when I need it most. With all this, I hardly thought about TikTok by week 2 of the month. I never tried to open it, and I wasn’t desperate to have it back.
I was more worried by week 3, that I was missing something and that I wouldn’t be up to date with trends and internet drama. My nightmares came true when the whole Hailey Bieber, Selena Gomez beef blew up. I had no way of hearing who said what without my primary forms of social media; it felt like friends gossiping without you. Eventually, I stopped to wonder if I really needed to know what two women in their 30s were saying about each other, and decided that I probably didn’t.
It’s now been a full month without social media, and I’m not sure I want it back. If I had to pick one downside it’d be that I started spending loads of time on snapchat instead. Still, watching stories doesn’t have the same effect as the endless scroll and I managed to limit myself quite well. It helped me focus on my wellness because I had more free time, and I wasn’t constantly confronted with people who looked like they were doing better than me on their journey to become ‘that girl’. I can now safely say I am that girl, even if I don’t have any apps to prove it on.