Why I took a social media detox, and why you should too.
I’m a 21-year-old that spent most of her life knee deep in social media. As an outgoing, extroverted teenager, I had a lot of friends and spent most of my time on Facebook. I got to high school and Instagram became the new fad. Mind you, this was before smartphones were the status quo. So, I took my dad’s first gen smartphone and made myself an account there too.
Everywhere we went there would be a photo-shoot on our 2 MP cameras until we’d clicked an “insta-worthy” photo. The popular girls had hundreds of likes and followers. Some of them were nice about it. Most of them were not. If you followed more people than you were followed by, you were a loser. It was a time when Valencia was used more than Facetune.
We grew up being bullied in person and through a screen. We developed unhealthy mindsets and an over reliant relationship with social media. What people who have never met us thought became more important than the opinions of those actually around us.
As we got older, we discovered Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and most importantly, Snapchat. We witnessed the passing of Orkut just as we were coming of age, otherwise we’d get on that too. Social media became the center of our lives and we documented everything we did for the ‘gram, or for the snapstory. The upside, or downside depending on how you look at it, is that we have an extensive collection of memories that, under normal circumstances, we’d have forgotten.
Views, likes, and followers became the new teenage economy. When a picture didn’t do well, it was promptly deleted. Not much has changed. Except maybe the numbers.
Personally, it messed me up. The generation after us has it worse.
I was a young and very impressionable teenager reproached for flowing away with the tide one too many times. I quickly fell into the well of yearning for validation in the form of likes. My high school friendships were fickle and emotional. Likes, I thought, were forever.
Last month, I spent over three hours a day on average on Instagram, only worsened by the pandemic. Whether we like it or not, some of us have nothing to do. Stuck in the limbo between getting my engineering degree and the delay of joining the workforce, my motivation to learn new things is depleting daily. Even my hobbies bore me now.
It got so bad that I installed Tiktok. I even made a few.
I got so into memes at one point that I could have a conversation with my friends, also Instagram addicts, speaking only in meme lingo.
Usually, life would be full of things to do. Classes, skipping classes, assignments, café runs, and long zombie-like commutes used to take up most of my day.
Like every extrovert, social distancing has been difficult for me, so I grip at every opportunity to interact with people despite being stuck at home. While it has served as a platform for me to stay connected to my friends, social media has been being increasingly flooded with various mediums of negativity.
We’re paying more attention to the news. The pandemic. The loss of life. The international political tension. The police brutality in already brutal times. The dire state of the world is being displayed front and center, in capital letters across our screens, and the people who can do something about it are arguing about why the opposition isn’t doing more.
Some of us are locked down in situations that we used to be able to easily escape with a quick coffee with a friend or just a Saturday morning game of football. Watching a film in the theatre seems like a distant dream now. It hasn’t been great for our mental health.
My tipping point came when a well-known Indian actor, Sushant Singh Rajput, renowned for his kind heart and dedication to his craft, took his own life. He was young and had touched every Indian heart in one way or another. He was successful, rich, adored, and had 13.9 million followers.
I posted a lengthy Instagram series in his honor, trying to educate my meagre 430 followers about the troubled relationship between men and their mental health. I noted that while talking to your friends might help, talking to a trained professional is the right thing to do. I provided helpline details and resources to reach out to. As did everyone else.
A day later, the videos started coming in.
With the cacophony of hoards asking “why” and screaming bloody murder at nepotism at the background, hordes of influencers posted their two cents about the people posting their two cents about mental health.
They said, stop posting and go be a better person. They said it in an IGTV video.
They said, everyone will suddenly become a mental health expert. They then spoke about mental health.
They said people prefer to talk to friends, not strangers. Then they said friends are fake.
The irony was not lost on me.
None of these videos were targeted at me specifically. That didn’t stop my mind from being personally affected, and offended, by them. I had done the right thing. I had taken a situation, provided fact-backed education, written words of reassurance, and provided resources to help. In a family where mental health is rarely spoken about, my father asked for my post so he could share it with his friends. That was supposed to be a win.
I could have heard the criticism and let it go, like healthy people would have done. For some reason, I just couldn’t. In the meantime, the press was grilling celebrities on why they hadn’t spoken up yet about their colleague’s early demise.
