How My Life Has Changed Since I Quit Social Media

I belong to the last generation who didn’t grow up with social media; in fact, it wasn’t until I was in middle school that social media began to take off. I joined Instagram in 2013, at the age of thirteen. At the time, it was an app to post low-resolution selfies with friends or silly pictures of your pets. No one really tried that hard, and that was what made it enjoyable; there wasn’t the pressure to present the “best version of your life,” to get the angle and lighting perfect, or to generate a certain number of likes and views.

Throughout my teenhood and into my early twenties, social media underwent an enormous evolution, morphing from an informal way to keep in touch with friends and family into the all-consuming, life-draining behemoth of today. Simultaneously, my own behaviors and attitudes toward social media evolved as I spent more and more time online, caught up in the endless scroll, trying to grow my own platform, and increasingly comparing my life to the carefully curated lives of those who I followed.

The changing political landscape had also imbued itself into the platforms to which I belonged, in particular Twitter, where inflammatory and hateful remarks were becoming ever-popular. It seemed inescapable, this doom scroll; this onslaught of negativity and hate that merely served to heighten my anxiety about the world. 

No longer was social media fun, but stressful, demoralizing, and, above all, compulsive; although I recognized in my late teens that the cons of being on social media were far outweighing the pros, it was years before I finally managed to quit. I’d try, deactivating my account for a week or two now and then, but it wasn’t long before I was sucked back into that highly addictive online world, losing hours of my life to my Instagram explore page or Twitter newsfeed and feeling frustrated with myself for not having the willpower to quell my compulsion once and for all.

And then in early 2023, my mental health took a turn for the worse. I was having panic attacks on a weekly basis, my racing thoughts kept me awake at night, and I felt increasingly down and discouraged about my life and the world. I knew I needed to make a change, to prioritize my mental health before it got the better of me — again. Optimizing my lifestyle and sleep hygiene became paramount to my wellbeing, and among the habit changes I implemented was reducing the time that I spent on my phone, particularly on social media.

I started small: setting time limits, unfollowing accounts to declutter my feed, setting my phone to grayscale and leaving it downstairs at night so that I wouldn’t be tempted to go on it at bedtime. In May of 2023, I took the long-awaited plunge and deleted — not deactivated — my Instagram and Twitter accounts and removed the apps from my home screen. No going back now, I thought.

There’s an adjustment period that comes with any habit change, like a lesser form of withdrawal where you feel unsettled, resistant to the unfamiliar newness and highly susceptible to lapsing back into old routine. At first, I felt lost without social media; empty. I felt like I was missing out, like I was sabotaging my writing career by not having a robust online platform. I didn’t know what to do with the hours I’d once spent scrolling through apps and dreaded the boredom which invariably accompanied these intervals of inactivity, though I soon found other ways to fill my time: reading, working on puzzles, being in nature — even simply observing the wildlife in my backyard, noticing things I’d been too preoccupied before to pay the slightest attention.

I became curious again, almost child-like in my fascination of nature. I felt connected to the world around me in a way I hadn’t since my childhood and closer to the people in my life; in the absence of a few hundred superficial online connections, the in-person relationships I had seemed more special and meaningful, and I was less distracted in my everyday interactions. My attention-span grew, and so too did my creativity. In time, I stopped being afraid of boredom and even began to embrace it.

I realized the quiet I’d been craving was not so much external as it was internal; it was a quiet of the mind, and the less information I consumed via technology, the less my thoughts raced, like a hamster stuck on a wheel. I’d spent so long living in fear of my own mind that it took time to get used to sitting with my thoughts, without feeling compelled to seize the nearest distraction. The more I practiced, however, the safer and more at home I began to feel in my own head. This mental quietude I’d obtained made it easier to manage the loud, busy world in which I lived, and consuming current events in smaller, heavily-moderated doses helped me to not feel so angry and anxious about the state of the world, which was no longer constantly at the forefront of my mind.

Getting off social media, I discovered, was only my first step in reducing my dependency on technology. In the coming months, I sought to further severe the tie by significantly scaling back on how much YouTube and television I watched, as well as how “available” I was. I began to leave my phone at home when I went on walks or short outings and to turn off my ringer while I worked. Though this made me less reachable, it felt infinitely healthier, and my friends and family quickly learned not to be alarmed if it took me a couple of hours to reply to a text.

As my dependence on technology decreased, so too did my tolerance of it; the symptoms of too much screentime which most of us have experienced — heavy head, bleary eyes, irritability, and so on—presented ever-earlier, and on the occasions when I regressed into old behaviors and spent several hours on YouTube or Reddit at a time, I always felt really crappy afterward, like I’d just consumed a large and heavy meal. Once my norm, these feelings now served as a reminder of my past dependency and encouraged me to keep at my healthier, offline habits, which didn’t have the same draining effect on my energy and mood.

And keep at them, I did. It’s been almost two years since I last went on social media, and I don’t miss it; most days, I don’t even think about it. I like my quieter, simpler life; I like reading before bed, I like being fully present when I’m in nature, I like that I’m in control of the information I consume, I like that I don’t feel compelled to fill every second of my day with distraction and entertainment, that I can just … be. I like too that I don’t have to have my phone with me twenty-four seven, and that the role of technology in my life is minimal and purposeful rather than all-encompassing.

This has been a journey of multiple years, and it’s one I’m still on every day. In a world where easy, mindless entertainment is literally at our fingertips, moderation is no simple feat but one which requires continual effort and diligence — and it’s so worth it, not only to feel better mentally and physically, but to be more connected to the world, to one another, and to this one, fleeting life we’ve all been given.