I quit social media for a month and here’s what happened

I am sure that most of the people reading this article have at least two to three social media accounts and apps. Before writing this article, I counted my social media accounts and the result is 7. It is worth noting that I am only using three of them proactively.

Among social media platforms, Instagram, YouTube and iMessage are the essentials for me. However, I cannot consider YouTube as a social media platform. I feel like it is more like an entertainment platform with a spice of human communication.

In the summer of 2021, I decided to close my accounts for an unknown amount of time. However, I only kept it closed for a month. It was because of my work and I was working as a digital marketing specialist. Therefore, I couldn’t deny Instagram and Facebook.

Despite this forced opening, I did not directly interact with my accounts and the usage of it was due to professional reasons. I also kept using YouTube and iMessage. YouTube was a platform for entertainment and I never used it for social media purposes.

I was only using iMessage as a means of contact with my girlfriend and it was the most convenient way of communication. Let’s accept the fact that in a digital age, it is nearly impossible to contact and exchange information without social media. So, the slight exposure was accepted because I was not interacting with a bigger audience.

My main reason for closing the accounts was my mental health. I am constantly writing blog posts and interacting with people on my public account. Once you are interacting with many people, you start to receive some toxic attention as well. Additionally, it was cutting down my productivity and I needed a break from it.

After I returned to my accounts, I realized that something had changed in me. The meaning of social media and its importance lost its value sharply and I started to be more aware of my social media usage. However, I would like to talk about them in more detail below:

Information overload is real

It is no secret that we are living in the golden age of content. There are a lot of ways of accessing new information and we are constantly exposed to different types of vast information on social media. Unfortunately, most of the information is unnecessary.

Once I open the app, I am getting lots of posts from the people I follow. Most of the content from the following list is my preference. However, once I reach the explore page, I see a lot of reels, videos and posts. This means a wave of content that I haven’t asked for.

As soon as you are caught in this endless loop of content, it takes you hours to escape the loop and get back to real life. At the end of this loop, not only time is wasted, but your brain capacity is out of storage. Too much information is exhausting the brain and this translates into constant tiredness and underperformance for the rest of the day.

Our brains are like flash drives and hard disks. If you are stuffing them with too much data, it will start to slow down and most importantly you may not be able to store the important data anymore. It is the same with our brains.

Imagine, you are trying to learn coding after coming home from a long day of work. You take some rest and start scrolling through Instagram. After this session, you end up with exhaustion and your brain wants to rest furthermore. Because you already used your capacity for the day and important knowledge cannot be absorbed in that state of the brain.

It is essential to keep our consumption of information clean. Too many unnecessary items on your phone will notify you of the lack of storage and too much unnecessary information will alert your brain to shut down and take some rest. Therefore, plan your social media consumption wisely because information overload is real.

The illusion of real-world on social media

We usually use social media for our friends and acquaintances. It is a great way to communicate with them and follow up on the events in their life. However, as we move forward, we start acquiring new relations on social media too. Sometimes we are more drawn to these relations than we have in our daily life.

This, as a result, destroys the boundaries of the virtual world and physical world. People are becoming more attached to social media, as it is easier to interact and even much easier to hide feelings and emotions. Even worse, people start to ignore their surroundings and prefer to stay in the comfort zone named social media.

It leads to communication issues in daily life. It is not only related to the obsession with social media but with the virtual world in general. Such problems did not affect me too much, but I have seen people being affected by this issue.

Personally, once I stopped using social media, I was more concentrated on my surroundings and communicating much better with the people in my daily interactions. Besides, it is more exciting to talk to people face-to-face rather than virtually. I feel like physical talks are much better at transmitting emotions and feelings during the conversation. I prefer an actual smile to a digital one.

After I returned to social media, my understanding of virtual and physical boundaries has changed a lot. Now, I am less interested in the people on the internet and I care more about my physical surroundings. It is a change for good and I hope to continue it forever.

Addiction problems

Social media is addictive and that’s no secret to anyone. Every day, people’s dependency on social media increases and it is not good. Another problem is that most people don’t even realize that they are addicted to social media and usually they get offended by such remarks.

It can be a great place for all-in-one content, however, it is not very feasible to be dependent on one digital method for all the things we are looking for.

I have seen a lot of friends of mine addicted to different features of social media: likes, good comments, funny videos, memes and so on. The only time I lost control over my social media usage was during the last year and I was following news headlines carefully due to the events in my country.

After a few days, I realized that I was addicted and it was not good for my productivity and mental health. Waiting for some news or rumor made me anxious and nervous. Additionally, I was not doing any work or studying. From time to time, I can feel the addiction problems, when I am too depressed or unmotivated to do anything.

After a month’s break, the addiction problem was also gone and I realized that I can do and enjoy most of the things without social media. If I was depressed, I was talking to someone. If I was looking for news, I was just checking the news websites, not the social media.

