I Quit Facebook and Instagram for 5 Nights and Learned Some Things About Myself

Up until this week, there were only two things in this world I considered myself addicted to: coffee and pizza.

Coming to realize my social media addiction was a complicated and deeply reflective journey, one where I had to lose what felt like everything to see what I was clinging onto so tightly. But I took the hard but necessary steps to be able to self-evaluate: I gave up all social media for five days.

When I say “all social media” I mean only the platforms I actually care about using daily — Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — and when I say “I gave up” I mean I gave up after 6 p.m. So really what I should be saying is: I gave up Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for five days after 6 p.m. each night.

But in the interest of honesty, I should actually say this: I planned to give up Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for five days outside the hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., but I failed on the first morning and realized I am a weak person, so I changed my own rules and only gave them up after 6 p.m. I also replaced those three platforms with other social media, and thus am addicted — very addicted — to social media.

My media career has me on social media constantly so I already knew I spend more time on these platforms than the average user. But to be faced with my dependency on them was alarming and to feel the physical effects of not using them nightly was shocking.

Here is an infographic I created that sums up my experience and below is a detailed account of my findings during and after the detox.

I Attempted to Open The Apps Several Times

Leading up to my detox, I was confident that while this would be difficult, I would be able to commit to not opening the apps. But I quickly realized that I am almost programmed to visit these three social media platforms at particular times of day no matter what is going on around me.

In two days time, I caught myself attempting to open my banned social media apps five times. Four of the five times, I attempted to open Facebook. All of the times, I had a full-body reaction to myself that included yelling and throwing my phone, as if it was slathered in cockroaches. “AHH! I JUST ALMOST OPENED FACEBOOK!”

I was so surprised that I was catching myself attempting to use social media during the detox, not when I was bored or trying to unwind but when I was in the middle of spending time with my daughter or petting my dog. Time that I could have been fully focused on physical relationships would have been thwarted by digital relationships had I not caught and stopped myself.

I Slept Better Than I Have in Months

The way detoxing from social media affected my sleep really surprised me. I read about “blue light” and its effect on eyesight and sleep in “Smartphone Addiction Could Be Changing Your Brain” on CNN.com. According to the article, research has found that blue light emissions from our phones and tablets can disrupt our melatonin production and make it harder for us to fall and stay asleep. I dug through my phone and found an option to filter out blue light and flicked it on so that once this dreadful week ended I would at least be protecting myself while scouring Snapchat before bed.

 

But I also noticed a difference in the depth at which I slept. On the average night, I wake up for several +/-15-minute intervals. I estimate 15 minutes each because for each wake I spend a few minutes scrolling social media before going back to sleep. Moderately, this amounts to about an hour awake per night.

During the detox, I can only remember being awake once in an eight-hour sleep and did not use social media to get back to sleep, proving that without using social media at night I sleep more soundly.

In “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” from The Atlantic, Jean M. Twenge wrote about her own data analysis of smartphone addiction and the physical effects on the human body including sleep patterns. In one horrific incident she described, a teenager awoke to a burning smell and found that her smartphone, which had been in bed with her, had overheated and melted her sheets.

“Why, I wondered, would anyone sleep with her phone beside her in bed? It’s not as though you can surf the web while you’re sleeping. And who could slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone?”

Twenge was right, and I had not been sleeping deeply. That was until I stopped using social media before bed.

I Felt Left Out And a Little Depressed…But Also Free

Emotionally, the feelings that came with this detox were a little confusing and, at times, contradictory. Some I anticipated and some I did not. On Day 1 I felt almost liberated, as if I could walk away from my phone with no problem. But by Day 3 I felt lonely, depressed. I felt like I had been missing out on something, a lot of somethings, and decided to connect with my friends in another way.

I began to text message some of them more. I tried to carry on conversations, but then I remembered that I wanted to spend more time away from my phone and that giving myself a reason to continue engaging was not going to help in that mission.

Perhaps these feelings surfaced because I didn’t know what to do with my newfound unstructured time. In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport wrote about the mental state of flow and how unstructured relaxation time makes people more anxious than work. He quoted Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ESM studies which found that people enjoy being involved in something worth concentrating on, something that causes them to lose themselves. But free time comes with effort needed to shape and mold what we do into something enjoyable.

I genuinely felt like the world was happening around me and that I was not going to get to be part of it.

I Replaced My Favorite Social Media Platforms With Ones I Rarely Use

This was one of the more interesting effects of the detox. By Day 3 of the detox, I found myself spending time — more time than is typical of myself — on LinkedIn. I even told myself, “This doesn’t count. It’s LINKEDIN! I don’t even consider this social media or like to be on here.”

Still I found myself swiping up on the home feed, reading what my connections had shared, liking and commenting. I was fully engaged in social media.

On Day 4 I told myself to try to avoid LinkedIn, that it was still kind of cheating. But I found a new fix: Venmo. I wasn’t there to send anyone money or request a payment. I was there because the main feed lets me see what other people are spending money on in cute emojis. I spent time trying to figure out what the emojis meant when strung together like little puzzles designed uniquely for me to solve.

They weren’t meant for me and I had no business being on Venmo at that time, but a feature like that which allows me to endlessly scroll my friends’ purchases is designed to suck me in the very way it did.

I Ultimately Couldn’t Do It

I went to lunch with a friend mid-detox and told him what I was doing. I said I wouldn’t be using Facebook, Instagram or Twitter after 6 p.m.

“What a martyr,” he said.

I was a little annoyed. I felt like I had made a sacrifice here, but then I told him that really what I originally set out to do was give up social media outside of working hours (social media is required for my job), and I realized what I was saying was pretty pathetic. Not even 24 hours after I established my detox parameters, I had broken them and as the week went on, I continued making excuses and allowances that would put me on social media more. I told myself things like:

Oh, well, really the 15 minutes between waking up and getting out of bed aren’t that bad to be on Facebook.  I’ll just change the detox to night hours, no one will know.

If I’m looking at LinkedIn, at least it’s not mindless. This is good for my career.

Yea, I could not look at my phone at all, but I just need to unwind and this helps me.

As the days went on I realized more and more what I had feared to be true: I am not only addicted to my smartphone and social media, but my addiction is far worse than I was aware of. I subconsciously reach for my phone and tap apps all the time, I feel anxious when I’m not scrolling a feed and the absence of these alternate-reality platforms in my life makes me feel sad and isolated.

Fortunately, there are things I can do to quell this addiction before it completely takes over my life. In “Is Smartphone Addiction Ruining Your Memory?” from Thrive Global, Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald offers several solution options, including:

• Putting your smartphone to bed in another room
• Not looking at your phone at least an hour before bed
• Giving yourself a “screen-free” day
• Setting notifications to “off”

While not all of these are realistic to how I want to live my life, I’m willing to give a couple a try. And if all else fails, I’ll grab a piece of pizza and try to make the most of the time I am on social media. There are tons of great animal rescue videos to be watched.