It brought back the duality of life and society. No matter what you do, you will never be able to make everybody happy.
I knew this, and yet I found myself unable to apply it. My walls of social media dependent validation came crashing down on me. I was applauded by my followers for the information, and still let the opinions of strangers distress me. That’s when I knew I couldn’t keep living like this.
I informed my nearest and dearest and hit the small x on corner of Instagram app.
I stayed off Instagram for 7 days, and it was revolutionary.
My mind cleared up. My phone screen time went down drastically. It’s as if someone put a vacuum to my temple and sucked out the negative energy.
I started to spend more time on YouTube, catching up on some light comedy and the lives of the folks at the Bon Appetit test kitchen. I signed up for medium, spent hours micro-analysing my LinkedIn profile and working on my network, audited a course on Coursera, finished a painting I’d been procrastinating on for weeks, and played a whole lot of PUBG. I am still young after all.
My muscle memory craved the motion of aimless scrolling for a while, and my mind felt devoid of the joy brought by 15-second videos and meme culture. I accidentally cut off contact with friends that I only communicated with on DM. Then something magical happened.
People started sending me screenshots of funny images. Screen recordings of hilarious videos. Links to their favourite IGTVs that I could watch without logging in. I might have left my Instagram community for a while, but they weren’t ready to leave me.
In the age of simplicity, when the world is at our fingertips, the act of these people taking an extra step when they saw something they thought I’d enjoy, to get it to me, is something people don’t really do anymore. It was an unexpected upside to the whole ordeal.
My fingers twitched less as the days went by, and even after the week was over, I didn’t itch to reinstall the app as I had been on day one. When it did return, however, hand in hand with my iOS 14 beta, it stayed off my home screen, tucked away neatly in my app drawer with badges firmly remaining turned off.
It’s safe to say that I didn’t attain nirvana or find my inner peace, but I did install the app with a better sense of self. No longer dependent on validation by means of likes, I had achieved something that might seem like second nature to some, and easier to say than to do for others. Now when I try out a new product, I don’t urge to publish a review. When I read some disturbing commentary on socio-political events, I no longer want to put up a twelve-slide rant. I probably should, but I don’t.
Through this process, I learnt many things about myself. My greatest takeaway, however, is that it is okay to choose your mental health over the digital expectations of an Instagram society.
Society will criticize you no matter what you do with your digital presence, so you might as well do what you want.
I am down to 40 minutes a day spent on Instagram. I no longer have a Twitter account. That’s a story for another day.
Here’s why you should detox once in a while too.
Maybe, unlike me, you aren’t over reliant on Instagram. Maybe for you, it’s Facebook. Maybe it’s Twitter. Most recently, it’s probably Tiktok.
Check your screen time. Every phone, irrespective of make and model, provides you with the ability to check how long you’re spending staring at your screen, further classified by app. It should show you how often you pick your phone up, which apps you open first after pickup, and which apps are sending you the most notifications as well. This information should show you just how dependent you are on your phones, and further, on social media.
If you’re young like me, fresh out of college with no direction or ETA on when your company finally wants you to join, and sending your friends memes is what you do for most of the day, maybe it’s time to get a little head start on your other batch-mates. There are tons of free or cheap courses available on so many different topics. Take one! Or even just scroll through the ones available. See what’s out there. It’ll leave you with so much more clarity. Or you’ll just end up learning a new language! Win-win either way.
Do a fitness challenge! There are some great follow-along work out videos on YouTube for all levels. You don’t have to install a new app, and you get a companion encouraging you along the way. If you still think that’s boring, try some dance workouts to get your mood up!
Fix your sleep schedule. The old “I was in bed at 11 and was just scrolling through so-and-so, next thing I know, it’s 4 am!” is a story we’ve told too often. It means we wake up at 2 pm, and a whole day feels wasted. We have the time to correct these habits.
Focus on yourself in this pandemic. Some of you might find it difficult to just up and delete your apps, some of you might have social media dependent careers. Find what works for you. If you can’t delete them, try setting an app timer. They’ll lock your apps after you spend a set amount of time on them, unlocked only at midnight, or with a passcode.
It’s worth it. Take as long as you need. Break the chains of dependency. There’s a lot of negativity being put out into the world every single day, it’s upon you to decide how much of it you want to consume.
