This summer, I deleted every social media app on my phone. As a teenage girl, it was shocking to others that I would no longer be commenting on their Instagram pictures and liking their tweets. But, for me, it was a much-needed cleanse.
The first social media app I found myself on was Instagram in sixth grade. While I think middle school is an appropriate time to start exploring social media apps, I definitely proved to be “not ready” when I posted 200 pictures on the first day of having my account… embarrassing, right?
Having just Instagram soon turned into having just Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook too. Snapchat for me in middle school was just an app to text people by using silly animal filters on my face. And, as for Twitter, I soon discovered that the app was comedy gold (and still is most of the time).
As I got older, Instagram became all about how one’s feed looks, Snapchat became the way people talked to avoid texting or calling, and Twitter became all about retweets and likes. I found myself sucked into the cycle of scrolling through one app, switching to another, scrolling through that one, and so on.
All I did was scroll.
It wasn’t until after my first year in college that I was talking to my friend about the stereotypical “college experience” when she noticed some red flags in what I was saying. Everything I felt pressured to fulfill in these four years was strictly stemming from what I was seeing on social media.
Once I realized how addicted to social media I was and how I wasn’t even enjoying the apps that I originally downloaded for fun (remember the 200 posts in one day?), I decided to delete my social media apps off my phone.
For two months, I didn’t snap, tweet, or post on anything. And honestly, they were the most peaceful months I had experienced in a long time.
After the two-month cleanse, I decided to re-download the apps, and the weirdest thing happened: I didn’t even want to get on them anymore. So, I kept them downloaded but turned off all of the notifications for them and took them off my home screen.
That’s where I’m at now. While I still find myself getting stuck in an hour of endless scrolling on TikTok every once in a while, I feel much less pressure about my Instagram feed and a lot more carefree about the number of likes my tweets get. So, do I suggest that everyone deletes their social media? Well, if you feel like it’s affecting you more negatively than positively, delete, delete, delete. You don’t have to permanently deactivate your account, but maybe hide the app from your home screen and see how that goes.