It can be a great place for all-in-one content, however, it is not very feasible to be dependent on one digital method for all the things we are looking for.

I am going to miss my posts

A lot of people have this fear. It is undeniable that there are lots of things on social media. We follow lots of pages and people and they share the content at different times. Some people have the fear of missing out on the recent posts, not being able to comment or share them before anyone else.

If your friend Jake has posted a picture an hour ago and you didn’t see it, it is not a problem.

I had this problem during the specific period mentioned above. I was cautious and very attentive to every post to not miss any detail or news. This kept me in a constant state of thinking about social media and it was not a nice experience.

The first important lesson is the constant availability of social media. If you understand this reality, you can start putting some distance to social media. If your friend Jake has posted a picture an hour ago and you didn’t see it, it is not a problem. You will have the chance to like it later and probably comment on it: “That’s so cool, man”.

Secondly, we can’t keep ourselves attentive to social media all the time. There are more important things to do and the digital world is just a way to ease our communication. The fast and easy availability of content shouldn’t be a source of distraction.

The Approval Psychology

You must be the one approving yourself, not the others or the social media.

Another main reason for social media addiction is approval psychology. People share photos and wait for likes and comments. In the case of bloggers and influencers, they expect more visibility. These manners are part of approval psychology. Unfortunately, many people do this in a non-deliberate way.

When we see the likes and nice comments on our posts, we feel better, happier and satisfied. Because we get the feeling of approval by others. It is like being suitable to other people’s standards. This, in return, causes a lot of mental health problems. As soon as we see the decreasing activity levels, we are panicking and searching for mistakes in ourselves.

In reality, we don’t need approval on social media to continue our life. Some people’s career and professional choices can be related to people’s approval, however, the social media statistics do not tell everything about the person. One day you will get 100 likes, the other day it can be 70.

Remember, the quality is over the quantity. If you believe in the quality of work you do, there is no problem with the social media side of your life. Your likes can be low due to some people not checking their social media accounts or missing your posts. You must be the one approving yourself, not the others or the social media.

Comparison with the unreal

Social media is like a low-budget fantasy movie, the only green screen the people have is the filters. From time to time, I like to analyze my social media accounts. During the analysis, I realize that most of the photos have either lower exposure or slight color-grading. I decrease exposure because it just shows me more drama.

Believe it or not, most people do not even use small detail editing and instead use the filters from numerous apps. If those options are still not satisfying, they eventually use some Instagram filters too. The people I mention here have more insecurities about their looks than you, me and everyone else. Yet, you still believe in the fantasy world.

Instagram filters are just small-scale examples of the unreal world existing on social media. How about the people showing off their rich-looking lifestyle or the so-called productive, professional business life? These fantasies are like your Amazon basket. They may be tempting to get, but it is a waste of money and time.

Everyone would like the best out of their life and may sympathize with some people. It doesn’t mean that your life is bad or you should get that life for sure. You can be different and much better than him or her. Maybe getting a lifestyle like some influencer may not be the best destiny for you, so try to be yourself and stop the comparison.

You are good and unique in the way you are. If you need to develop and adopt some new habits or better discipline, that’s a different story. If the change is not bad for you, you can commit to that. We humans must develop and improve ourselves constantly and it must be done in the healthiest way possible.

Social media is like a low-budget fantasy movie, the only green screen the people have is the filters.

Time Eater

Finally, and most importantly, it is a big drain on time. Probably, this is the main point for me. Because my main problem with social media was the loss of time. Scrolling through the posts, answering all the DMs and interacting with many people are time-consuming activities. I was doing this mostly because I was tired and wanted to rest.

… small quantities of the work will matter in the long run and it is good to pay attention to the time.

Social media was another source of my exhaustion and after understanding this, I stopped the excessive use. As soon as I came home, I wanted to rest and start learning to program. However, social media was not the way to rest but to drain my energy and time.

Maybe you are using Instagram in small chunks throughout the day, then I would suggest you go to the usage statistics of your app. I experimented with this in the summer and the results were shocking. On average, I spent 105 minutes a day. Spending around 13% of your day may not seem much in general.

However, think about it in this way, you repeat this activity every day. The result is a huge amount of time. Instead of spending time on social media, you could have developed different habits and skills over the long run. Therefore, it is not about the amount of lost time, but the quality of time spent.

Therefore, don’t underestimate the amount of time spent on social media. Because it is not about quantity but quality. Think about what you can do instead of surfing on your Instagram page. Because small quantities of the work will matter in the long run and it is good to pay attention to the time.

This was the longest article I have written so far. However, it is good to talk about personal experiences. I hope the article will be useful to you to quit social media for a while and understand what is wrong and right. The topics of mental health, productivity and time are important. Therefore, keep the advice in mind and make use of them.