How I Quit Excessive Social Media Use During This Pandemic

Now is the perfect time to do so.

Social media can be a handy tool to connect with people and build businesses. Furthermore, it provides us with social feedback, making us feel ecstatic and loved. But with too much magnificence usually comes a price. It’s a cost we don’t realize to be present until we see what we are missing out on. And once we recognize the lack, the price has already been paid.

On the surface, we are paying for using social media with our time and mental wellbeing. Looking at the issue in more detail, science is finding increasingly more evidence for social media's dark side. But one doesn’t even have to rely on science to realize this. Every day, social media keeps nagging on my daily plans, without me prohibiting it.

I escaped social media rabbit holes at the beginning of this pandemic. Mostly the comment sections swarmed by bots and conspiracy theorists made me aware of the toxicity that I exposed myself to — seemingly voluntarily — daily. It wasn’t an easy endeavor, but nowadays, I am in complete control, without a need to check back in. I achieved this by focusing on two crucial aspects: Mindset and action.

Mindset

The idea of quitting social media has come up several times throughout my life. And although I had the correct strategies implemented, they wouldn’t work unless I was ready for them mentally.

Fear of missing out

First, I had to rid myself of the fear of missing out, which is my strongest justification for logging back into social media. The main source for this is motivation porn. Posts about “making it”, hustle culture, and inspiration are awesome and can improve peoples’ mindset and ultimately their lives. But it is not something you necessarily have to consume, especially if you are spending too much time according to your own estimation on these platforms as a result.

Reading quotes about success can be useful, but it is mostly just procrastination. Thinking and reading about being disciplined and looking at pictures of amazing houses provides us with pleasure in the short term. It feels good to know we could make it. However, as with most short term focused thinking, it doesn’t translate into a future benefit. None of the quotes you read two weeks ago improved your life today. You would have to read another quote to get that improved feeling again — or you could have taken action two weeks ago and reap the first benefits of doing so.

One of the most important insights of my self-improvement journey has been that there will be no progress without taking action beforehand. I couldn’t read about taking action and expect to improve my life this way. Yet, that’s exactly what I used Instagram for. This was the first concept I had to understand before I could go on the journey to using it less.

My next fear was to miss out on the lives of family and friends. I still have it to this day, which is why I check in regularly to text people back and stay up to date. However, most social media profiles aren’t showcasing every facette of their life but are rather composed like a highlight reel.

First, you will probably not miss out on too much. At least in my case, the people that I am good friends with and don’t want to miss out on life-changing updates would text me the happenings anyway. And regarding the others, I think it will be completely fine to see their highlights a few days later when I may catch up with the latest posts.

Fake comparisons

As most people are mainly posting their highlights on social media, fake comparisons will become a problem, too. We will always compare ourselves to others to find our place in the different dominance hierarchies. Comparing yourself in states of boredom or procrastination — which are the two main reasons I am using social media — with photoshopped highlights of others will delude your perception of the hierarchy.

I would love to think of myself as someone who doesn’t compare himself to others. And although I know about the problem, it still doesn’t make me immune to its effects. Not engaging in manipulating my perspective will increase my confidence and happiness while decreasing my anxiety, which is the ultimate reason for limiting social media use in my estimation.

Lastly, I had to set the right expectations.

Will I ditch social media for the rest of my life? No, it’s a great tool, after all. This is about using social media mindfully and within reason. It’s about taking back the control, which social media has deprived me of.

Action

To achieve this, I broke the bad habit down into three parts:

1. The phase leading up to the bad habit
2. The bad habit itself
3. The aftermath

To gain back control, I had to tackle all three parts simultaneously.

1. The phase leading up to the bad habit

I had to design my life in a way so that logging into social media becomes improbable and tedious. I further had to decrease potential triggers, such as seeing that I got a message or got tagged in a picture.

The latter was achieved by merely deactivating notifications. Notifications, in general, are seldom of any utility. They are useful, in case you have to react to something quickly. If someone urgently needs my help, for example, I would love to see a notification of this. But in most other instances, notifications aren’t serving you; instead, they represent a tool to draw you back into the app. How often do you get a notification, open the app to check it out, and then find yourself several minutes scrolling through your feed?

That’s exactly what these notifications are there for.

Furthermore, I installed an app blocker, disabling social media apps throughout my workday. Sadly, I still have to find one without a possibility to bypass the block. But, any extra work that I have to put in to open the app takes away from the probability of ending up on a social media platform — scrolling.

Uninstalling the apps and only accessing them through a browser would also be a potential step to increase the hurdle of logging and scrolling. I haven’t done that, but you can try it if that solution may fit you better.

2. The bad habit itself

We are mostly following bad habits for three reasons: Either we don’t know any better, we know about the harm but enjoy it nevertheless, or because we are addicted.

I couldn’t rely on the excuse of ignorance anymore, so it turned out to be a mixture of the two latter. I was at a point at which I still enjoyed social media mostly. You can find a fair share of great content out there, after all. However, sometimes I opened social media to escape any pressure or anxiety I was exposed to in reality. Which might be fine if it helped me relax, but it didn’t.

Usually, social media doesn’t solve my problems. All it does is consuming the time I would need to face my problem, worsening my mood, and the situation overall. Still, I would revert to social media regularly. But I also believe that these two factors are linked. As I sometimes enjoy using social media, the addicted aspect is looking for more of this enjoyment and keeps using until it receives some.

I decided to switch my phone’s color mode to black and white throughout my workday to reduce the enjoyment factor. This way, I won’t constantly be bombarded with saturated, beautiful, addictive colors. To reduce the addictive factor, I again focused on two aspects.

First, I always had to be aware of my reasons for reducing my consumption. Everything I have listed above under the mindset part will ultimately be needed once my mind tries to persuade me to check my social media feeds. I did this by noting them all down on my notion dashboard, reminding me daily. Also, writing this article will help consolidate these reasons in my mind.

Second, I tackled the mindfulness aspect of it. If I end up on social media during my day again, I want to be actively aware of it. The enemy is mindless scrolling; hence I have implemented mindfulness reminders, asking me after ten minutes of using social media whether this is what I want to be doing right now.

3. The aftermath

Lastly, I have to diminish the reward I may receive from social media while maximizing the reward for not logging into my accounts.

Apart from the above tactics, I added an accountability partner. A good friend of mine also feeling like social media is eating up too much of his time. Together, we checked in daily on one another, discussing our challenges and progress. The fear of having to tell the other one of us that we mindlessly scrolled through our feeds again ultimately diminished the alleged reward social media was promising to provide us with.

Besides, not wasting as much time on social networks allowed me to do more throughout the day. In the long run, these accomplishments were more rewarding than anything I have seen on social media. Which again, would reward me for not logging into my accounts.

This plan will seem quite strict, and it is. The idea is to take some drastic action, which allows us to build momentum. Once this momentum is built, the urge to check social media will fade.

Nowadays, I am still using an app blocker during my working hours since it's convenient. However, I am not trying to circumvent it anymore. Also, once I use social media, the risk of ending up scrolling mindlessly reached zero. After staying away from it and building momentum, social media wouldn’t affect me like it once did.

That being said, there is still the possibility of me getting caught up in the downwards spiral again. Especially during stressful or frustrating times, I have to be aware of this eminent risk and react according to the above plan.