Yikes! There has got to be a better use for my time.

If your YouTube recommendations are anything like mine, lately they’ve been  filled with people who have kicked a phone addiction and want to teach you to do so as well. Pop culture is currently gravitating hard towards wellness, and it’s near impossible to avoid videos about healthy food and gym content, for example. 

Seeing so many people talk about phone addictions is a natural symptom of this. After all, it’s a type of content that can be marketed to everyone. Who isn’t addicted to their phone? Not many of us. More and more people are becoming conscious of just how bad social media— more specifically the consumption of short form content—is for them. 

The widespread embrace of the term “brainrot” essentially captures our collective attitude – we all know low effort, short form brainrot content is both figuratively and literally rotting our brains, and yet we continue to watch it, because it is meant to grab our attention and hold on. 

To be completely clear—I am not against using social media. I think it’s an incredibly important tool for connecting with others and staying in touch with pop culture. 

What I really want to stop is my compulsion to use it to distract myselft isn’t healthy to feel the urge to pick up your phone and watch 30 second videos every time there’s a quiet moment in your brain, and it certainly isn’t right to scroll backwards and find that you don’t remember the third-last video that you watched.

That is why I decided to write this article. I wanted to see if I could go a week with limited social media use and see how much my life improved, if at all. 

A (not so) long time ago during COVID, I recognized I had a problem. With nothing to do all day inside, I had turned to mindlessly scrolling TikTok for hours a day. My mental health was deteriorating, and I felt like every day was wasted. Can this all be attributed to TikTok? Of course not – it was a pandemic, a depressing situation all around. But deleting TikTok was one of the very few ways I had to take control of my own health in this time, and that I did. 

It was difficult at first, finding  other activities to replace just sitting and doomscrolling made me feel substantially happier. Plus, I had other social media to keep me connected with my friends, so after a while I didn’t really feel like I was missing out. 

Things were all good – until they weren’t. While I still don’t use TikTok to this day five years later, my hard work to stop myself from consuming so much short form content was erased by the addition of first reels to Instagram, then shorts to YouTube, and then shorts to… Snapchat? 

I had previously used these in pretty little amounts per day – Instagram and Snapchat to talk to my friends, and YouTube to actually learn stuff. Now they were promoting this content, and I couldn’t help getting sucked back in. I’ve tried to quit in the past, but with limited success. 

So how did it go this time?

My criteria consisted of:

• No Instagram, except for work.
• No watching those stupid things on Snapchat — just talk to people if I am going to use it at all.
• No YouTube.
• No Facebook or TikTok (I already don’t use these, and I can’t start now).

For the most part, I was able to avoid using most social media throughout the week — so, my first piece of advice to anyone looking to limit their usage is to make it a challenge. I had previously tried to just quit cold turkey with nothing really to hold me accountable. This was a suboptimal tactic. 

I wrote the first part of this article a week ago today, and putting my intentions on paper was a major reason I managed to hold myself (mostly) accountable. 

I found it extremely disturbing just how wired my brain was to crave social media — on the first day, as I sat and worked on this article, I felt an urge to open Instagram. It was pretty standard, just like any other urge to open your phone when you’re working. 

You don’t realize until you ignore it, however, that your brain almost treats it like a need. I had this compulsion to start working and distract myself with social media that wouldn’t stop nagging me. 

On multiple occasions, I accidentally opened something up without thinking because it was my default reaction to boredom. I would promptly close it when my conscious brain caught up to what I was doing, but it was truly incredible that it was just a reflex for me.

It was frustrating at first, but after the first few days of not giving into my cravings, I began to stop feeling them. Our brains are highly malleable, and while it is all too easy for social media to rewire your brain, you have the ability to rewire it back with just a bit of willpower.

This is not to say by any means that I am free from the clutches of social media. This is where the “mostly accountable” part comes into play—I still posted on my story for my best friend’s birthday and reposted a major achievement by some of my peers on my story. 

Obviously, using social media to celebrate your friends is objectively one of its most positive uses, and I immediately closed the app after I made each of these posts. But even if my brain now feels less wired to crave short, distracting content, I still felt a compulsion to post these things. This might be a problem unique to me, but it almost feels like there is a performative aspect to celebrating my friends that has been wired into my brain by social media. 

Technically I violated my challenge to do this—does it matter in the end? No, I violated my challenge to do something nice. But it is interesting that social media holds so much weight in my life that it mattered so much to me that I did it when a nice message probably would have sufficed.

Finally, I’d like to add that my screen time didn’t really go down as significantly as you might expect—from about four and a half hours the previous week down to three and a half. 

I found that I spent more time texting friends and reading the news when I was bored. Is it unfortunate that I still felt the need to pick up my phone when I didn’t know what to do with myself? Yes, very much so. But even though I wasn’t able to make a substantial change to my time on my phone, I felt that the time I spent online wasn’t interrupting my workflow and it made me happier. I get a lot more out of texting a friend back than I do from watching a video I won’t remember in about two minutes. 

It’s about the small victories. It’s not such a substantial, glamorous change as those influencers who make the switch to a flip phone, but I would still highly recommend giving it a try. While my week of restricting myself is technically up, it doesn’t feel so much like a restriction anymore.